beauty is ugliness at rest

Upcoming Solo Show and Other Business

2012-01-25T12:55:00.000-08:00

I’ll be having my first solo show at the EEL Gallery next month.

The Hysterical Male is comprised of about 40 photos, largely miniatures and black boxes, as well as some sculptures, a mossy dong and a sound piece.

The show will run from February 1-17. The gallery is located in the creepy and crumbling Victorian hospital/murder scene/school at 1 Spadina Crescent.

The opening reception will be on February 1 from 5:00-7:00 PM. Drop by if you can.

I haven't been writing much because I have been busy and have been re-thinking a lot of things.

I am currently editing an art blog/annual mag for UofT here. I only contribute reviews sporadically and mostly run the behind-the-scenes part. I'm also doing some research work at the ROM for an upcoming exhibit.

Diana Thorneycroft: A People's History at Art Mur.

2011-11-25T22:54:00.000-08:00

The past decade has seen photographer Diana Thorneycroft delving into the icons of Canadiana. Her shows travel the country and have even popped up in Paris at the Canadian Cultural Institute as "Caustic Landscapes of Canadian Imaginary." The tableaux she creates feature everything from the Group of Seven to the Trailer Park Boys and Don Cherry, generally engaging in brutal acts which parody the sensibilities of Breughel and Mack Sennett. While the souvenir shop items which populate her pictures don't exactly make up the Canadian psyche, they're a big part of how we package and sell ourselves to the world. Rather than retread the imaginary, in her new series she digs through the more literal history of the country. It's certainly not the popular history of Canada – a country that is world renowned for its hockey and maple syrup, but equally for its kiddie porn. Aside from our massive pillaging of natural resources and export of comedians, those are our essential cultural products.

Canada has always had a Walt Disney World approach to culture (or multiculturalism), something which is mirrored in Thorneycroft's images with their smooth and brightly saturated colours as well as their compact and densely populated decors. Quintland, featuring Disney stars the Dionne Quintuplets, was, in many respects, the most truly remarkable piece of public art ever made in Canada. It was one of the unique cases where human beings were raised explicitly as cases for public display, sometimes visited by up to 6,000 people a day. Grown in a strange, enormous boutique in an isolated community, their lives were scrupulously documented in films to be shown around the globe while all of the objects they touched instantly became artifacts in an ongoing national archeology programme. If anything really broke down the barrier between art and life in the twentieth century, it was this experiment which sought to seamlessly assimilate life to museum culture. Perfectly selected among the travesties Thorneycroft re-enacts, it provides the key to what these works are examining. If the Louvre – and modern French culture – was born by looting the rich and exposing their lifestyles as a kind of 'degenerate art', Canadian culture was made modern when it ransacked childhood to invent the prototype for reality TV.

Besides Quintland, there are numerous cases of child molestation at the hands of priests and hockey coaches, child brides in Bountiful, cops murdering aboriginals, a serial killer and more. They aren't mournful images exactly, but they lack the humor that was common to her earlier studies of Canadiana (see directly above). The toy is more of an alienation device (in the proper Brechtian sense) this time, set up to function therapeutically. She instills the dolls with all sorts of pathos and this becomes unnerving, if not altogether successful. The Japanese being interned are all racial stereotypes, though slightly more current ones than those that underwrote the actual internments. It is only this time around that her work really verges on the uncanny (a). But this is important because the banal existence of life in Canada is a lot like Quintland. To extend what Glenn Gould once said of Toronto, optimistically comparing it to Brasilia: its sense of relative serenity springs from how controlled it is, its spirituality from the fact that it was never exactly alive.

If anything, Thorneycroft could be accused of playing it too safe in her choices. At least, this is what I thought at first. There’s nothing of the destruction of unions and exploitation of the poor, nothing of the several foreign genocides and colonial wars we've been involved with (and those we are still involved in) or the massive environmental devastation our economy is predicated on. Rather, the acts she selected, which form a kind of 'family romance' version of history as Lynn Hunt might put it, are depicted as something secretive and marginal. In fact, they are cast as increasingly marginalized, even down to a man (Col. Williams), when they have been a far more molar phenomenon that has implicated the general population. But then again, perhaps this is a wiser strategy. As Margaret Atwood used to have it, Canada is fundamentally a victim culture, although most of our victimhood comes from our own hands. Simply victimizing each other isn't all that our social bond, such as it is, is made of though. There is still, though in ever more repressed forms, the step beyond, to sacrifice.

The show is made primarily of images taken from the institutional torture of children that has been a fundamental part of our national character. While we get glimpses of the small pox genocide, Louis Riel, Africville's destruction and Japanese internment camps, the majority of the works concentrate on child abuse of various kinds. The torture of children has double importance here. Not only because everything is depicted using toys and inviting the audience to play with them, in effect infantalizing them, but because both childhood and its violation are products of our corporate culture. For years now, there's been a kind of Kleinian analysis going on in Thorneycroft's work. The viewer has to take on the role of little Dick and find a way to plug their machine into the molar machine of the broader territory. This is what the use of toys placed in tableau against the generic landscapes is there for. However, even as all of the elements in the tableau are assembled, no good object seems to be formed, no good breast provides succor. There's a sense of the poisonous that saturates everything in the very deliberate coldness and deadness that her landscapes are cast as.

One of her stated goals has been to invite the viewer into the world of the perpetrators (b), to muddy the distinction between guilty parties. But this blurring may have gone further than she intended. The view of the perpetrator is never really taken in – there's too much distance for that – but there is a cold aesthetic pleasure to be gleaned from the inevitable, if highly ironized, voyeurism inherent in looking at these images. Again, it is the uniqueness of Canadian masochism. What the works point to, without any overt consciousness of the matter, is the museum quality of what it presents: a very up-to-date museum where the dioramas have all been flattened like screens. All of these acts being replayed with plastic toys (a folk idiom for an post-industrial society) testify to a kind of arrested cultural moment, one where only the death of a culture comes to count for something. These are the sacrificial acts that have gone to make up Canada where, in our final sanctified perversity, our victims are our martyrs.

Diana Thorneycroft
Art Mur

A People's History runs from November 5 – December 17 at Art Mur.

Notes:

(a) Sharona Adamowicz-Clements makes the argument in Diana Thorneycroft: Canada, Myth and History: Group of Seven Awkward Moments that her work should be read along the lines of Freud's unheimlichkeit. While her secondary argument, concerning the death drive, seems fairly accurate, this one struck me as hollow in regards to Thorneycroft's earlier works which are too fantastical to effectively be uncanny.

(b) "The art that was exhibited in “Mirroring Evil” was profoundly different from traditional exhibitions about the Holocaust, which focused on the horrible plight of concentration camp victims. Instead, these artists invited the viewer into the world of the perpetrators and produced work that muddied the lines between “us” and “them”. Zbigniew Libera’s “LEGO Concentration Camp Set”, that encourages his audience to imagine making tiny little gas chambers and crematoria to play with, is but one example." (Thorneycroft)

Black October: Tony Scherman at Georgia Scherman

2011-11-05T20:17:00.000-07:00

He would be much too dazzled to see distinctly, those things whose shadows he'd seen before.
- Plato

For years now, Tony Scherman has paid most of his attention to Europe, rummaging about in the waste of its revolutions and myths. He's now turned his eyes on Canada to examine some of our failures and cast them in larger-than-life encaustic close-ups. Saying it's about the October Crisis of 1970 wouldn't explain much. That's fine because the show doesn't explain much and it's doubtful that it's supposed to. Nothing terribly analytical is going on. Instead, he creates sedimentary lumps. They aren't so much paintings as crystal formations within which an avatar is projected. A face whose temporal quality is inscribed in it by the medium itself. The edges of each layer show through. Each layer another captured mark and another set of dissimulations. He makes a cave out of wax.

What I find interesting about his work is the tension it suggests between being a cold, calculated act verging on sadism and merely another instance of the cheap romanticism that tends to crop up in Canadian art. I'm not sure which it is. More optimistically, it would be better to say neither. Rather, it dwells in an anxious space between them. The layers upon layers of wax and pigment which he accumulates aren't aesthetic doodling – they're indexes of his failures, of the fact that he's had to go at it again and again with a repetitive stuttering. (Freud infamously reasoned that stuttering was the attempt to shit on the parents using their language as a form of revenge). There are painters who approach their canvas only to realize it is never blank, it has already been filled with cliches. Painting then becomes the task of skinning it down to the bone. But there are others who come to the same situation and decide to feed the space, to let the canvas get so fat that it sags. Scherman makes just such oleaginous paintings and all of the stretchmarks show.

De Sade was known to speak of wax when writing on art. The Marquis was very fond of dioramas and anatomical models cast in it. Wax, the favoured substance of French philosophers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, served as the model for matter, able to take on any form it was cast in or any image suspended within it. Wax is the living and the dead because the distinction can't really be made as anything more than one of the relative speed of decomposition. Maybe this is what people mean when they say Scherman's work isn't moral?(a) How can there be morality in a world where there is no serious distinction between life and death, only a very contingent, largely imaginary one? (But isn't that the world we live in?) It's hard to imagine his work is really that unsentimental. In fact, it isn't. The prettiness gives one a niggling sense of doubt that he really goes that far. Not just the prettiness either, but all of the spectres of labour that make up the surface of the pieces and testify to a kind of Kantian abortion at the point of realizing the logical direction of aesthetics.

As mentioned above, numerous critics of his work have insisted on regarding it as non-moral, non-intellectual. He's cast as a visionary with no message. However, Jaques Henric exceeds most in creating a completely self-negating text, a piece of utterly hysterical nonsense which winds up imparting everything to the work it attempts to reject. Scherman's work is intrinsically moralistic, but the moral is never made clear. His paintings are jokes with the punchline removed. Yet, Henric accurately observes that Scherman's work has a 'liturgical' base. It's a kind of metaphysical painting for agnostics.

He doesn't paint from history, but from the toilet paper of history (films, photos, books). The scale is that of traditional historical painting, but the subjects are all film still style. The eyes of familiar faces become giant holes that all the little egos that file by can lodge themselves in. They are more like the gaudy photos of a gossip magazine (Napoleon in drag) than they are like a David. This foregrounds their libidinal aspect. Scherman isn't really painting portraits. These are fetish items. The images are fabricated from found sources to exploit the viewer's relationship with history, inviting that reserve of experience to be invested in them, poured into their eyes like a gutter. Those giant faces are painted under the disguise of the grandiose and romantic gestures of history painting, but then the disquieting contradiction that undergirds his work kick in. What becomes clear on inspection is their imprecision, their frayed quality and their limitations. There is nothing epic here, just a murkily illuminated lump of festering matter. You could say that he paints the romance of failure, a particularly Canadian passion. Scherman's work is nothing if not gluttonous in this respect.

The soft world of wax is always ready to crumble. Dense and honeycombed, his work has the quality of an oozing fat. Nothing is being deconstructed or analyzed, only deformed. On one wall is Trudeau, the lover of Plato, a would-be the philosopher king who brought martial law back to Quebec. He peers across the room at René Lévesque as a child. It could be a saccharine work. In some ways it is reminiscent of a Disney headshot from the 1950s. The brush work for it is a little less brutish. Trudeau also peers over at Machiavelli. Double Trudeau: the man who introduced so much of the soporific discourse that has continued to curse this country in polite obscurantism, a set of noble lies meant to obscure the fact that there is no society here any more (if there ever was). Marx comes off different among the stranded faces. Devoid of the hallucinatory quality of the other faces, he registers as graffiti in their vicinity. This is Trudeau between Machiavelli and Marx, spelling out the remaking of modern Canada and the birth of the cynical and hypocritical glaze it's had ever since. At least you could read it that way... But there's something more sentimental at hand. Scherman is only interested in freezing decay and casting a little light on it – though not too bright of course because then it would melt – that's the scabby nature of encaustic painting.

Trudeau's face is enlarged again and again. The painter seems to be looking for a tic. You get a sense of the Prime Minister's arrogance but he blurs into an icon bordering on the kitsch of a Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré dinner plate. When he is set beside Napoleon, you get a sense of something more sinister. However, in that same room, Trudeau also stares over at Barbra Streisand, who he was dating at the moment. You don't get Trudeau fucking her though, like Scherman did with Eva Braun riding Hitler in "Eva and Adolf." And you don't get Trudeau in drag either. This is where it starts to become clear that what he's doing is different from his earlier work. One of the weaknesses of the series is that it tips too far into the sentimental, something he's often been dangerously close to. His sense of metaphor is unusually weak this time. There's something cowed about it and something a bit pious. The greatest instance of this is the little trio of flower paintings, including "Conversations with the Devil" and "The Death of Pierre Laporte," set under a skylight in a corner like they are part of some PoMo church altar. So why give flowers to Laporte, the mediocre martyr of Canada's last failed revolution? Did his life amount to more than the wax you can scratch out of your ear? Is his rotting corpse just a pathway to a carbuncled ornament? Is Scherman deliberately rendering it as one of the most cliched kinds of memento mori? It really isn't that caustic though. You could also read Scherman's work as a matter of complete indifference to anything but the most superficial. There's a reason you don't see the striking workers of Quebec, but you get the glamour of Streisand complemented by iconic details. He could have painted a banana and called it "The FLQ" or Margaret Trudeau's tampon and call it "Dishrag of Liberty." The work invites imparting gravity to such things, something which it simultaneously mocks in the floating quality of the images themselves. Scherman has always insisted he's not an ironist. He seems to wish he could accord all of this metaphysical value, a morality, but his career would indicate that he constantly fails on this count, and goes back again and again for more.

(a) Lilly Wei and Henric are both guilty of this.

"Black October" runs from October 20 - November 26.

Georgia Scherman
Tony Scherman

Attila Richard Lukacs at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

2011-10-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

Attila Richard Lukacs from the Collection of Salah J. Bachir.

First, my confession: Growing up in rural Ontario, I had no idea that there was such a thing as Canadian culture (to the degree to which one can claim there is indeed such a thing) beyond what I saw on the CBC or CTV. When I was about ten years old, I started hearing about this guy, Attila Richard Lukacs, who did huge paintings of naked skinheads beating and fucking each other. This caused quite a bit of controversy around the Ottawa valley when his work popped up at the National Gallery. Along with the 'Voice of Fire' fiasco, this was my introduction to what art in Canada was. It took a few years for me to discover, to my dismay, that the art scene in this country wasn't remotely that interesting most of the time. However, these two visceral events were, in a very real sense, the high (or low) points for art here. Since then, things have been fairly inert.

Lukacs doesn't show a lot in Canada. That doesn't stop him from being in some sense a kind of legendary figure. Maybe it even helps. He's admired for his technique. Even if you hate what he paints, it's hard to deny that he's a great painter. He's got more technique at his disposal than most, regardless of the genre. But this is balanced with thematic concerns that leave people unsettled. His work is political in a way that most contemporary art never succeeds in being. Instead of sinking to the level of critique, he creates a fully realized utopia, or heterotopia as Eugenio Filice argued in his thesis on the subject (a). It's a world that comes as the culmination of a long history of alternate worlds. Patches of Petronius, De Sade and the fantastical all male islands that popped up in the counterculture of the Enlightenment are at the back of his work. In his world, women do not exist: there is no Otherness. An Eden without Eve. It's a total nightmare for dialecticians. For that matter, femininity doesn't exist and its absence leaves no trace of void. The work overflows everywhere. Even the blacks in his paintings seem full and as resonant as the gold. But with this utopia, he isn't shying away from the world. Even with angels and spirits scattered among his landscapes, the contemporary world is never far away, just re-calibrated along the lines desire dictates.

In the massive IKEA store that current Canadian art tends to resemble, not many have followed his example. Evergon and Bruce LaBruce obviously cross over similar terrain, though not as followers. Both are far less ambitious and less successful: Evergon because he never reverses the zone of exclusion and LaBruce because his fanaticism is only an ironist's. What Attila does isn't ironic. There isn't any distance in his work, just perversion. He and LaBruce perfectly illustrate the two sides of a great Canadian pathology: One espousing skepticism when he is really a fanatic of banality, the other expressing fanaticism when he is really a skeptic. A pervert has to believe and love because they don't really believe. There is no ground for belief and no height for irony. Rather, there is just a glamorous brutality.

As with Genet, Lukacs' work is about ritual and intended to invite ejaculation as much as contemplation. It isn't work that readily invites the much hallowed 'dialogue', that crutch of so much contemporary art and theory. Liberal critics sometimes put his work down to the representation of a sub class of the gay community. Mark Cheetham has suggested this and Scott Watson (b) has attempted, somewhat shakily, to situate his work in like manner. That's the easy route to take, but it avoids facing what's really at play which is the remarkably realized construction of personal (though never esoteric) mythology. In a very real way, he accomplishes what high Modernism failed to do and what postmodernism has mourned, or celebrated, for failing.

It would be a mistake to say that his work is fascistic, although it's hard to know what else to call it with its overt celebration of violence as an expression of love, of military ritual and of beautiful young men. (Or maybe it is exactly fascistic in the sense that Žižek sometimes speaks of?) You can argue for a certain political reading of his work, particularly in light of the war paintings he's done over the last 8 or 9 years, that makes his work a little more palatable. However, much like reading Pasolini's Salo as a harrowing indictment of Fascism, the seams come undone unless you're really desperate to believe it. Whatever is at stake, it's certainly a far cry from any kind of order, which is never sought. Instead, there is a constant appeal to crumbling and mutation. Without duality, there can only be a continual doubling and a string of metamorphoses. But the cry is just as far from being truly reconcilable to liberality or the kind of pluralistic and sentimental discourses favored in the art world.

He takes on art history with verve, though never garishly. He does Velazquez. The "Rokeby Venus" becomes an afternoon's transgression, complete with decaying flowers. In doing this, he returns to the blatantly pornographic function the Velazquez originally had before it was torn away for museum use. Turn your eyes and you face his repainting of David's incomplete "The Death of Joseph Bara." A fascinatingly homoerotic image of political martyrdom in its original, under Lukacs' hands, the image changes only subtly, losing some of its suppleness but gaining something else – a less prosaic sense of voluptuous doom as the details of the scene vanish and the body becomes more focal. The body becomes the sole context. His diptych "William and Bill" overtly asks the viewer to 'fuck it' and does a cock tease. There is no duality to the diptych but a sense of the interchangeable, like an optical illusion that reveals that what was hidden is what is actually there.

His investment in iconic figures also has a religious bent. He takes on the Archangel Michael, reinventing him as a musclebound 'Mike' in a kind of colossal phone sex ad. He vanquishes the Damned, here cast as Uncle Sam, a rabbi, a sultan and sailor. To his side are a pair of skinhead angels erecting their ladder to Heaven. Gold shines along the background. The tiny squares of patterned gold frequently popped up during a certain period of his work. The squares are never firmly gridded. There's something casual and deliberately disorderly, almost chaotic about them. Their application seems consciously clunky. The colour of paint seeps through in gaps. A grid is only ever superimposed. This is brought out even more in one of the paintings showing a hard assed angel overlooking a peak. The rocks are painted with such deliberation that they drive home the way that the gold is a kind of collapse of the grid into luminescent formlessness.

What's at stake in his use of art historical references is not an attempt to make himself look clever or give himself a slightly transgressive form of authority. As Robert Enright once said of him (c), he rewrites the master narrative of art history 'with all the chicks removed'. What this amounts to, in practice, is a wedding night for catamites where the offspring is a donkey: a large cocked and sterile monster of nature. (One large painting in the show has the word 'catamite' written across the top.) It is not an art of Evil any more than of Good, but of their impossibility. There is an ethos in his work, but it is that of the sterile, of that which can not be part of the moral order. All things come and arrive at their nothingness as the dispersions of fuck without end.

The young men which he paints are all engaging in some form of ritualized violence which is heavily invested with libido. This is true whether they are quietly lurking in black, marching in military parade or stomping on the throats of their enemies. In "David and Goliath," a set of young men seem to engage in an intifada as smoke burbles behind them. Lukacs isn't simply romanticizing these figures. If he were, it might be hard to explain why Goya's dog is peering out at the bottom of the canvas. In fact, the dog's head, which I take to be an avatar for Lukasc in place of the usual monkey, has a double in the image. His name is spelled out on the pimped out belt buckle of one of the young men in the style of the lettering for a radical Islamist group. His investment is always in the pants of rebellion.

Out in the open, the pants and uniforms of his idealized models receive the attention. His skinhead portraits are fashion ads done like a Gainsborough. His nudes - in bleak interiors or destroyed and vague landscapes - have a radically different space though. The crumbling grid or the abyss of black. His use of black is unique and startling. It possesses a hallucinatory degree of subtle shifting and delicacy. Lukacs has always insisted that he's emulated Caravaggio over the Flemish masters. For reasons more complicated than I'm willing to get into here, this is important for the way that he articulates the figure, giving it more of a totemic than narrative quality when they encounter these negative fields. But the turn to the Classical example of Caravaggio has another fetish aspect that provides a fuller form of sexualization. The curves of the body are extended. However, it should be noted, that his is a Classicism that has been wounded and dragged through the Cloaca Maxima rather than perched in a clean position to have a perspective on things.

There's little depth in most of his paintings. There's a remarkable flatness that verges on what one finds in the collage based paintings of Max Ernst, but takes as much inspiration from the tradition for erotic miniatures in India. He has referred to this in interviews as a product of his layering process. In many of the paintings ("Koo Coo Kachoo Mrs. Robinson") this is clearly evident. Within the rigidly mannerist compositions, he fills each shape and line with oscillating textures and patterns. If there is little sense of recession, there is an excess production of surfaces, each of which manages to have its own pulse. They aren't always harmonic. There's a gaudiness to some of them which verges on the campy at times, but they are always full, livid. This comes out even more when contrasted with the the abstract direction he's been flirting with. There's one purely abstract piece on display and it is unimpressive. This is only buttressed by the fact that the backgrounds and details of so much of his figurative work show so much attention to grain, to texture, to blending, to the careful exploitation of reflective qualities and density that it puts most purely abstract painting to shame. There's something disturbingly flat and exhausted about his abstract work: a dullness. It lacks libido. Suitably, it's dominated by a bland grey and cheap silver.

The show could be criticized for being a little tame in terms of the choices for display. This may have been intentional (no one I spoke to at the gallery could tell me). There is not a single erection or an ounce of scat, not a swastika, a beating or a sacrificial throat slitting anywhere to be seen. Even monkey anuses are curiously absent. All the same, in the three hours I spent at the exhibit, only about twenty other people wandered through, usually for only a minute or so, often laughing at the sight of naked men, doing their best to ignore them or ushering their children away. The guide for the tour group that drifted by made light of how discomforting penises on display were and concentrated almost exclusively on the references to Christian iconography that were nearly omnipresent. In fact, it was this particular iconic streak in Lukacs - as opposed to the equally frequent penchant for the cliches of socialist realism, or the more important channeling of the history of the sodomite in art - that the show was largely organized around. But even with all of that, the gallery deserves kudos for displaying the work so well. The walls were painted in varying blacks, greys and blues and the paintings spread across three well-sized rooms that managed to be neither too grand nor too intimate.

Attila Richard Lukacs
Art Gallery of Hamilton

Notes:

(a) Felice's Figurations of ethics, configurations of power: Michel Foucault, Attila Richard Lukacs, and the New Painting offers a useful starting point but finishes just when it was getting going. One of the only lengthy treatments of the painter, it gets bogged down in too much Foucault and an attempt to relate Lukacs to General Idea which strangely fails to take into account his brief sojourn into the realm of performance art and zine creation.
(b) Cheetham outlined this in a lecture I attended. Watson makes his moves in the essay contained in Lukacs' Polaroids book. It would be useful to read this through Gary Indiana's analysis of Salo, particularly in light of LaBruce's Skin Gang.
(c) In the documentary on Lukacs Drawing Out The Demons.

If you are in England...

2011-10-27T19:08:00.000-07:00

Some of the best younger painters in Canada are showing in London, England at the moment with a few of their friends from across the Atlantic. Included in the show are Mr. Joe Becker and Rory Dean as well as Peggy Kouroumalos, Derek Mainella, Richard Stipl, Erik Tidemann and James Unsworth. "Extremely subversive, often offensive, ‘idiotic’ art has been, until now, lightly trodden territory, particularly in the politically-correct western world. Curated by artist Joe Becker, Savant’s subject matter lives up to its word, promising to make your eyes pus and your jaw drop off completely," the press release promises.

Visit The High Roller Society to read more about it. The show runs from October 29 until November 27.

You can see more installation shots here.

Liam Crockard: A Month of Sundays at O'Born Contemporary

2011-09-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

The Burlesque of Labour

...boredom is a higher state… we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.
-E.M. Cioran

There's a scene in Jean-Luc Godard's "Passion" where Isabelle Huppert's character wonders why films don't show people actually having sex or working. They're both taboo acts, extraneous or deprecating to the narrative agent, and not allowed to be fully depicted. There is a pornography of labour to art – a sense of the graphic that hints at the mechanical, but which is almost inevitably shrouded over by discourse or some precious nuance. Arguably there always has been such a thing, but for a long period it was transparency that was sought and the sign of the artist's hand was a sign or failure. Style was nothing other than that. Labour had to be as invisible as God's hand. That all changed with the rise of bourgeois art. The fad for 'de-skilling' has had more to do with a performative priapism that with a rebellion against bourgeois values in art. The fetishization of the artist became significant, their brushstrokes or 'concepts' operating as the sign language of the sublime, or at least a sublime handjob. Their handiwork, the traces of their being, became ways to evaluate its market value and instill it with gravitas. This was as true for high Modernism as it was for the collectors of regional folk art.

Liam Crockard's show "Month of Sundays" at O'Born Contemporary explicitly enacts this fantasy and casts it in the familiar terms of absence/presence and the lack which needs to be fulfilled. The signs of labour without the actions themselves make up the bulk of the work. It's usually doubled. You get the image of the laboured act (generally its result) – carefully swaddled in nostalgia – and you get the deliberately over-laboured framing of this image within the sculptural body assembled to cloak it. This body never labours and has no nudity. It's all dressing. No sweat. A smidgen of deoderized picaresque.

Largely assembled from woodcuts and other refuse, his pieces largely resemble common items (a chair, tools) which are rendered inutile through the exaggeration of their forms. That is, through an excess of aesthetic sublimation. What these objects point to, constantly, is their de-realization and their de-materialization into a hodgepodge of ideas. As the title of the show suggests, it's the doldrums of leisure that are really on display: a contemplative misapprehension. The exhibit is a showroom for the purchasing of an antiquarian ideal. The materials are displayed like fabric swatches or wallpaper samples, assembled for accents of physicality to aid those no longer in possession of actual bodies. Instead, the viewer inhabits the space in expectation of a narrative or reverie. It's an enabling of physicality, even if only a vicarious one. Labour becomes a source of nostalgia and desire because it is so blatantly dead and gone. But even if labour is only a spectre, the voyeur's trip through the gallery still makes them do some work to grope toward the fuzzy feeling of presence. As the artist's statement says, "The artist was present, the seat is warm." This isn't Schwitters' piss in a nook of the Merzbau or Manzoni's shit though. His collage pieces are charming regional postcards to pick up on the way. By harnessing this, Crockard is creating an operative mechanism for sentimentality, the surplus of which is an aesthetic pat on the head.

The spectres of castration are everywhere. You can see them from the solitary chair, the perforated walls, the fragmented and re-assembled actions that tile the walls and the hideously oversized and useless tools that span the floor. Like the original cult of Priapism, this is all played for sad laughs. Pornography at least assumes not merely psychic investment but a physical one as well, since onanistic action takes part in the fulfillment of a virtual form and carries it off. And unlike pornography, that 'mentalization of instinct' as some psychoanalysts used to call it, something different is at stake here. There is no discharge on order, no lurch into desublimation. Instead, there's a kind of voyeuristic inertia, like what would be left of a reality TV show if you removed all traces of its narrative and left the extended raw footage of banality within completely artificial surroundings. This could easily lead to boredom. The labour of art, as most artists know, is excruciatingly boring much of the time. In fact, boredom is one of the most important parts of artistic production. This isn't limited to art. Having worked as a labourer for several years, I can testify to its boring, repetitive, mind-numbing quality. These three aspects are all displayed in the show, but in a purely mediated form so that they can never be actualized, only contained. They are objectified into sources of delectation. Which amounts to saying that they are turned away from boredom to become fetish items for the urban set - theme park spectacles for people with more money than sense.

Liam Crockard
O'Born Contemporary

On The Recent Work of Rory Dean

2011-09-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

“At present, there is no means of making something pass as ugly or repulsive.
Even shit is pretty.”
- Michel Leiris

Rory Dean can be rather unpredictable. As soon as I think I know what he's doing he starts doing things that knock the crap out of me. That could be because there's something essentially irrational about his work. Not that it's inconsistent: there's a great deal of continuity between one distinct set of works and another. The unpredictability comes from what he suddenly decides to attack and how. His work isn't critical - it's adversarial, often taking some concrete aspect of the art world as its object of spite and scorn. This attack isn't always direct and it tends to involve a shift in style. While his earlier paintings took a swipe at the obsession with crass textures and colour that have been selling so well lately, his recent works push along to some of the other trends currently underway.

These new works, consciously or not, come in the middle of two of the biggest retro fads to have taken hold of the art market in the past couple of years: the return of decorative abstraction and language based art. There's a new cult of the latter evolving, mostly out of a revisiting of certain aspects of 70s Conceptual art. It was, in its origin, a strange Neo-Platonic pyramid scheme, sometimes mystical, comic or banal. Often all three. Such an 'ideologization', as Piero Raffa once put it, was meant to get its kicks from extracting the 'surplus of rational self-consciousness'. In its second coming, however, this neurotic abreaction to the material world tends more to the narrative, the anecdotal and the sentimental. The most genuinely bourgeois art has now become neo-classical in the worst sense of the term.

Dean's work seems to be completely taking the piss out of these trends, uniting what were originally warring reactionary positions in a compost heap that robs them of any integrity. His words don't communicate. He doesn't have a message, a concept, or an idea. He isn't crocheting letters for nihilism either. There's no eloquence or token profundity in spelling out 'Steve Guttenberg', although it could count as an invective. He's not just some aesthete either, even though his work is almost inevitably pretty. It's a kind of deflatable prettiness – deflatable because it's inflated in a deliberately hideous way, like a blow-up doll wearing lingerie carved out of the town drunk's old socks.

The charm of Dean's work is in his spite. It's never simply nasty though. If he hurls shit at people it's because he knows we live in it and attempting to conceptualize your way out of it only makes it more absurdly laughable. His mockery of deflated art dreams is bitter and sardonic, a self-mockery which only adds to the sense of leveling. This seems to be what fuels the kind of vicious humour that gives the work its bite. It's here that the work flirts with irony but never succumbs to it. Irony inevitably requires a moral stability and there really isn't any moralizing going on, just a kind of discharge.

A demonstration of a strangely basic kind of labour happening here. It's not the melodramatic Victorian factory kind, but more of the cottage industry for a geeky high school girl variety. That's why you find pencil crayon drawings of Justin Bieber, along with mock maudlin drawings of odd looking children that recall the dislocated sensibility of Prudence Heward.

His text works aren't anything like Graham Gillmore's similarly colourful text pieces. In the latter's case, sense has to be re-established thanks to the discombobulation of letters and fragmenting of narrative. It asks for an investment through a momentary illegibility. Using the vaguely familiar, Dean's work assumes the investment at the outset and then cancels it, bankrupting the process and throwing away whatever meaning could be culled as profit. There's less to them than there appears. They aren't paintings about the surface but of the hollowness which it occludes.

Accompanying this use of words is a leap into the use of rainbows, generally done in watercolour. The rainbows, one can suggest, are the fulfillment of their earlier appearance with his KKK garbed figures. In those images, the rainbows popped up like sentimental trinkets or magical powers – the psychotic accouterments of characters who always saw the world in black and white, or black and blue at any rate. But that world, the one of meaning in all of its stubborn idiocy, has given way to full spectrum stupidity. The engulfing rainbow is a series of essences, superficially like the pure essences that were so sacred to Mondrian or Kandinsky, but not really like them at all. For here there is no scent of the drive for the pure, that medical stench which the synesthetically blessed could find wafting out of the Russian's canvases. Instead, there's a real impurity, a sense of colour as the chaotic effect of light decay. They may be a conscious reference to the rainbow colour schemes of Franz Marc, but they are completely devoid of his utopian desire to save humanity with art. In fact, the rainbow sets the limits of anthropomorphic visual perception. Spiders, fish and many mammals experience a substantially different, far more complex and varied array of colours. That human beings like to imagine there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow points out how sensually impoverished we are. The rainbow is a wink at one of our many evolutionary abortions.

Dean's rainbows fill up the iconic lines of his mediocre public figures, or they hover beneath the twinkle of his words. And sometimes they sit alone on their own page like Hell rendered as a full-spectrum colour field painting. They aren't exercises in the faddish abstraction that's currently spilling around the galleries. They aren't nostalgic, sentimental or even decorative. Dean manages to paint rainbows that nearly seem to sneer in their vacuous idiocy. But is that because he realizes that abstract expressionism in painting is almost the same thing as the expressive pop metal of Guns N' Roses and that the art market tries to cast someone like Jackson Pollock as a kind of Axl Rose? Maybe, but it's probably not that conscious.

Dean is using the pathos-laden colour field to deflate things rather than instill them with the metaphysical gravitas they generically denote. This happens in two ways. First: by using the spectrum rather than a reduced set of variations on minimal hues, he disintegrates the sense of a localized integrity with its own individual decomposition, opening up each hue to its unremarkable demise, robbing it of its monadic pathos and leveling it in relativity. It isn't harmony but a spectral decay. The rainbow has an excretory function, much the way it is played out on a more figurative level by his colleague Joe Becker. Second: by placing the glittering and hollowed out names of D-List celebrities on top of them as personalized icons robbed of a face. This is intriguing given Dean's other recent propensity for displaying recognizable pop figures through a rainbow which erodes the singularity of their faces. With the names, the less familiar are rendered legible but vague. The schmaltzy lettering itself is already a deflation and a mockery of the optimism of cultural up-and-comers. These are the faces of those who dwell in a Hell for the mediocre.

The Hell that Dean depicts is a proper Hell with a properly sardonic eschatology. It's not one of misery and tortures but of the petulant crapulence that this world consists of. His KKK figures now start to morph into rocks and mountain ridges for an alien planet. The world is in the distance, ruled over by demons, the countries running into each other like the cultivated blocks of 'expression'. Dean is a narrative painter whose characters don't really have a story. Losers, creeps and failed exercises in machismo, they're all abortions mired in shit, but the only shit art is capable of – pretty shit.

Rory Dean
My Interview with Dean

Happy Anniversary Refus Global.

2011-08-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

It's the anniversary of Refus Global, perhaps the most significant moment in Canadian art history. Arguably it was also one of the few instances, aside from the French Revolution, where radical art actually had much of a genuine social impact. Authored by Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960) in 1948 and signed by most of the Automatistes, it is often given credit for helping to push Quebec into its 'Quiet Revolution' against the pseudo-fascism of the Duplessis government.

It's still pretty pungent stuff, and was notably scorned in Anglo-Canada, where few followed in its wake aside from some of London's anarchist artists of the 1960s. It was also received with what amounted to indifference by the Surrealists in Paris. Borduas' correspondence with André Breton (1896-1966) around the time is a curious read, as was Alfred Pellan's (1906-1988) reaction, but I'm not going to analyze either here.

For French speakers, here is a rather nice, if depressing, little documentary from The NFB about what Refus unleashed.

And finally, the text:

Refus Global (Total Refusal) by Paul-Emile Borduas

Descendants of modest French Canadian families, labourers or petit-bourgeois, from our arrival on this soil up to the present day kept French and Catholic by resistance to the conqueror, by an irrational attachment to the past, by self-indulgence and sentimental pride and other compulsions.

A colony trapped and abandoned as long ago as 1760 beneath unscalable walls of fear (familiar refuge of the vanquished) -- its leaders taking to sea or selling themselves to the conqueror, as always when the time is ripe.

A little people, huddled to the skirts of a priesthood viewed as sole trustee of faith, knowledge, truth and national wealth, shielded from the broader evolution of thought as too risky and dangerous and educated misguidedly, if without ill intent, in distortions of the facts of history, when complete ignorance was impracticable.

A little people, grown from a Jansenist colony, isolated and cowed; and defenceless against the horde of clerics of France and Navarre -- out to perpetuate in this fear-ridden place (fear-as-the-beginning-of-wisdom!) the prestige and advantages of a Catholicism despised in Europe. Heirs of a mechanical papacy, invulnerable to redress, great masters of obscurantism, their institutes of learning still hold sway through an exploiting use of memory, static reason, and paralysing intention.

A little people, that multiplied in generosity of flesh, if not of spirit, in the north of this immense America, with its sprightly band of golden-hearted youth and its superficial morality; spellbound by the annihilating prestige of remembered European masterpieces, and disdainful of the authentic creations of its own oppressed.

Our destiny seems harshly fixed.

But, revolutions, foreign wars, disturb the most efficient blockade of the spirit, however disarming.

Some pearls slip through, inevitably.

Political struggles become bitter. Against all prediction, the clergy acts rashly.

Rebellions follow, executions result, and impassioned first ruptures occur between the church and some of the faithful.

The breach widens, shrinks, then widens further.

Travel abroad increases. Soon, Paris is the rage. But, too far in time and space, too volatile for our timorous souls, it is often only the occasion for time off to complete a retarded sexual education and to acquire, on the basis of a stay in France, facile authority for improved exploitation of the crowd upon return. For example, the conduct of our doctors, with very few exceptions, is scandalous (after all, those-long-years-of-study-have-to-be-paid-for, whether they have travelled or not!).

Revolutionary works, when by chance they come t o hand, seem but the sour grapes of a few eccentrics. The academics acquire prestige from our lack of information.

Exceptionally, among these travels, some produce awakenings. The normally unthinkable is found increasingly. Forbidden readings circulate, spreading solace and hope.

Minds are enlightened by discovery of the poètes maudits: those who, without being monsters, dared express loud and clear what the unhappiest among us stifle quietly within, in shame and in terror of being overwhelmed. Illumination comes from the example of these men -- the first to acknowledge contemporary anxieties, so painful and pathetic -- whose insights prove of greater value, in their disturbing precision and freshness, than the interminable litanies charmed in the land of Quebec, or in all the seminaries of he globe together.

The limits of our dreams become no longer what they were.

We are dizzied by the fall of tawdry finery so recently obscuring truth. The shades of hopeless bondage gives place to pride in a freedom obtainable by vigorous struggle.

To hell with the goupillon and the tuque. They have seized back a thousand times what once they gave.

Beyond Christianity, we attain the burning human brotherhood on which they have closed the door.

The reign of hydra-headed fear has ended.

In the wild hope of effacing its memory, I enumerate:

fear of facing prejudice -- fear of public opinion -- of persecutions -- of general disapproval;
- fear of being alone, without the God and the society which isolate you anyway;
- fear of oneself -- of one's brother -- of poverty;
- fear of the established order -- or ridiculous justice;
- fear of new relationships;
- fear of the superrational;
- fear of necessities;
- fear of floodgates opening on one's faith in man -- on the society of the future;
- fear of forces able to release transforming love;
- blue fear -- red fear -- white fear; links in our shackles.

From the reign of debilitating fear we pass to that of anguish.

One would have to be of stone to remain indifferent to the grief of deliberately feigned gaiety, of psychological reflexes of the cruellest extravagance: transparent disguises of poignant, present despair (how is it possible not to cry out on reading the news of that horrifying collection of lampshades made of tattoos stripped from unfortunate captives, at the whim of some elegant woman; not to moan at endless accounts of torment in the concentration camps; not to chill to the marrow at descriptions of Spanish prisons, unjustifiable reprisals and cold-blooded revenge?) How can one not quiver before the cruel lucidity of science?

Overwhelming anguish is replaced by nausea.

We are sickened by the apparent inability of man to correct evils, by the uselessness of our endeavours, by the vanity of our past hopes.

For centuries, the bountiful products of poetic activity have been doomed on the social level; violently rejected by the upper strata of society, or warped irrevocably by them and falsely assimilated.

For centuries, splendid revolutions, their hearts high in hope, have been brutally suppressed after a moment of delirious optimism -- scarcely noticeable interruptions in our slighter to headlong descent:

- the French revolutions
- the Russian revolution
- the Spanish revolution
aborted in international confusion, despite the wishful thinking of os many simple souls around the world.

Death triumphing over life, again.

How can one not be nauseated by the liars, by the forgers, by the makers of the stillborn objects, by the tricksters, the obsequious, the opportunistic, the false prophets of humanity, the polluters of springwater, or by rewards obtained for brutal cruelty?

By our own cowardice, impotence, fragility and lack of understanding?

By the disasters of our loves....

By the constant preference for cherished illusion over objective mysteries. Where is the source of all the cursed efficiency which man imposes on himself, but in his fury to defend a civilization shaping the destinies of dominant nations?

The United States, Russia, England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain: sharp-fanged inheritors of a single decalogue, and identical gospel.

The religion of Christ has dominated the universe. What has been done with it when sisterhoods become exploiting little sisters?

Remove the motivation of competition for raw materials, prestige and authority, and nations might live harmoniously. But grant supremacy to whom you wish, give world control to whom you please, and the same deep-rooted patterns will emerge -- although perhaps with different details.

They signify the end of Christian civilization.

The next world war will witness its collapse, by destroying any possibility of international competition.

Its state of decadence will even strike those eyes that are still closed.

Its decomposition, begun int he XIVth century, will nauseate the most insensitive.

Its loathsome exploitation, effective for so many centuries at the cost of life's most precious qualities, will be finally revealed to all its victims, docile slaves, the more eager to defend it as they were made more miserable.

There will be an end to putrefaction.

Christian decadence will have dragged down in succession all the peoples, all the classes it has touched, from first to last, from top to bottom.

It will end in shame at the inverse of its achievements of the XIIIth century.

In the XIIIth century, when the peak of moral evolution had been reached, intuition gave way to reason: gradually, to preserve a supremacy which had once been spontaneous, acts of faith gave place to calculation. Exploitation began in the very bosom of religion through it s self-interested use of petrified sentiments and through the rational study of glorious texts.

This exploitation of reason spread to all society's activities, in response to demands for maximum production.

Faith, taking refuge in the heart of the crowd, became its only hope of revenge and ultimate compensation. But there,also, expectations were dulled.

In high places, mathematics succeeded obsolete metaphysical speculation. The spirit of observation succeeded that of transfiguration.

The method hastened some impending progress in limited fields; it encouraged the birth of our versatile machines with their vertiginous speed, it allowed he straight-jacketing of our tumultuous rivers -- and decadence seemed amiable and necessary, even if inviting the destruction of the planet. Scientific instruments brought us unanticipated means to investigating and regulating what was too small, too quick, too vibrant, too slow, or too huge for us. Our reason enabled us to over-run the world, but a world in which our harmony was lost.

The rending of psychic from rational faculties is close to paroxysm.

Material progress, reserved for the propertied classes but elsewhere held in check, has allowed political evolution with the guidance of religion (later without it), yet without renewal of our sensibility, our subconscious -- without allowing the emotional evolution of the crown -- which alone could have rescued us from the deep Christian rut.

Society, born in faith, will perish by the weapon of reason: intention.

The inexorable regression of collective moral power to a strictly individual and sentimental level has helped to weave an amazing cloak of abstract knowledge -- behind which society hides to devour at ease the fruit of its crimes.

Two world wars have been necessary to bring us to a recognition of this absurd state. The terror of the third will be conclusive. The H hour of total sacrifice is close upon us. Europe's rats already try to build a bridge of frantic escape over the Atlantic. But events will catch up with the greedy, the satiated, the self-indulgent, the appeasers, the blind and the deaf.

They will be put down without mercy.

A new collective hope will be born.

Already it commands the ardour of exceptional lucidities, anonymously bonded by a new faith in the future and the collectivity to come.

Magic booty, magically wrested from the unknown, lies at our feet. It has been gathered by the true poets. Its power to transform is measured by the violence shown against it and by its resistance in the end to exploitation. After more than two centuries, de Sade is still not found in bookstores, and Isidore Ducasse, dead for more than a century of revolutions and carnage, remains too virile for flabby contemporary consciences, in spite of the cesspool customs of today.

The items of this treasure reveal themselves, inviolable, to our society. They remain the incorruptible, sensitive legacy for tomorrow. They were ordained spontaneously outside of and in opposition to civilization, and await freedom from its restraints to become active in the social scheme.

Therefore, our duty is simple.

To break definitively with all conventions of society and its utilitarian spirit! We refuse to live knowingly at less than our spiritual and physical potential; refuse to close our eyes to the vices and confidence tricks perpetuated in the guise of learning, favour, or gratitude; refuse to be ghettoed in an ivory tower, well-fortified but too easy to ignore; refuse to remain silent -- do with us what you will, but you shall hear us; refuse to make a deal with la gloire and its attendant honours: stigmata of malice, unawareness or servility; refuse to serve and to be used for such ends; refuse all intention, evil weapon of reason -- down with them, to second place!

Make way for magic! Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for love! Make way for necessities!

To this global refusal we contrast full responsibility.

The self-seeking act is fettered to its author; it is stillborn.

The passionate act breaks free, through its very dynamism.

We gladly take on full responsibility for tomorrow. Rational effort, once in its proper place, will be available again to disengage the present from the limbo of the past.

Passions shape the future spontaneously, unpredictably, necessarily.

The past is contingency of birth, it thus cannot be sacred. We are always quits with it.

It is naive and misleading to consider the men and things of history through the magnifying glass of fame, which lends them qualities beyond the reach of clever academic monkey tricks, although such qualities come automatically when man obeys the deep necessities of being -- when he elects to become an new man in a new age (the definition of any man, of any time).

End the cascade of blows from the past which annihilates both present and future.

It is enough to disengage yesterday from the needs to today. A better tomorrow will be but the unforeseeable consequence of the present.

No need to concern ourselves with it before it comes.

Final Settlement of Accounts

The organized forces of society reproach us for our eagerness to work, our inflated anxieties, our excesses; such things insult their tolerance and gentleness, and their good taste (generous and full of hope and love, merely from habit).

Friend of the present regime suspect us of supporting the "Revolution". Friend of the "Revolution" call us merely rebels, saying we "pretest against what now exists but only to transform it not to displace it."

As delicately as this is put, we think we understand.

It is a question of class.

We are credited with the naive intention of wanting to "transform" society by exchanging the men in power with others of the same kind -- and of ignoring the friends of the "revolution"!

But the only distinction between these "friends" and those presently in power is that they belong to different classes -- as if a change of class implied a change of civilization, a change of desire, a change of hope!

They would devote themselves at fixed salary (plus a cost-of-living bonus) to the organizing of the proletariat. So far, so good: the trouble is that, once in power, besides low wages they will foist on the same proletariat always, and always in the same manner, a renewable levy of supplementary charges, without discussion.

We recognize, nevertheless, that they might still be serving history. Salvation will come only after the most excessive exploitation.

And this excess they will achieve.

They will achieve it naturally, with no need of special talents, and the feasting will be lavish. We have refused to participate, already.

Therein lies our "guilty abstention".

For them, the rationally organized spoils (and everything in the affectionate bosom of decadence); for us, the unpredictable passion; for us, the risk of all in global refusal.

(Inevitably each social class will succeed to the government of the people, unable to avoid the path of decadence. And, equally for certain, as history affirms, only a full blossoming of our faculties and a perfect renewal of their emotional sources will extricate us -- directing us towards the civilization impatient to be born.)

All of them, those in power, and those who want the power, would pamper us, if we agreed to overlook their crookedness by wilfully restricting our activities.

Integrity depends on pulling down our visors, plugging our ears, lacing our boots and boldly clearing a way through the pack of them, whether of left or right.

We prefer being cynical spontaneously, without malice.

Nice people smile at the meagre success of our exhibitions. They are amused to think themselves the first to spot some bargain prices.

If we continue to hold such shows, however, it is not in the naive hope of making fortunes. We know the wealthy stay away from us. They could not with impunity make contact with incendiaries.

In the past, misunderstanding of exactly that has generated sales.

We believe this text will help dispel misunderstandings for the future.

If our activities increase, it is because we feel the urgent need for union with others.

It is there that success has been gained.

Yesterday, we were alone and indecisive.

Today, a group exist with wide, courageous branches that extend beyond frontiers.

A magnificent duty falls on us: history elects us to preserve the precious treasure it bequeaths.

Real things require relationships repeatedly renewed, or challenged, or put to question: relationships impalpable, exacting and dependent on the vivifying force of action.

Our treasure is poetic resource: the emotional wealth on which the centuries to come will draw. It cannot be passed on unless it is transformed, and lacking this it is deformed.

Let those who are inspired by this endeavour join us.

We foresee a future in which man is freed from useless chains, to realize a plenitude of individual gifts, in necessary unpredictability, spontaneous and resplendent anarchy.

Until then, without surrender or rest, in community of feeling with those who thirst for better life, without fear of set-backs, in encouragement or persecution, we shall pursue in joy our overwhelming need for liberation.

Paul-Emile Borduas
Source: Paul-Émile Borduas, Écrits/Writings 1942-1958 trans. and eds. François-Marc Gagnon and Dennis Young (Halifax: 1978), 45-54.

Signataires du Refus Global
Magdeleine ARBOUR, Marcel BARBEAU, Bruno CORMIER, Claude GAUVREAU, Pierre GAUVREAU, Muriel GUILBAULT, Marcelle FERRON-HAMELIN, Fernand LEDUC, Thérèse LEDUC, Jean-Paul MOUSSEAU, Maurice PERRON, Louis RENAUD, Françoise RIOPELLE, Jean-Paul RIOPELLE, Françoise SULLIVAN.

In French.

The Painter as Barbarian: An Appreciation of Joe Becker

2011-08-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

Dreams are liars; if you shit in your bed, that's true.
-Martin Luther

We live in a therapeutic society because there is no culture here, only a market. A culture is predicated on sacrifice and capitalism, as Adam Smith and everyone after him has known, is incapable of sacrifice. Instead, it has a kind of pious sado-masochism where nothing ever really happens and the social contract amounts to a fanatical aversion to facing reality. The common sense of this world is a make believe pasture where everyone's masturbatory whims are turned into sacred cows.

Canada is a country established and maintained by corporations and, like most corporations, has built itself through massive campaigns of murder and rape clothed in evangelical messages of generosity. But the myths which successive governmental institutions have promulgated about the country, and which fuse our generic politeness with piousness, are only superficial. What makes up the minds of the people is a gelatinous mess of referents and images, torn from foreign pop cultures, which metamorphose into monsters. This monstrosity is omnipresent in the art being made at the moment, but it's usually sublimated into something slightly less terrifying than the Muppets. A few escape the trap.

Joe Becker's imagination trails into the more amorphous territory of these corporately created legends. It's a space haunted by horror movies and the children's television of the 1980s. However, there's nothing like the heroic and musclebound Aryan Prince Adam of "Masters of the Universe," that strange symbol of an idealized cosmopolitan whiteness. (When Prince Adam would turn into He-Man, he would get a tan. In Canadian art terms, He-Man is basically Lawren Harris. A trip to the savage land - the terrestrial manifestation of the unconscious or the transcendent - to bring back inoffensively abstract tourist mementos that can eventually be turned into ads for alcohol: the thing that helped destroy the 'savages' in the first place.) There isn't even a sign of anything so romantic and idealistic as Wun-Dar, the so-called 'Savage He-Man,' a murky figure with dark features who was a kind of evolutionary predecessor to Prince Adam from the land of Tundaria. Instead, what you get with Becker is a murky world of caves, giant rat-like creatures and ghouls who appear to be oleaginous wrestlers gone to seed.

It's work that comes directly from the experience of living in suburban or rural Canada, a world which exists, and even in the 80s existed, largely in the Imaginary. A world where empirical life is just a feedback mechanism for the reproduction of electronic icons. The mining of this territory benefits enormously from an apparent lack of consciousness or concern for the matter. Few other artists working today deal so well with what it is to be a product of this morass at this point in time. Unlike Diana Thorneycroft's pastiches of Canadiana, they are not a reflection of how we try to package and project ourselves to the world, but of how the world has penetrated us and infiltrated our minds. Her works are a little too deliberate to be genuinely evocative, while his work comes from the nauseating ether of the country - a space saturated in trashy TV, nostalgia and the general decay of society. As Thomas Hobbes once put it, images are the decay of sense, and Becker's images are the festering residue of the sense and sensibility of this society.

Two major painterly influences inform his work: The tradition of Flemish genre painting and the works of Neo Rauch. The Flemish obsession with the everyday, and the goriness that constitutes it, is present, torn out from it's common manifestation as the ordinary. Likewise, Rauch's sense of gliding through socio-historical tangents is also present, only relayed through the historical amnesia that constitutes the Canadian sensibility. What should be noted here is not simply the matter of influence, but the fact that the former's influence was also of cardinal importance to the history of Canadian painting. Most of the painting that fills the canon of eighteenth and nineteenth century art in this nation comes explicitly from the attempt to emulate Flemish genre painting. Among the first major images of mythical Canada were Cornelius Krieghoff's attempts to re-create this tradition in rural Quebec, albeit in a softened and highly sentimentalized manner. It's in light of this that I see Becker's work. No doubt unintentionally, he has managed to turn the tourist kitsch of Kreighoff upside down – the shacks of the habitants are no longer jovial bastions of saccharine familial bonding, but fetid, nightmarish swamps.

Becker's work may seem childish, but such schoolmarm's complaints miss the substance of the work. Canada is an adolescent nation, in spite of the fact that its elites have striven to become adults, that is, to become responsible corporate citizens. This is one of the reasons that the country has long been simultaneously acutely conservative and yet completely perverse and potty mouthed when it comes to much of its cultural output. Canada is less like any other nation than it is like the FOX Network, only with lower production values. Becker's figures are formed from the fecal matter that constitutes contemporary Canadian consciousness. While this situation is true for all of us, he has the integrity not to pass shit off as chocolate. Such a possibility is an explicit point of mockery: His most horrid characters shit rainbows. He is, probably, one of the most realistic painters of our lives.

Unlike his earlier, art history obsessed works, Becker's recent stuff uses a more banal set of resources as a springboard for his development of images. These are altered through a deep-seated sense of the teratological. Shit and monstrosity go hand in hand as the predicate and excess of Being. One could attempt to find meaning to accord to the creatures in his zoo – to Black Simpson and all of the social pathologies he calls upon, or to his hairy, possibly hermaphroditic creatures with their benign smiles and sagging tits – but milking significance out of them would be a mistake. Monsters are not abstract nor are they conceptual. The concrete is only possible through the monstrous because it is the base from which it is is formed. It's a symbolism which is not representational or socially meaningful. Both of those things are too scrawny and easy. The monster is the figure of nothing, that which exceeds the possibilities of human comprehension; it is the threshold of the concrete. It represents nothing and signifies nothing: It is a pure paradox, much like Canada, the multi-cultural culture that legally and morally defines itself as having no culture. The only authentic art this country could produce would be one that shits on the possibility of what passes for communication. Of course, it is precisely such an art that has been institutionally excluded.

Becker isn't alone in this teratological approach. Shary Boyle works in a similar vein but self-consciously and analytically, domesticating the monstrous into the digestible, while dozens of others use it for far more sentimental reasons, largely as a means to personalize the pop culture fad for horror. What sets him apart is how brutally naked his work is, how reluctant it is to be subdued by communicating or offering respite. Instead, it retains a visceral punch. There may be laughs, but they aren't the comforting kind. Even with his notable technical acumen, it's the brutishness that wins out. A lesser painter would simply get sucked into technical prowess but he lets ugliness override it. He seems to recognize that ugliness is not only more complex aesthetically, but that it rests closer to the truth.

Ugliness is matter excluded and rejected – the base of everything, the stupid excretory essence of life – but beauty is simply a tangential policy in the service of idiocy fetishisizing itself. There's mockery of this for sure in Becker - whether of the cults of Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber and Oprah, or the condo friendly art of the Angell Gallery – but there is no point of contrast or self-delusion to make it satirical or moral. Rather, it's a venomous form of class hatred, one which parodically deforms everything in its path. This is true whether it comes in the guise of his small and crude paintings or his larger works which seriously emulate the traditions of the old world, using them as a polemical knife against contemporary fashions and taste. These gross caricatures inhabit the decomposition which constitutes our lives. Although he places his cast of characters in a theatre, they are never given an explicit narrative, merely acts which tend to be sacrificial attempts to abort continuity and which barbarically refuse the sanctity of commonsense.

Joe Becker Paintings
Joe Becker Jellybeans

Various things

2011-08-02T11:25:00.001-07:00

I have not forgotten about this site. I've just been taking an extended break from writing about art for the sake of my mental well-being. I needed to clear my head and have been too busy with other things. This fall will be more productive. I'm going to be doing some work under Dennis Reid.

However, I have started a picture tumblr I'm trying to update daily.

Art In Canada

****

In other news, a photo installation of mine will be on display at the ARE Gallery, located at 1581 Dundas West. The show runs from August 5-10. My piece is kind of an homage (and I mean an homage, not a pastiche) to Paul Peel. It's going to be completely out of place, but most things I do are.

Movie Day: Three Shorts by Norman McLaren

2011-07-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

Spheres (1969)
Music performed by Glenn Gould

Dots (1940)

Synchromy (1971)

AbEX - NY Flexes in TO

2011-06-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

"There is no greater compliment [than] to have garbage thrown at an artist."

- Charlie Sheen's publicist.

This is the unexpurgated version of a review I originally wrote for BlogTO. It was posted there, edited by other hands, at about 35% of the length and effectively ended my relationship with them. It was written using a string of hyperbolic parodies and caricatures of the critical puppy mill that's accumulated around this stuff over the years. This was interpolated with various - deliberately distorted and sometimes hidden - statements by the artists themselves as well as conscientiously mistyped passages from the show's catalogue and statements given by the curators to the press gallery or directly to me. You don't need to read it because it's kind of a boring general audience blurb. Although it's pretty inoffensive and respectful to the art, it garnered me some of the snottiest hate mail I ever received as a scribe for the digital rag. And while annoying grammar Nazis and other apparently well-educated people who still don't understand how to read never ceases to amuse me, the entire event left me with a certain nausea. I actually cross the street so the shadow of the AGO won't hit me when I walk down McCaul.

The mess was a co-production of the AGO and the MOMA. The crew that put it together were many of the same people responsible for the Julian Schnabel debacle last year. David Moos notably justified that by arguing that Schnabel was the twentieth century's Courbet. While spewing this kind of nonsense seems to get people well-paying gigs with the 'art mafia' at the MOMA, it doesn't lead to thoughtful exhibits. This one failed on numerous counts. First: by its frumpy design and lack of lighting sensitivity; second: by predicating the organization of the show on a narrative of historical contingency and then failing to actually provide the context to establish it or flesh it out in any way; third: by turning a complex, relatively incoherent, series of artists into a streamlined package to suit purely commercial purposes; fourth: by failing to provide any illumination as to why this show is now relevant. (It remains to be seen precisely why the post-war era in America has become such a libidinal apparatus in pop culture lately, whether on TV, in the movies or pornography. One could hazard a guess, however, that a nostalgia for the smarmier aspects of Imperialism is clearly at play and being actively sentimentalized. This fad is appropriate enough given the general neo-conservative swing of the time, specifically in this country.) And finally fifth: by randomly exploiting personal details of the artists' lives in a kind of peepshow of melodramatic angst. Where the show succeeded was in demonstrating how conservative and provincial so much of the art establishment in this country still is. In addition to that, it demonstrated that no matter how strong a painting may be, a badly curated show will make it impossible to actually see it.

One could also object, as an issue of Canadian Art noted, that the show doesn't make the slightest nod to the relationship between abstraction in Toronto or Montreal and the often incestuous business partnerships between the centres. Nor does it offer more than a hair's toss at the substantial role of the American government and the CIA in funding, promoting and institutionalizing this work. In Canada, the comparable movement was largely financed by the auto industry, various cold war profiteers and government institutions. It is still hard to walk into many government offices in Toronto without seeing a Painters Eleven piece on the wall.

One of the even more interesting issues about this stuff, to me at any rate, is how innocuous it rapidly became. Its power lies in its glamour, one which is anonymous enough to be charismatic. To this day it serves as the generic backdrop for corporate culture as can even be glimpsed in the random still from "The Young & The Restless" seen above. It speaks volumes, albeit unclear ones, that these works can easily be bought on t-shirts or reprinted as the cheap posters of dorm room walls, but the works of someone like Morton Feldman, mining similar terrain in music, is still marginal, if not unbearable to a general audience. No one can make millions putting on Feldman's Beckett opera on Broadway but Pollock on a coffee mug is twee.

Of course, one could be more optimistic. Making a completely perverse wink to Wyndham Lewis and turning him a little on his side, one could insist on the proper deadness of art and suppose that this trendy floating to, and feeding off of, dead art is the most positive instance of art for art's sake possible. Anemic exhibitions like this provide the perfect cultural milieu for a culture of zombies and a proper outlet for the peculiarly self-loathing manifestations of the death drive that seem increasingly fundamental to this country's cultural institutions.

****

"Abstract Expressionism: New York" at the Art Galley of Ontario May 28-September 4.

It is being hyped as a 'killer exhibit,' although what it's killing isn't all that clear. There haven't been many retrospectives of the history of Abstract Expressionism quite this size. This one is unique because it brings together many of the key pieces in the collection of New York's MOMA. Works featured include those of such twentieth centuries luminaries as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Philip Guston but there are many more. The AGO is the only stop off the show is making, testifying to the close, sometimes controversial, tie between the two institutions. It gives visitors the chance to see the disparate, often misunderstood, work that falls under the banner header.

If you've ever been bewildered by Abstract Expressionism, the show does provide a nice summary of some of its major features. It's a very traditional, even conservative, little narrative. It's organized around the principle that it was a kind of queasy feeling that came out in painting. More specifically, it's about two decades worth of such painting concentrated in New York. 'Abstract Expressionism' is a loaded term, and not a very good one, generically used to describe some of what happened there.

Even if there is something new to say about these works, this show doesn't try to say it. Instead, it's a question of organizing and recalibrating things so they can reverberate with the present. One of the things that make the moment Abstract Expressionism emerged in art history interesting now is that, in many respects, it marked the beginning of the end of Modernism and the idealistic or utopian vision of art – the end of Art with a capital 'a' before it just became the art of capital. From its ruins, and ransacking them ever since, has been the massive art industry that quickly reached the point of self-parody by the 1980s and has never come back. The MOMA, love it or hate it, has always been puttering around the forefront of this.

But why this show now? As the organizers were at pains to explain, a decade or two ago they never would have put on a show like this because people wouldn't have paid for it. But now, since irony is passé, sentimentality and nostalgia are all the rage. This is 'authentic' art, insisted the curator, art that doesn't play games, doesn't ask the viewer to think, just to feel. Idiotic art for idiotic people. Art has become romantic again, or so I'm told almost every time I attend an art event. This has been in the air for the last ten years or so but it's getting thick as fog lately. A kinship between the angst of the post-war years and whatever feeling is supposedly in the air at the moment was conjured up during the press conference as the inspiration for the show. But I don't really buy the similarity of feeling and expression that they're trying to exploit. Today's abstraction is to that of the 40s and 50s what Avril Lavigne is to punk.

Abstract art has always been based on the assertion that in removing the clichés of pictorial space and dealing with essentials, it could speak a universal language. But, like Esperanto, it's never managed to be a universal language. It's localized as slang. What unites most, though certainly not all, of the artists in the show is their depressing spirituality. This art, though always hyped as authentically American, is the bastard of two European art movements: The kind of spiritual abstraction espoused by Wassily Kandinsky, where elements were pared down to their most basic forms and gestures to express the eternal, and the obsession with the subconscious that was the condition of Surrealism. An appeal to the primitive essence of things is what was thought to be at stake.

The two classic views concerning these paintings were given by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. To simplify what are actually rather dense arguments, the former advocated a pure formalism wherein a medium progressed to its natural perfection by gradually discarding everything extraneous. "Thereby each art would be rendered 'pure,' and in its 'purity' find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence." Ultimately, the paint and the surface with all of its colour and texture are all that's left. Rosenberg advocated a slightly more romantic view and cited the thematic import of the work. Borrowing heavily from some badly digested Existentialist philosophy, AbEx painters were turned into heroic figures testifying to the void at the heart of post-war America, the horrors of the Second World War and the dread which suffused the Cold War era.

It's the Rosenberg take on things that gets play in the show. I lost track of how many times Glenn Lowry, the director of MOMA, talked about painting 'rising from the ashes' of the war to deal with 'cosmic' issues in an 'authentic' way during the opening spiel. It's an old rhetoric. It's as old as the paintings and they haven't tried to improve upon it. And that's not to say that these things aren't there in the works. There's plenty of angst and dread. They aren't just paintings about painting or art for its own sake. In fact, I would argue, and most of the painters did at various points, that they're completely representational paintings based entirely on their experiences of the world. They were just trying to represent it without being clichéd or full of crap. This is something the show obviously wants to talk about it, but it's too superficial to pull it off. Instead, you get a lot of cliff notes that don't have a completely coherent set of concerns and sometimes verge on the anecdotal. If there was a single unifying purpose to all of these works, it was the desire to state something with absolute clarity, only not in an old language. Unfortunately, the hodgepodge approach they're lumbered with makes them all rather vague.

There are all sorts of odd choices littered around the galleries. After a little preamble through some minor, though certainly good painters, and notes on the wall about Surrealism that are just tacked in, you get Willem de Kooning. He's stuffed in a kind of alcove separate from everyone else but Pollock and Rothko get their own rooms. Unlike in the 1950s, their abstractness is actually a little more comforting today than de Kooning's distorted figures. When you turn around, you can see a nice example of Helen Frankenthaler's large scale stain paintings. They're right beside a couple of Clyfford Stills. Still, a sadly underappreciated painter whose reputation has been getting an overhaul over the last few years, stands as the outside of everything else in the show. He rejected New York, the MOMA, the art world and urbanity as just more crap and it shows.

As you walk along, you'll see a sculpture or two, a few decent Lee Krasners, a strong and brutal sand and oil painting by Richard Pousette-Dart. You'll also find little videos to watch about the various processes of different painters that play like craft shows for PBS. The sporadic attention to specific personalities also knocks things off-key. For instance, Franz Kline is singled out for his 'signature style' and thanks to the anecdotes in the cue cards at the foot of his paintings; his stark pieces actually manage to come off as almost sappy.

Nearby, you can enter the Pollock room. The pieces run from his early, not especially successful, Picasso influenced works to the paintings he became more famous for. What this part of the show surprisingly, though I assume deliberately, lacks is much insight into Pollock. He's left enigmatic, a spiritual warrior. None of the usual stuff about the macho, alcoholic painter who used to bite dogs and cry when people refused to fight him in bars. Nothing like what you get from the appalling emo biopic film made of him by Ed Harris. Maybe you get a little of the man who struggled all of his life to live up to being the 'American Picasso' but that's it and that seems unintentional: it's a little too unheroic. In the middle of it you can see a major painting like "Full Fathom Five" hung like it's a dart board in someone's basement. But the whole arrangement doesn't say much about the way he altered the picture plane or the grammar of painting, as if he'd suddenly revealed a way to write sentences which didn't need nouns.

Rothko's room starts with one of his early Joan Miro influenced pieces. It's historically interesting, but dramatically out of place and knocks everything else in the room off-kilter. His more familiar colour field works span the walls. They're extraordinarily careful paintings about undulating hues, often in strikingly original combinations. There's a solemnity to them. He wanted them to express modern life and the fact that it's incapable of being nothingness so it settles for just being void. They're depressing, but if you see them when they're lit properly, they evince incredible op art effects as the hues become transparent and shine through each other the longer you stare. However, none of that happens in this show. The lighting sucks all of the delicacy out. The ingenuity he put into his layers of scumbling evaporates. There's just a plum dullness. This is how the English painter Francis Bacon must have seen them when he said they were the most depressing and murky paintings in the world.

Then things brighten up. You get Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman all thrown in a room together like the set-up for a joke without a punchline. Rather, you just get their lines: Newman's lovely thick lines, Motherwell's curves, Reinhardt's squares. But everything seems out of whack because of how they are arranged. These are paintings by people who used scale with enormous impact but their scales are compacted by contact so they look like an adult trying to wear the clothes of a doll. But all of the lines in that room just point the direction to the end, which is the little room of Philip Guston, who for CanCon purposes I'll point out was born in Montreal. His paintings have lots of broad brushwork, with small strokes and light, creamy colour combinations. Then he drops dense bits in to weigh things down in odd places. The light actually works here and the paintings still seem wet. But he's really put there to show the move away from abstraction. His more cartoonish work is present: bright, sardonic, a bit menacing and strangely contemporary. On the wall you can see a note talking about how he went back to figuration to represent the reality outside of art, which is basically what the whole show was trying to demonstrate all the other painters were doing all along.

However, a show like this isn't really about art: it's about the aura art is supposed to have. While I have little doubt that art has some kind of aura, I don't think it's something you can stick on a platter and serve as a hors d'oeuvre at a dinner party, which is basically how it comes off here. Perhaps I'm cynical, but I find it hard to take. It's not that I think 'quests for the authentic' aren't serious and worthwhile, because I do. But I don't think that this show is going to lead anyone down that path. Instead, it leads you down to a gift shop where you can buy an AbEx backpack to put your Jackson Pollock puzzle in, along with your black drip painting t-shirt and The New Yorker postcards.

Pop Up Shows this May: Satok & Dean

2011-05-06T06:41:00.000-07:00

There are two pop-up shows opening this month that I would like to encourage anyone and everyone to check out if they happen to have the opportunity, although they have nothing in common.

In Toronto, Lauren Satok's "All The Places We Have Been" will be running from May 12-14 at the Baitshop Gallery located at 358 Dufferin St, Unit 117, which can be entered through the Milky Way. I met with her last month to see some of the pieces and wrote a brief essay to be displayed at the show which also promises hard booze, some kind of country-punk music, video projections and improvised storytelling.

For those in Montreal, Mr. Rory Dean has a solo show at Ctrllab baring the eloquent title, "Fuck It, Fuck Art & Fuck You" running from May 18-21. It seems to be a rather new road for Dean this time out, but hopefully it will get some love since they do still have some genuine appreciation for aggressive painting in Quebec. Here's an interview I did with him a few months ago.

And I promise to update this site more often, but being basically homeless for awhile made it hard.

Movie Day: Hart of London by Jack Chambers

2011-03-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following paper for something or other awhile ago, which is why it's a bit more academic than what I normally write here. Anyway, after the recent piece about the Chambers show at Museum London, it seemed appropriate. It's not a great essay by any means, and it's scope in dealing with the notoriously complex and esoteric film is decidedly limited, but it may offer some interest. The full film can be found below, but if you ever have the good fortune to see it on the big screen, for the love of God, do it.

The complex and often paradoxical artistic vision of Jack Chambers (1931–1978) was something that the artist attempted to give context and intellectual clarity to in his essay "Perceptual Realism." This difficult, rather esoteric, text documents his relationship to contemporary art praxis in North America. Although it is often cited in discussions of Chambers' work to explicate his intentions, what has received scant examination has been the penultimate section of the essay and the specific implications which it has for his work.

In this paper I will examine Chambers' understanding of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) in terms of his spiritual beliefs and the formal strategies he deploys in the film "Hart of London" (1970). There is a close connection between these elements. He regarded Duchamp's work as an illustration of the relationship between the different planes of aesthetic experience and interpreted it as a fundamentally metaphysical gesture. For Chambers, the Spirit, which is 'indistinct' because universal and a parcel of God, is mirrored by what Duchamp would call the 'indifferent' object, the material which, for Chambers, is also made of, and by, God. These two things do not function in a dualistic manner. As R. Bruce Elder argues in his extensive documentation of the quasi-Hegelian aesthetic attitude which Chambers developed(1), the notion of a dichotomy between subject and object is constantly under attack in his work. There is only one substance, though this can readily become distorted and degraded by subjectivity, and then turned over to illusion.

The penultimate section of Chambers' text contains a brief discussion of the impact of Duchamp on modern art and what it means for the art practices of North America. He identified the art of this continent as 'impoverished' (Chambers, 36) precisely because it was actually a technology, not an art; that is, it dealt purely with appearances, or the secondary processes of nature. This was an inevitable result of the fact that most of the arts only had an imported history, one which was dislocated from its organic development in Europe. For Chambers, a work of art had to engage with what he regarded as the two fundamental animating processes of life. The continuity of these two processes, their interpenetration, is what could best be understood by the term 'artifice'. The notion that nature is an artificial system working as an artificer under God (the primary artificer) is common to theology and seems to be essential to Chambers' understanding of the nature of art.

Although Elder goes to some lengths to note the Romantic tendencies inherent in this line of Chambers' thought (2), specifically in his concern with synthetic perception revealing the truth of a numinous nature, a process which is isomorphically related to the primary processes of nature (Elder, 227), and even wrote an essay explicitly placing Chambers within the verist tendencies of Surrealism (3), he doesn't pay heed to Chambers' remarks concerning Duchamp. This is even more surprising given the fact that the one work which Chambers cited as embodying Perceptual Realism was actually Duchamp's "New Piece" later known as the "Étant donnés" (1969), which had been widely publicized in arts magazines at the time.

Chambers set out a theory which was explicitly spiritual, even if his Catholicism was not exactly doctrinaire. There is an overt neo-Platonic tendency manifest in his Catholicism and the insistence that the material, or fallen world, is somehow the degenerate version of primary forms, although this is tempered by the insistence on the presence of God in all material aspects of life. The Spirit manifests as the body, a corporeality. Art has to be as material as the body of Christ was, otherwise it simply becomes an Imago and a myth: it cannot be art because it cannot participate in Divinity but only in the even more degenerate form of subjectivity. The latter is precisely what he attacks North American art, specifically the art of his time, for succumbing to. "Art... is not art when having only the mind-system to work with," (Chambers, 42) for "[i]ts image is not found outside itself." (Chambers, 42)

Chambers compares the art scene (pop art, neo-Dada, early land art) with Duchamp's readymade. The North American has a visual language from Europe which doesn't belong to this continent and a material language from the industrial production of this continent that communicates nothing because it is cut off from history. To crudely paraphrase: North American art is a urinal in a desert. (This is a polemical statement, but given the anti-American climate at the time, an appropriate one.) While Chambers recognized that his contemporaries were utilizing Duchamp in various ways, something had gone seriously wrong. What was lost in North America was synthetic unity and this unity no longer existed because the continent's art had no body, only machinery, and a detached metaphysics that seemed to be operating unilaterally. To rectify this problem, Chambers turned to filmmaking as a means to synthesize the two processes. Much like Duchamp's experiments with cinema, as exemplified in his "Anemic Cinema" (1926), the use of film is to a large degree for its biological value, for the intense encounter it can have with the nervous system. It wasn't for nothing that cinema was known in its early days as the 'bioscope'. Chambers summarized what this procedure involved in this way: "Everything begins and everything happens through contact with matter." (Elder 1989, 363)

Chambers outlines the operation of the two key processes of life and art according to the following model(4). The primary process that undergirds the world is the fluctuation of energy. This passes through circuits which allow for the transfer of matter and sensations between elements as they are gridded together and through each other. This dynamic process of energy transmission is what he calls 'perception'. Experience is a circuit which constellates the senses so that they can communicate the energy which passes between organisms. Perceptual realism is the intention to imitate the superimposition of these processes: to create an artifice which is capable of synthesizing the two active processes of the general economy of matter. The successful occurrence of such a phenomenon is what Chambers calls the 'WOW' (Chambers, 43) experience, one closely akin to the more traditional notion of epiphany and what the Surrealists would call the 'marvellous'.

Duchamp had infamously introduced the readymade with the claim that he was searching for an object of indifference, for work which had no subjective value. The Surrealists would extend this notion in certain respects. André Breton (1896-1966) explicitly spelled out Surrealist aesthetics in Hegelian terms as the attempt to overcome the subject-object divide and arrive at objective truth. This same ambition for Chambers was manifest in his interest in photography and essential to perceptual realism. As Elder explains, the photo "...renders the time-bound timeless..." and can "...afford knowledge of something that is beyond the self and higher than the self: it is almost a religious conception of photography..." (Elder 2002, 100)

One of the purposes of perceptual realism had been to rid painting of lyricism and mannerism, to finally establish an objective art. Film was ideal for this because it made the material dominant over the creator and insisted on the physical experience of the viewer's body and the cardinal importance of light. Ross Woodman suggests that Chambers also moved into film because of his dismay that his paintings were too easy to consume with their basis in 'descriptive space' (Woodman, 46). Descriptive realism provided the audience with an easy escape from facing things. "He was determined to destroy the image as a spatial form seducing the viewer into certain illusory notions about the nature of reality." (Woodman, 46-47)

In Chambers' paintings prior to the period he was working on "Hart of London," the influence of photography had taught him to move further away from a united depth of field. Instead, there were areas of his canvas which had a splintered series of nearly hyperrealist depths which were then synthesized into a frame that was held together by its nearly monochromatic colour scheme. "Some of Chambers' works of this period (like Daffs, 1964-1965) even resemble a photographic negative or bas-relief; the colour is handled in such a way that forms appear to be modulated by light, and forms are sometimes visible from one angle though not from another." (Elder 1989, 219) The collapsing of depth and layering of surfaces also served to break down the temporal relations between things. As Chambers puts it, "It's a different realism: space has become time." (Elder 1989, 221) An image is put together through an amalgam of particles, each of which contains the light of Being. God is not deep, just as the soul of things is not in their depths or their recesses, which are only degradations of the original process. Instead, Divine aspects are always on the surface. They are spatial issues; light can only exist there.

"Hart of London" explicitly plays out what is at stake in the play of light on the surface. It takes apart the distinction between forms, often functioning as a force to annihilate difference and negate clichéd dichotomies like inner and outer, life and death, or public and private experiences. Bart Testa attempted to contrast the personal and the social in the work, but this distinction doesn't seem applicable. The public and private are always simultaneously within each other and ultimately negated as distinct forms. The actual distinction is chromatic, which is something that Testa later seems to realize. "By piling up motifs and distributing redundancies around the assembled core figure... Chambers creates masses of images that through his use of superimposition, constantly vary in tone and rhythm but rarely in meaning." (Testa, 150) I would go further and insist that the meaning is not that coherent at all, or at least not that simple. Much of what frames Testa's analysis of the work is the insistence on its simple sentimentality, but the fissures in this argument open up as his essay progresses. While Testa asserts that "[w]hat we do see oscillates wildly... between clarity and fuzzy indistinction" (Testa, 155), making the montage of the film reject an analytical reading, he doesn't recognize that the push to and from indistinction is actually essential to the significance of the film. Giving distinctions the force of actuality is something which is agonizingly frustrated.

In fact, in spite of the oft claimed assertion that the film is about the principle of generation (in the various senses of the term), it seems more accurate to say that it is about the relationship between indistinction and generation, or about the indifferent object and the accession of a synthetic vision. It is precisely this process which the film enacts, explicitly calling up distinct images (personal photos and collective public memories) which are eroded and synthesized within the indifference of light. The distinct object is burned in a mass, something which is quite literally played out in the film. Likewise, one of the film's guiding formal qualities is that of a catalogue. It calls up one image after another, one narrative after another, but always stripping away the context and stripping away its subjective character, leaving the tiny events with an overriding sense of oddness. This oddness is thanks both to their juxtaposition (for example: sorting through photos placed next to digging holes which is next to posing with foxes) and their frequent return, never as repetitions, but as variations using the same footage.

"Hart of London" is divided into relatively succinct sections, each of which demonstrates a substantially different style, both in terms of its chromatic values and its variation in editing, but which operate together to engage the nervous system into a space where it can experience perceptual realism. The bulk of the film is made of black and white footage which was culled from local television stations. This is interspersed with newsreel footage from other archives and the home photos which residents of London sent to him. These are all woven together in a highly textural way. Much like Duchamp, he is creating an assemblage through found objects which can be set up to resonate (or not) as he tries to set the two processes of artifice (real-object and mental-object) into play through superimpositions. "As in any other mosaic, the third dimension is alien to TV, but it can be superimposed." (McLuhan, 273)

The opening of the film is dominated by a harsh whiteness which is accentuated by the minimal soundtrack. It slowly develops, layering images over one another at varying states of exposure. Even more specifically, Chambers was appropriating footage from television, which McLuhan would note is "...not the isolated moment or aspect, but the contour, the iconic profile and the transparency" (McLuhan, 169). White always predominates though figures gradually start to break through. Since he frequently uses negative inversions of footage in superimposition, the figure changes from black to white. This both creates a kind of bas relief effect to the figure and breaks down the solidity of the foreground and background. There is a reversibility between the two at points. Light is explicitly the predicate and the source of decomposition for the figure.

The centre of the film, concentrating on birth and the the slaughter of lambs, was largely shot by Chambers. It is filled with chiaroscuro and suffused with the aesthetics of traditional academic painting, only used now as a set of readymade forms. These are then hacked up through montage to be re-presented as an inextricable oddness, as '"odd" objects in the "right" place' (Chambers, 42). The static shots of dying lambs is harshly contrasted with the often frantic and fragmentary cuts of the childbirth. Unlike so much of the film, which works through a conjunctive cataloging of disparate images which are rendered indistinct by light and their spatial relation to each other, these images are cut to penetrate each other, looping and negating even the extreme distinction of black and white from colour. It is their highly aestheticized character that Chambers undercuts through this process, refusing the distinctions which would allow for the 'because'(5) of aesthetic judgment.

The articulation of the figure is also complicated by the frequent return of the images. Their return does not allow them to function like leitmotivs because they are never quite the same; they are always in variance and re-contextualized and therefore destabilized. This is necessary to constantly undermine the conversion of the images into simple information which can be used to articulate a subjectively consumable content. One should point out, however, that while there are no characters, there are certainly reiterated forms, albeit fairly abstract ones(6). The opening section of the film which shows the deer running around London and the piling of deer corpses by the townspeople is continually undermined by overexposure of film stock, illogical superimposition and reiterations of footage which destabilize the coherency of what it could be documenting. This is essentially played as a battle of pure light and vying transparencies, a battle between forms of 'mind-systems' and 'container-bodies' (Chambers, 42). This light, the light of God or the primary process, both of matter and explicitly of photography, is simultaneously the force of annihilation and the force of birth, simultaneously that which can fashion the figure by artifice and erase it in the same process. As has been observed of the Duchamp work which Chamber cited, it is "...an allegory staging the desire of figuration." (Buchloh, 157) An allegory of the union of the two processes through figuration.

The purpose of the figure, its excitation of the 'WOW' moment that Chambers speaks of, has another similarity with the work of Duchamp and the unusual kind of bioscope that the "Étant donnés" creates with its specific structure of viewing. In that work, the moment of astonishment arises from searching through a peephole at a mysterious object, the exact significance, location and even gender of which are highly ambiguous. There is an insistent mystery or sense of absence which only fuels the intense experience of one's own presence as an aspect of the piece, as a conduit in the creation of the figure. This is precisely what Chambers sought as well. "In short, everything and anything that one sees is in its actual presence also more than we can in any one way understand it to be." (Chambers, 43) In Chambers, however, it is more complexly spelled out.

The importance of perception is its shock to what passes for the natural or everyday, its break from the subjective world of memory. Once it becomes something remembered, it becomes no more than 'a "forgotten" awareness' (Chambers, 43) and is degraded into the wold of subjective illusion. The greater ramifications of this are played out throughout the film. While the film's final sequence, featuring Chamber's wife chanting to his children to be careful as they approach deer in a petting zoo, can readily be interpreted as the encouragement of compassion, there is another side to it. In the trajectory of the film, the world that emerged following the sacrificial one (both of the lambs and birth) is a domestic world, a world of colour and harsh contrasts. A world where God is diffused into everything, refracted in the spectrum of light into differentiated circuits. This falls away again as things break into further differentiations and various absurd narratives appear as so many parodies of the sacrificial form at the heart of the film. A boy swims in frozen water and is arrested; bushes are trimmed and domesticated, held under umbrellas; and a handicapped child is given a bird in a cage. These are all is rendered as a kind of parody of the original sacrifice, domestications of the initial violence once the power of shock has passed into memory. In this respect, we can see Duchamp's "Fountain" (1917) as enacting the same process, introducing the domestic (toilet) into an elevated public space (the gallery) and returning the violence of the corporeal to it.

Figuratively, at the centre of both Duchamp and Chambers' works, in the middle of all of the readymade and reworked found objects that constitute their limits, is a vagina. In both cases, it is correlated to the eye as a double of sight. In Duchamp, it provides the vanishing point of the image and insists on the carnal nature of visuality. In Chambers, it is equally carnal, though less in the sexual sense of the term. The vagina appears with a shift away from the stillness of carnage (slaughter of lambs) to rapidly cut footage which is an intense patchwork of dark film grain and harsh light as it documents childbirth and the excretion of multiple bodily floods. But this gory passage, which articulates the coming of vision, of light, is also an allegory of the desire for figuration, one which is explicitly mirrored in the scene of slaughter which presages it. The lamb is never simply a lamb, but always simultaneously the container of a metaphysical weight and a material instance of the primary process – the force of generation and destruction. As such, the figures are intended to work against the distinct identity of elements. As was the case for Duchamp, a figure is not a sign or a communicative device but a kind of visceral attack intended to force the body to think. As Gilles Deleuze would put it in a statement applicable to Chambers: "It is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought." (Deleuze, 189)

Notes:

1.See Elder 1989, 344-354
2.See Elder 1989, 225-230
3.See Elder 2002
4.Chambers 33-36
5."Because is the mental process of aesthetics, at whatever level of sophistication, where appearances trigger conditioned aesthetic responses to fade out an otherwise potential perceptual impact. The impact on the perceiver looking through the visible to a general vision-awareness of the whole will register impartially an experience because it is not intercepted by the mind. The aesthetic concern converts and manipulates its own energy according to its particular needs. The spontaneous and primary nature of perception cannot speculate in values." (Chambers quoted in Elder 2002, 101)
6.In a very real manner, events or objects are actually focal points where highly charged psychic impulses are transformed into something that can be physically perceived: a breakthrough into matter. When such highly charged impulses intersect or coincide, matter is formed. (Chambers quoted in Elder 2002, 109)

Bibliography:

Buchloh, Benjamin. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Print.

David Burnett and Marilyn Schiff. Contemporary Canadian Art, Edmonton: Hurtig, 1983. Print.

Chambers, Jack. "Perceptual Realism." The Films of Jack Chambers. Ed. Kathryn Elder. Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 2002. 33-43. Print.

Chambers, Jack. Hart of London. 1970. Film.

Deleuze, Gilles. Translated by High Tomlinson and Robert Galets. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Print.

Elder, R. Bruce. Image And Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989. Print.

Elder, R. Bruce. "Jack Chambers' Surrealism." The Films of Jack Chambers. Ed. Kathryn Elder. Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 2002. 87-115. Print.

Masheck, Joseph. Duchamp In Perspective. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Print.

McInnes, Val Ambrose. To Rise With The Light: The Spiritual Odyssey of Jack Chambers. Toronto: Ontario College of Art, 1989. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Print.

Taylor, Michael R. et al. Marcel Duchamp : Étant donnés. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009. Print.

Testa, Bart. "Chambers' Epic: The Hart of London, History's Protagonist." The Films of Jack Chambers. Ed. Kathryn Elder. Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 2002. 141-173. Print.

Woodman, Russ. "Jack Chambers as Filmmaker." The Films of Jack Chambers. Ed. Kathryn Elder. Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 2002. 45-57. Print.

The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century, edited by Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss and Sandra Paikowsky. Don Mills: University of Oxford Press, 2010. Print.

The film can also be seen in two pieces on UbuWeb.

Jack Chambers: "The Light From the Darkness" at Museum London

2011-03-02T17:52:00.000-08:00

The moment of "white light" is the moment of perception ... It is the seminal brilliance of perception - that blind vision of unconscious intelligibility, never seen nor known except as unknowable, which makes a work of art real. (Jack Chambers)

This is the first time that the 'so-called' silver paintings of Jack Chambers have been reassembled in forty years (I like it when things are actually labeled 'so-called': it's like something out of Lewis Carroll or a piece of Marxist anthropology from the 1930s). They are displayed alongside his film works, appropriately enough since he referred to them in explicitly cinematic terms as 'instant movies'. They developed at a crucial period in his short career, a time when he was stylistically restless and momentarily breaking from the strictures of the classical European tradition of academic painting which he had been steeped in. They are not, however, casually experimental, but probing. Nor are they a flirtation with techniques that were in the air, but rather a deeply skeptical analysis of the medium that he would continue for several years before devoting himself to what he dubbed 'perceptual realism'. This context is important on a number of levels. As he sought a truly localized art, he reacted against the colonial tradition in both of its modes, as either the influence on style exported from Europe or, perhaps more immanently dangerous, that exported from south of the border. He was also gradually stripping the medium to what he regarded as essential – the image – in what was, to a substantial degree, a polemical attack on the direction painting had gone in since the second world war.

Chambers' most active period was when the arts scene in London was ratcheting up its emphasis on localization and nationalism, a tendency which would take an avowedly theatrical anti-American tone with his friend Greg Curnoe. The works on display by Chambers are part critique of pop, part embrace, but it is only either of those things on a superficial level. Whenever I read about these paintings, Warhol's silver paintings almost invariably get name dropped, but there are enormous differences. In both artists, one finds the complete saturation of the world with death, almost to the point that there is nothing to existence but dying. In Warhol, this was sublimated into glamorization and campiness. As all of Andy's talk about being a machine hints, there's a distinct dread of material existence which underscores his work. Unlike Warhol and his obsession with the glamour of death, death for Chambers was a radically everyday and intimate encounter, something which is testified to most explicitly in his film works. While both artists were intensely Catholic (religion played a frequently under appreciated role in both of their bodies of work), what was at stake for the American is what would come to be at stake for Conceptual Art, namely a glamorization of banality. In his case, the reification of consumer objects: Warhol's items became fetish items for a crass kind of immortality. Chambers did something completely antithetical to that and, in many respects, less humanistic, because he had rejected all of the dualistic baggage which makes glamour possible.

One of the most striking things about the Chambers works, and which I can't recall anyone mentioning in the sparse literature on the subject, is the fact that the majority of the pictures are done on plywood or particle board. Although the images have a blatant iconic quality, and their smooth surface is often mentioned, there's nothing of the sort there. Rather, the surface is deliberately rough and highly textured. They are explicitly not flat and unified but texturally artificial in a gruff way, full of shifting densities which cause subtle lighting effects due to the volatility of the surface. These add to the sense of materiality and offer a different level of illusionism than the simple play between positive and negative. In fact, in a very real way, they complicate that relationship in what must have been a deliberate choice.

In spite of the fact that Chambers was quite consciously working against the grain of the contemporary art scene at the time with his use of figuration, it's impossible not to see the debt to geometrical abstraction which the silver paintings have. Maybe it's too obvious for anyone to bother pointing out, but it's worth acknowledging. There are complex rhetorical games he's playing with it and they're riddled with paradoxes. It is not strictly parody that he's doing either. Rather, he's taking advantage of geometrical abstraction's attention to rhythm as a means of further delineating time. Even while doing this, however, he is still playful. The use of 'color options' is part a printer's joke and part a jab at the kind of painterly reductionism practiced by Mondrian. Chambers may use the same rigidly geometrical forms, but his colours are almost inevitably impure, mixed and, in the case of silver, a neutralizing agent rather than one that is differentiating like the black favored by abstractionists. These formal elements are further complicated by the use of images painted off of photographs or art reproductions. Narratives, rather than the events or characters of Warhol, are implicated. They are not linear ones though. Instead, they are highly condensed and undifferentiated to the point that any causal stream is voided. In this fashion, they retain the intensity of the event, while placing it on a more deliberately cosmological level. What all of this amounts to is a method for creating simultaneity, a method, in other words, of using line against itself to create a non-linear configuration which retains both the kind of spiritual weight of someone like Barnett Newman while retaining the figure.

There is a deliberate minimalizing of brush strokes, but this is not to give them a mass produced appearance (although he made multiples of some of them) but to depersonalize them and attempt to minimize style, a process which Chambers would push further later in his career. There's a desire for transparency at play. The silver's capacity to optically change the figure makes the images exercises in seeing. They're special effects paintings, but never gimmicky, always with an art historical self-consciousness and deliberation. As in Pop, he uses images from popular media, but they aren't glamour shots and they aren't disasters: they're non-descript and anonymous, almost random. These are mixed up with Ingres and references to Baroque painting, equalizing the two things within the plane of neutrality. This technique is furthered by his slightly mysterious use of numbers. The presence of numbers are part of the work's general schema of reversibility. Neutrality works against identity and for interchangeability because everything is already made of everything else and can, therefore, go into everything else. Mathematics flow in a stream of jump cuts and reflections. Each equation is an instant movie, a method for breaking down time and space to reassemble it.

While Warhol is often the point of reference for the silver paintings, one could also look to fellow Canadian Paul-Émile Borduas who, only a few years before, had been rigorously pursuing the reversibility between figure and ground. The similarities between Borduas' late, predominately black and white paintings and Chambers' are complex and not completely obvious, but they are genuinely there. In those late works, Borduas created strictly composed paintings, heavily relying on a set of formal dichotomies that are synthesized into an unstable neutrality. The figure was never stabilized; rather, it was mobilized. The dissolving of ground was accented by the fact that light could be mobilized across the plane based on the density of the paint, continually shifting the delineation of its terrain according to the angle at which it was viewed. The overt duality which the use of black and white might conjure was subverted. They do not function as positive and negative registers but in equilibrium as interchangeable aspects. Borduas accomplished this through the densities of paint, conscious of how they will capture and light and play off against each other, deliberately creating a surface which is unstable and indefinite. A tension, but also harmony, is created in this. This complicated the illusion of depth, making it difficult to discern if the figurative elements are receding in space or not. It is very close to the same special effect that Chambers sought out. Neutralization through the ambiguity of the figure is what Chambers pushes even further than Borduas. Figure and ground only become functional distinctions based on the manner of viewing. They become optically activated and mobilized.

In these works, Chambers tried to paint time. But what does that mean? It means painting with light. Through the rest of his career, he would obsess over photography and what it meant to painting. But even before he ventured into his perceptual realist phase, he was introducing the importance of painting with light, only in a different way. The silver paintings work by light. Time is the fluctuation of light. He began trying to create a realism that was not concerned with space, as had long been the case, but which dealt with the movement of light, its fluctuations and emanations. For him, light was the greater part of corporeal reality and, therefore, of spiritual truth (there's very little verticality in his work). This was something that artists had long failed to properly consider, relying instead on the degradations of light, on the silhouettes of objects and on surfaces. For Chambers, light and time are unified as the movement of God, manifest as the fluctuation of Spirit, as the force of intelligibility.

If one looks at a connected work like "Olga and Mary Visiting," it becomes clear what is at stake. Working from a photograph allows the artist to fix a moment, or string of moments, in time. Chambers explained that a painting is an accumulation of particles forming the experience of lived space. Duration is the movement of light, accumulated into a density which can be focused into an image. The image is meant to be rendered not as a description or a representation but as a kind of Divine machine which enacts a quasi-holy moment, that is, it reveals the Objective facticity of God.

Like Hart of London, the works deal with history in a way which is forceful and sweeping. In effect, the historical is made to inhere within the single plane, not through Joycean cacophony (as is, to a degree, the case in the aforementioned film) but through neutralization. It is here that the conflict between creating an artwork that responds to the unique demands of a specific moment of material existence comes most clearly into focus. In this, he responds to his often stated dilemma about being a classically trained painter in a territory where this was not necessarily a tenable option. Not only was he utilizing experimental new techniques, he was doing so while consciously appropriating imagery from (largely neoclassical) art history. One of the most persistent paradoxes in Chambers' work is the weight of history and, simultaneously, the constant disavowal of it by virtue of acknowledging the neutralizing force of Time. Essentially, he unites the two things and neutralizes them in much the same way he neutralizes space by gridding his figures in a way which is aionic.

Jack Chambers: the light from the darkness, silver paintings and film work at Museum London.

Primitive Glamour.

2011-02-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

"Fussiness and kitsch, after all, are the two principle characteristics of so-called civilized man, highly stylized as he has become into a single human grotesque over hundred of thousands of years..."

-- Thomas Bernhard Old Masters

The kitsch of expressionism.

What had been at stake in the shift to non-representational painting often took two radically different directions, though the work in-itself may have been identical. On the one hand there was the appeal to the universal and spiritual and on the other, a different kind of universality, that of matter and the brutishness of form. Of course, non-representational painting quickly ceased to be non-representational. In fact it became rapidly representative of a host of things from the myth of the heroic artist to the hegemony of American capitalism. This was only extended by Pop art before reaching its reductio ad absurdem in Conceptual Art with its heightening of the importance of that most spiritual of cults – intentionality and its glamorization of banality. But if you know anything about glamour, you know that it always comes with nostalgia attached, if not riding piggy-back.

Abstraction has become romantic because it's old, but the same is true of much figurative work, particularly that which is often called naïve, which is the more polite way of saying primitive (the term 'primitive' is here to connote a set of enshrined stylistic cliches). Abstraction seems even older and more mythological, therefore it's no surprise that there is a current obsession with drawing contemporaneous with it since they both share a renewed obsession with geeky myth mongering. Abstraction once appealed to a kind of aniconic religious impulse, although, unlike Islam, it was never organized properly into a ritualistic function. Rather, its function has tended to be emo, something which has become culturally solidified and reached its most appalling form in the Hollywood film about Pollock where both the myth and emotion were unified in a biographical skit that could have come from Tracey Emin if she wrote after-school specials. This campy abstraction continues to percolate and fill up galleries, sometimes serving up a style that has more to do with the current fad for 3-D than anything else. It expresses only a sentimental emoting. This is easily crafted into objects where the handiwork is apparent and the emotion is transparent. Hugh Scott-Douglas' show at Clint Roenisch even provides the buyer with the opportunity to see themselves in the mirror, refracted in the emotion he has packaged his frames in.

What is at work in the 'handmade' kitsch that makes up the refurbished modernist cliches finds an analogue in much of the digital work being done at the moment. In fact, the distinction between the two things is becoming largely one of fetishization and little else. Painting is something anyone can have access to in theory, but in practice few have much experience of. It's exotic in a way, whereas digital manipulation is something that most people do. It is the folk art of our time. As a result, painting doesn't distinguish itself by craft or by imagery, but by materiality, by brandishing itself as something obviously physical. It's a peep show of labour. Digital photography will fake textures and play the old two dimensional game, but painting, anxious to prove itself more precious, is built up with so much artificial surface it starts to resemble a muppet: not exactly real and not exactly anything, but material enough to be a presence and something more than a symbol.

The question then is: what does all of this supposed return to the primacy of matter over concept look like and how does it work? An interesting illustration would be the digital works of Alex Fischer which were put on display at O'Born Contemporary. Landscape, portraits, bits of trash and various materials including paint are layered and layered but always retaining a curious transparency. When a bug hits a windshield and its guts spread, the distinction between the surface and the depths of a body are no longer there. Rather, the single pane of shield and bug becomes the prismatic extension of a moment which then proceeds through a continual process of recession until it is eroded into disappearance. In effect, Fischer's work is just like softcore porn - all the depth of flesh but no orifices, no meat: a repression of material violence encased in a plane. The illusionism is maintained by a highly anxious distance which, even while it is trapped in a kind of petrie dish, still maintains a certain sense of mutation and collapse. This is one of the reasons that it works so differently in miniature or viewed on the internet than in person. What's important about this is what it, perhaps quite unintentionally, points to, and that's the highly mechanical nature of expression, or more particularly, expressionism.

It's well established in neuroscience and psychology (and the acting profession) that there are few things more mechanical, more robotic, in human existence than our emotional lives, those much fetishized, nonsensically arranged and paranoiacally misinterpreted elements of our biochemistry. The truth about our subjective existence is that we are computers that kill and defecate. It should therefore come as no surprise that as machines become an ever more present force in artistic production, expression is pulsed through them more and more and the results are an even greater sentimentality. Although digital work may not have reached the degree of instant emotional molestation which the analogue arts inspire in the viewer, it seems to be well on the way. It is only a matter of time, after all, before people stop attaching tacky effects to photos to 'age' them and the images of antiquated digital cameras grow to inspire the same sense of yearning.

The receding world.

McLuhan spelled out the fact that technological advance leads to a kind of alienated version of the past. Fischer's work, with his nomadic figures surrounded by industrial trash emblematically speak to that. The primitive is reinvented by machinery: history is always being reborn by technological means (if it exists in any other fashion). But the nostalgia which this factory breeds is not a longing for the past, but for a fantasy of the future projected into the past. As Fellini once said of his film Satyricon, it can only be a science fiction film about the past. Whether or not the past is anything other than science fiction is a slightly different question, and one which we can scarcely broach here. Nonetheless, this nostalgia for matter persists, though its strength ultimately comes from a passionate investment in nostalgia rather than any object. One can readily see this in the current obsession with collage which is less a call back to the history and anarchic politics of the technique than a folk art for technocratic society: a science fiction of sentiment. Now, it's collage without glue, that is, without fluidity or body. Everything is assimilated to one prism. That doesn't simply make the work flat. Rather, there's an interfacing which results in a kind of continuous recession.

These tendencies are being made manifest and explicit fairly frequently, but we'll relegate ourselves to a few highly localized examples. What is at stake is the erosion of materiality in the service of a constantly recessive subjectivity. This is in no small part an aspect of the photoshop aesthetic that has come into play and the ease with which it can be used to generate lazy personal mythologies. In part a reaction to the photoshop phenomena and an attempt to ween away from it to a more 'authentic' personal expression, it's also an extension of precisely what it denigrates. At the AWOL Gallery was a painting show by Valeria Rzianina called "XXX-posed: pretty in porn." Rather than displaying the overtly monstrous creatures that have become the stock in trade for so many of her generation of figurative artists, she collaged images from hardcore porn, overlapping, distorting and exaggerating them, lathering on paint in a way that makes a show of its sensuousness even if it registers as little more than a botched attempt at illustrating sensuousness rather than embodying it. The coolness of porn with its de-glamorized banality was skewed into an over-emotive mess. The money shot becomes the recognition of matter as something external to oneself, again reinforcing a certain dualism. This is part of the glamour of painting, very similar to the current trend to softcore modernism, only rendered in a way that borrows more from the world of fashion than interior and product design.

In the work of Alex McLeod these tendencies find an explicit manifestation as a shoring up of fragments into the set design of urban fantasy worlds, whether dystopian or utopian. His creations bloom with all of the richness of a sage's most geometrically pristine fantasies of apocalypse. They are not, however, apocalyptic because that would require an end. Instead, it is a terror of the endlessness of things that's at work. The mechanical pane is what is at play here, with its ready condensations and continual refractions – a machinery for a hodological theatre, one which is not satisfied with the confines of the arch but ventures into a constantly compacting ambiance. It is ambient because it is not a phantasm of structure, or of solid space, but only of its vanishing or refraction. In spite of their overt superficiality, these works are about recession, which is what makes them far closer to the ghostly aesthetic modality of video games than to that of historical expressionism.

A compliment to this tendency was also on display with numerous painters who hybridized the issues above. Stefanie Gutheil's paintings kick up the kitsch even more. Unlike the digital works which were, in a way, far closer to classical painting with its insistence on a projection into the recessive space of the plane, they dislodge it and turn it around. It's a processional space, a kind of goosestepping burlesque. They are a pastiche of Bosch (though they come off more Ottonian most of the time) and early twentieth century collage, only done in the thick paint of co-called naïve painters. Although the obsession with surface is identical to that of abstraction, the force of expression is reigned in by a rigid figuration which cannot support it. The force of the figure is weighed down by paint in what amounts to a comical murder-suicide. Her colour palette isn't vibrant, instead it rings bland, slightly incoherent. Their carnivalesque imagery fades into a nostalgic fog, its sensory power not sharp and vital but oleaginous. It was a butting against the surface which got stranded. Her paintings fumble because their iconic value is sacrificed by an excess of materialization, one which is purely performative but never attains a degree of luxury, merely the gesticulations of it. It is to the painterly what reality tv is to reality. Only when material life becomes as dissipated as this does it need to be so crass.

Born again primitivism; or, did Gaughin crap in the woods?

When Gaughin went to Tahiti for the journey that he would relate in Noa Noa, he could feel his body changing, becoming vaguer, less human and more elemental. Even gender began to melt as the stockbroker hallucinated his way into what he imagined to be a 'primitive' state of being. But even with all of the tropical sex, Gaughin never seemed to shit in the woods or the jungle. You might wonder why that's anything to be concerned about it, but you have to take into account that the civilized world he had left was even more hung up on shit (raw inchoate matter) than it was on sex. Parent-Duchatelet, the man who radically altered urban terrain perhaps more than anyone else in the nineteenth century, made a career out of re-plotting the sewers and the street walkers, the things which were nearly impossible to separate at the time, either in the popular imagination or in state administration. Gaughin, like most influenced by the allure of the 'primitive', was sure to wed the expressiveness of matter with the iconic functionalism that was also readily on hand and keep them within the connubial prism of the pane. Flatness is no longer to be attained in painting though. Rather, it is the frame as recess with the paint as the processional to this flatness where the current verve of the primitive lies. A little church for the alcove of a condo dweller's cabin.

Urbanity created the myth of the wild countryside as its unconscious, the place to which it feeds its shit, before raping and feeding upon it. This is the virgin territory that the Group of Seven sought out in their own highly mythological construction of the Canadian North, an extraordinarily odd vision of a depopulated world beyond the city limits. It wasn't for nothing that early reviews of their work referred to their paintings as 'apocalyptic'.

When General Idea made a painting of Thompson's into a kind of ad or when Lawren Harris' landscapes were turned into advertisements for booze, the Canadian landscape was flattened in a new way, one which, oddly enough, was more profound than what Thompson and the Group had done to it, making the fetish power more extensive. Canadians have always had a taste for Brutalism, whether it's in architecture, urban planning, or hideously over-the-top humour. It isn't simply a matter of beating a dead horse, but eating it and then wearing its skin to forget that we killed it in the first place. That's the world of fashion and it is such a world that the resurgence of such 'material' painting belongs to.

The original cult of the primitive was popular among a divergent group of socialist utopians, middle class bohemians and the other fashion victims around the turn of the twentieth century. It rested largely on the idea that the physical experience of life in the West had somehow dissipated and could be recuperated through a cultivation of the, generally misinterpreted, aesthetic norms of other cultures. This wasn't necessarily directed at foreign countries, but also at internal foreigners like mental patients and children, as in Art Brut. The works we are discussing, however, do not point at any promised land out there, or anywhere else. Instead, they are directed at the flatness of the immanent world, the flatland of advertising. This flatness isn't the kind you run up against though, but one which recedes, as in the video game. You buy the fetish product, not the wilderness that gave birth to it. They're postcards.

The tendencies of the primitive, the naïve and the sentimental are all mixed up explicitly with the tropes of Tom Thompson in Kim Dorland's show Nocturne with its very overt references to the myths of Thompson and the primitive cult in Canadian modernism. Gone is the anti-social vision that underwrote it though. Instead, it is a deconstruction by glamour, kind of a David LaChappelle take on Thompson, that launches an attack in the name of a greater kind of superficiality. Thompson, Canadian art's sacred cow, used to have his own little ramshackle cabin in Toronto to duplicate his experience in the mythical North. It was his own little tourist portal, rather like Dr. Who's Tardis, that allowed him to stay in character all the time. In Dorland, rather than a cabin, you get a tree house as the portal to imaginary innocence.

All of this heavy flesh that dangles from the walls is there to be alluring, like the decapitated geese in a butcher shop window. It seduces with the morbid desire to touch it. As my companion stood in the Angell gallery, the owner leaned in to make it clear that only by purchasing his wares could a little feel be arranged. It promises the sensual realm without the smell.

The glow in the dark paintings make clear that recession works both ways and that the plane is not limited to the frame but explicitly extends outside of it, not strictly by illusion but by virtue of its own facticity. Of course paintings, as much as photographs, have always been paintings with light. It just usually isn't spelled out so specifically. As such, it becomes a kind of virtual reality machine, much as the op art effects of the Douglas works are, resulting in a visceral art within the confines of the white cube. The world is flattened into a series of hard colours. There's a remarkable thinness to Dorland's paintings; a kind of anorexia wherein the paint is vomited out onto the viewer. Their much lauded painterly density is both reference to and extension of this. It isn't flatness that is accented in the pictures, it's the illusion of depth, a depth which is constantly reinforced by superimposition. But what is all this depth? It's the distance between the wall and the world which it depicts. The processional march that happens between them. This distance is filled up with an attractive texture and a vibrating colour. This colour made all the more intense by being placed in the context of such opaquely layered paint.

Primitivism finds its new home in what, to varying degrees, it always was to begin with – a kind of tourism. Of course, it was only a matter of degree before. Some primitivist artists are travelers in the sense that Paul Bowles used to speak of them: they leave and never come back. But usually what you get is tourists, who always come back and who travel the way that paintball players go to war. Just to make sure that you're aware of your part in this tourist expedition, at the Dorland show you can buy t-shirts as mementos of it. You don't need to go camping when you can buy a camp wilderness to take home.

Artifice by Josh Vettivelu at Xpace

2011-02-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

I wrote the essay for Josh Vettivelu's show now taking place in the charming Xbase space of Xpace. I didn't have a decent photo of the piece in situ, so Josh sent me one courtesy of Samantha Madonik. I'd encourage you to check the show out in the flesh if you happen to have the chance.

The show runs from February 11 until March 5. You can read the essay here.

Book Review: Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination

2011-01-22T09:01:00.000-08:00

'...the Canadian psychic landscape, as revealed in our photographs, is psychologically akin to that of an anorexic adolescent, and that Canadians unconsciously consider themselves to be both "feminine" and stalled in a rite of passage toward autonomy as a nation.' (7) That's the thesis of Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination, a rather ambitious book by Penny Cousineau-Levine. It's a troubling book and one that's deeply flawed, as interesting books so often are. Its failures in many ways say almost as much as its successes but it is essential reading for anyone who takes photography in this country seriously.

Cousineau-Levine analyzes some of the most recurrent motifs and themes to haunt the imagination of Canadian photographers (and writers). These include frequent depictions of crucifixion and bondage, effacement and encasement. All across the photographic landscape one can find the capture and torture of animals and destruction of nature, a procedure which is mirrored in the photography of artists, whether in the garb of BDSM or in far less theatrical states of ritualized masochism. Quite persuasively, and through a substantial cataloguing of work involving dozens of disparate artists, she builds up a case for the imbrication of death within all facets of everyday life, for the saturation of visual spaces with wounds and openings. It isn't death in an obvious or documentary way, but death as the general experience of existence, a blurring process that makes the delineation of life in opposition to it seem almost impossible (although Cousineau-Levine still seems hellbent on making the distinction).

What does all of this mean? She argues that it translates to a photographic culture which is remarkably unique in the world; one that, in spite of superficial resemblances to American photography, is completely different. This difference comes from the wrenching away of denotation from content. Instead, all images become connotative, that is, they become the traces of a metaphysical activity, rather than of a simple physical presence. There is always a disjunction between what the image shows and what it actually represents. The Canadian subject is always cracked. That is true in a more general way for other places too, but the myth of a frontier with an outside has never been terribly successful in this country. There's very little surface to get to and no escape is really possible. Such hallucinations are almost inevitably realized as such, though even this bit of rationality might not go far. She realizes this. She even quotes Northrop Frye: "...the apparent irrationality... of having two incommensurate accounts of every entity, both true, both exclusivist, dissolves when one perceives that the anomaly is not local, but rather the expression of a condition of being, and hence itself a principle of rationality." (121)

The diathetic that Frye speaks of is between the radically conservative (aristocratic) and moderately conservative (democratic) tendencies that have underwritten Canadian history and political thought. Rather uneasily, she migrates this scheme onto a contrast between the masculine and feminine principle in Jungian psychoanalysis. It's a useful choice for a feminist argument, and certainly comes with a radically different result than if she'd chosen to read things through Melanie Klein, but the result is that she often ends up conflating the imaginary feminine realm with actual femininity when the two things have virtually nothing to do with each other. One could also argue that the break from American style docurealism which is used as a surface and then perverted, is actually because the connotative function is ultimately more realistic since it does not rely on a specious dualism. Death is imbricated in everything in Canadian photography precisely because that is in the nature of material life itself. Symbolism has little to do with it. The illusion of division constantly slips away, in itself undermining the essentially dualistic (feminist) stream of arguments that she's making.

One of the things which the book ends up persuasively arguing is that these dualities aren't actually possible, that they are imported after the fact as readymade categories which constantly flunk when applied. People don't live or die the same here or anywhere else. But neither she nor Frye manage to find a more productive way of dealing with this, in no small part due to a reliance on certain unfortunate linguistic and symbolic forms and by virtue of the fact that they are both engineering what amounts to a colonization campaign. Many of the problems that they introduce as a result come from the misapprehension through language of a set of material phenomena and a course of production which is at odds with the obsessive dualism that haunts Canadian studies. To her credit, however, she does map out a great deal of what is at stake on a practical level and on the level of the concrete. All of these metaphysical gestures, after all, have a distinct strategic importance, even though one might hesitate to say that they have a specific goal in mind.

This strange diathetical situation is often mistaken for an inherent tendency to the pluralistic, but it isn't. Each culture is, in itself, singular. The misapprehension of this leads to a unique kind of humour, but not one which realizes the problematic of the situation and instead relies on irony and parody. Like all forms of humour, it is triggered by an inherent conservatism, one which assumes a divergent posture to mock another divergent posture and ensure the wall set up by the centre and its 'entombment' of the subject, as Torok would put it. That's not a new trick, of course, and it is, frankly, easier than trying to think of something in a more positive and unilateral way. To imagine that the passage between opposed positions itself is a goal is to miss the point. The point is the negation of that goal: the abortion of passage in the service of sustaining flight.

'Most Canadian art, has been created on an almost entirely unconscious level. One can only begin to imagine what Canadian photographers and other artists might accomplish once these layers and subtexts are brought into conscious awareness.' (19) This aim is part of where she starts to get into trouble. It is her attempt to, as she puts it, 'depathologize' (55) the Canadian unconscious and orient the culture that it produces in a more progressive and utilitarian fashion that continually distorts the evidence. If it is true that Canadian culture is an orphan culture, not desired by its parent nations, martyring and running from its feminine element and refusing the role of the father, there's little reason to assume that the situation can be rectified by an appeal to mommydaddy. Likewise, there is little reason to desire it, however much our culture has institutionalized its femininity as a strategy of differentiating our cultural production line ('...it has become a commonplace of Canadian cultural criticism to assert that Canada is feminine, often because of the marginal position shared within Western culture by both women and Canadians.' (175)). This strategy, embodied by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Joyce Weiland, is part of the reactive formation of identity in Canada, an attempt to cling to a Good Object. It is from this depressive position that the dichotomy itself is viewed and understood, and in light of which statements like these should be read: 'Once we recognize the nature of the liminal, "other" world to which our images refer, recurring characteristics of Canadian photography that appear to have been without signification fall into place, and reveal themselves as indications both of a way through a stalled rite of initiation and of the mature role that awaits us as a nation.' (174)

It is not a rite of passage though, at least certainly not one to some mythical feminine realm. Canadian artists may well have been on a flight from daddy, but mommy certainly isn't any more appealing. That would be too easy and what she has to offer, the mythical happy ending which the author proffers, isn't any better. It isn't even that it's a transsexual space that the artists create, it's just an ungendered one, perhaps one as sterile as the arctic. It seems to be a problem in our cultural criticism to constantly pose our national issues in terms of duality. It is part of the reactive position to deal with the incompossibility that is essential to the country in this fashion. Canada has always been an other world that never came into Being. There is no need to imagine alternatives, but only to look for what is immanently present. This is what the cultural industry largely attempts to avoid.

'The symbolic death to which adolescents undergoing initiation are subjected always includes a period of separation from the mother, during which the youths are considered, and consider themselves, actually dead, or to exist in a sacred, ghost-like space between life and death.' (158) Such a space is everywhere from Jack Chambers to Roy Arden to Evergon. The former and the latter make it the most explicit: Chambers in his theodicy, Evergon in his homoerotic enactment of shamanic death and re-birth rituals. In Arden it fills up the space of the social rituals and detritus of the banal. But, again, it isn't really a rite of passage. They are all too unilateral for that. Rather, it's a process of dissimulation, much as the frequent taking on of documentary aesthetics to revel in the symbolic is. It isn't a passage that is enacted, but the abortion of passage through the renunciation of dualism, a move which is at the heart of all of those artists. While this can be read negatively, it should be remembered that the space from which this defensive act is being conducted is the space which the imperialistic adult world defines itself negatively toward.

****

One could read it all another way. Is this a faked death? If so, what is this programme of dissimulation in the service of? It could be serving the essentially conservative and reactionary nature of the country, as if the nation's superego were so deeply embedded in the work of artists. This may be according the arts in this country, marginal as they are, far more significance than they actually have. In light of this, one could say that this faked death with its ritualized masochism is part of art's celebration of its own castration and its performance of a kind of abjecthood for the moral betterment of the bourgeoisie. One could go even further in this rather depressing direction... Or, one could say that it is a real death. That all of this is a function of the death drive and that our culture, if it has a will or drive of some kind, has one for a certain sort of sterility, one which is mirrored in it political conservatism, albeit one which is compromised, much like art in the market, by capitalist neutralization.

Canada is a land of orphans and abortions and it may well be true, and likely to our credit, that on some level we tend to persist in this, in resisting Being and rejecting both the pathetic fallacies of the feminine world and the staunch world of the masculine. Both of these options are still too rigid, too Oedipalized, and it's for that reason that they've served as such dominant factors in the study of our culture. This is not to say that these traps are not constantly fallen into, for they are, often resulting in a string of paradoxes, some more productive than others. But even these 'failures', as Atwood might put it, that other great category of Canadianness, demonstrate the material facticity of the world in the nudity of an act of artifice. These abortions are the actual programmes of art.

Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination
By Cousineau-Levine, Penny
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003

Images: (from the top) Evergon, Donigan Cumming, Genevieve Cadieux and Roy Arden. Taken from the text. Click on the book to visit publisher's website.

Softcore Modernism in Toronto

2011-01-15T10:03:00.000-08:00

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

E.M. Cioran

In 1995, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley got together to create a video called "Fresh Acconci." In it, they used nude models to re-enact a series of pieces that Vito Acconci had done in the 1970s. The sexual aspect in the Acconci work was retained, but given a force which was decidedly different from the original. Exaggerated glamour and softcore porn production values garnish Acconci's desperate pleas and discomforts, flattening them out, making them pathetic but funnier. They are spread among an ethnically and gender diverse group of performers to give them a sense of universality. The bleak light of New York is replaced by California sunshine. All in all, the freshening up of Acconci softens out all of the hard edges but highlights the romantic desperation, all the while making it seem cute and restoring the sense that its feeling could be readily purchased for private needs, rather than festooned on an undesiring public.

This process of softening is also what's been at stake in much of the work going on currently here. Unlike most of the retreading of old avant-garde fads that made up the latter half of the twentieth century, there's something uniquely softcore in this current take on Modernism. Most artistic innovation of the past century was largely the result of the 'new' getting somewhere several generations late and then being misinterpreted to the point that it had nothing to do with the original. The value of delay is something which is rarely appreciated, especially, it seems, these days. It isn't just that speed makes people lazy (though it does), but that it makes them more idiotic. And it's not as though art school pedagogy is giving people tools to actually think with. Much of the work currently being produced by younger practitioners either falls into work which is highly derivative of that being done in Europe more than a decade ago, but differentiated by its unconscious channeling of a peculiarly Canadian pathology, and work which revisits the various fads of High Modernism with an ambivalent nostalgia. While this is happening across the country (it has a more mature variation in Winnipeg and Douglas Coupland's recent re-imagining of the Group of Seven is another positive example), its manifestation in Toronto is uniquely Torontonian.

The last decade has seen several distinct trends develop around young Toronto based artists. There are hipster folk artists, sentimental shlock modernists, collage inspired fantasists, abstraction inspired pornographers, dance hall conceptualists and those who try to turn painting into a different kind of drawing. There are a few unclassifiable oddballs as well, but if you could characterize the work of most of the generation who are currently showing, it would probably be by calling them nostalgic. Perhaps that's not unusual. To paraphrase Heidegger: nostalgia was the disease of the twentieth century (and they're old enough to have contracted it).

Of course, being nostalgic for the twentieth century is a completely different kind of sickness than that which afflicted that rather barbaric century. To anyone who can look back at that period without nostalgia, that time seems an odd thing to get nostalgic about. The reasons for this mind-numbing nostalgia are complex, but they are, by and large, the byproduct of technological advance and the absurd acceleration of the subjectivization of matter. There are few things more sentimental than technology. If Marinetti could have known that technological innovation ultimately leads to this, he might have thought twice about being a Futurist. The nostalgia for the present is not about youth, it's a fantasy of senility. Youth dreams of the future.

The obsession with old school Modernism takes many forms, the most blatant of which is the huge market upsurge in the renewed evacuation of content, or, at the very least, its rendering as a fantastical element which is readily amenable to the daydreams of the condo and cottage owning class. There attraction, or the attraction of their interior designers, focuses in on the charisma of what was new and has been enshrined as the new, even if it isn't. For example, the prevalence of sellable op art and grotesque pop art which can both function as dinner party conversation pieces or the complement to salvaged antique furniture. What is currently at stake in all of this revamped Modernism is not an engagement with the spirit of the earlier movements, but with their regurgitated and repackaged charisma, their antiquated part as a player in History rather than as a break from history. It is the art world equivalent of what is called neo-conservativism in politics.

Art is the murder of the present. I mean this in the sense that Adorno had hinted at, if never thoroughly pursued. The objectivity of art is the violence done to the enduring subject, be it individual or group. Their reality, as present, constitutes the wall that art perforates or collapses against. But at the moment, little of the praxis that is going on does this. In effect, it does the opposite. There are all sorts of reasons for this. The demise of the avant-garde (to whatever degree there ever was such a thing) is only part of this, but the myth which seemed to animate faith in such a thing seems to persist. Indeed, it is this myth that is still present and accounted for, albeit in a highly ironic manner as fashion. Rather than a push against the present and the past for a possible world, work has come to be about the constitution of the present, either as memory or as nostalgic fantasies. In either case, it doesn't matter much, it is the present which is being accorded excessive power.

Although this nostalgia is manifest in various forms throughout many of the exhibitions of the past few months, in a couple of instances it was explicitly addressed. "A Regime of Chaos" at Gallery 1313 and "Parts of a Hole" at Xpace, were just some of the more explicit examples though you could find it as readily in the various retrospectives on display or in the works of more established artists like Arnaud Maggs' "The Dada Portraits" at Susan Hobbs or in the David Hoffos' show at MOCCA to name a handful. The Gallery 1313 show promised artists grappling with their, "sense of alienation in a world that seems too content to conceptualise irresponsibly and bathe in the facade of logic without the integral measures of foresight or hindsight." The show didn't quite work as a return to repressed Modernism though. While the styles, a patchwork of ballpoint Surrealism, vaguely politicized abstraction and a few odd objects had a certain personality to them, their flaws were less interesting than that would suggest and the show felt like exactly what it was: recent art school grads rehearsing the latest script they'd been given.

Canadian art (small 'a'), as Jack Chambers once put it, had no history so it had to invent something out of what was lying around, something which might not be art at all. Many of the most ambitious artists worked through this to produce curious hybrids, a kind of orphaned art that was sterile and quickly faded from culture in general. That is, after all, why most current artists acknowledge so little about it. But there's something funny here, which is that this, in itself, has long been part of the tradition, a kind of forgetting of the past, a concentration on the present. This had a lot to do with the country's rather nasty colonial heritage. But today, things are different. People look back (though not so much to Canada). In fact, there's an obsessive backward glance, a search for parents.

All of these shows are really about history, but history manifest as the desire to have History as a present. As Mark Cheetham demonstrated in "Remembering Postmodernism," quite contra Frederic Jameson's conception of Postmodernism as a time of amnesia and emotional deadness, it proved to be a period of hyper-historical awareness and sentimentality wherein the subjective and the historical gradually became indissociable. This personalization of the progress of matter has reached even more vertiginous heights in our time, in spite of the illusion that it may have subsided. This faith in the present (which was symptomatically outlined in the Clark and Faria show Reality Check but is something of a commonplace) is part of a weird metaphysical conjuring trick.

History in art is a difficult topic. In fact, I would argue there never really was any until recently. (Christian art was about the eternal and exists in theological time; 'History' painting is actually futuristic and utopian: both are about the presence to come or to be re-discovered). It is for this reason that so much current art seems anachronistic, the way individuals often see themselves. But while the twentieth century opened with artists bent on destroying museums, it closed with quite the opposite. In effect, it mirrored the progress of technological capitalism which has gradually made the most banal aspects of the world into museum pieces. This personal history is no longer material, but a spiritual one. This modernism, even more than that of the Theosophists, is a spiritual revolution that relies heavily on the negation of the primary processes of matter, instead drawing itself through a set of anemic moments which can be sentimentalized and packaged – a process extensively documented by the conceptual art movement.

The fanaticism of the contemporary commemorated in Malevich's black square with its completely renunciation of history is reversed as everything is placed within history. The black square just become a reflection for the sentimental concerns of the present which are then blown up into a religious universalism. One can also see it in a more established artist like Eli Langer and the all black paintings he showed at Paul Petro in "Toronto Mon Amour." Although he was playing on the modernist idea of the monochrome, he turned it around. All black, but highly textured, placed at eye level or on the ground (in what must have been a deliberate gesture at Malevich). The black painting captured and reflected bands of light in their grooves. These were then played against suspended glass bulbs set beside large photos of tree sap.

You could ask, which modernism was being addressed in these shows? It certainly doesn't seem to be Canadian Modernism. There was such a beast after all and it is still very much at play in other cultural centres of the country. It was a rather eccentric creature which often seemed out of step with the rest of 'the world' (that is, New York or whichever other city fancies itself as centre of the universe). One could argue that Canada actually had one of the most successful experiments in Modernism, one which is often misunderstood for, among other things, the smallness of its scale. What is more unique in all of this perhaps, is the way in which these events, whether consciously or not, were involved in an almost militant ignoring of the idiosyncratic form of modernism that once, and perhaps still, percolated in Canada. It would be false to say that Canada has never had a radical art scene. On the contrary, Quebec's Automatistes were probably (though it's not really that arguable) one of the most genuinely radical and politically significant art movements in North American history. The regionalist school in Ontario could claim something similar. However reactionary it may appear, their vehement rejection of anything that smelled American was an exemplary kind of productive negativity. With its rigorous formalism, startling juxtapositions of avant-garde techniques with regional concerns and generally incoherent political and metaphysical stances, much of the art in this country between the 1930s and 50s exemplified a lot of what was good in Modernism done right, rather than in a merely provincial way.

But, for the most part, that wasn't the modernism that was on display. Instead, there was something else. Something more, if not easy, at least comforting. It's a kind of kitsch modernism. With some it's just a pose, like the hipster posturings of Team Macho which amount to another edition of the city's long history of comedy groups, and for others it's just naïve. This provincialism isn't a new criticism of Toronto art. When Clement Greenberg came here more than fifty years ago to see Painter's Eleven, he said pretty much the same thing. Most of what they were doing was schlock and they needed to stop paying attention to the rest of the world and just get to work. (Greenberg also said a lot of other things which were more dubious...) With the rise of the art scene in Toronto in the late 50s and its frequent trading back and forth with New York, a lot of that changed, though more peripheral and obscure parts of the country continued making defiantly avant-garde, if often almost anti-cosmopolitan, art. To paraphrase Robertson Davies: Toronto's a fat girl with loads of money but no idea how to make herself attractive. Of course, he was saying that of the city several decades ago. Now she can afford liposuction and has joined Jenny Craig, but most of the time she still looks like she just wants to join the cast of "Jersey Shore."

Another question one might ask is: why Modernism at all? The backward glances weren't isolated. For "Traffic," the University of Toronto galleries (in co-ordination with other institutes across the country) concocted a massive look back on Conceptual Art praxis in this country which demonstrated how extraordinarily regional the conceptual art movement really was. The approaches they came up with are still alive, although the bureaucratization of banality that was undertaken in the 1960s and continues today doesn't bother calling itself 'contemporary art' (which is just a hodgepodge of market tested styles), but 'current work' (which is a hodgepodge of pseudo-academic disciplines without an institution). While Conceptualism developed largely as a critique of Modernism, like all critiques it was basically a reformist movement and it resulted in highly protestant kinds of art – high on intentionality and subjectivity but low on actual thought. Instead, it worked through what had happened in painting just using other media and marginally different rhetoric. Ironically, what really distinguished the original work done in Conceptualism was its intense localization, frequent pettiness and snideness – factors which were more explicitly present in Canadian work than in that of their American contemporaries.

Everyone does conceptualism now. Of course, post-Conceptualism, no one actually does Conceptualism, or almost no one. It has just become a style and a clichéd way of talking about things. There has always been a tendency to this vague generalization, whether in the abstraction which dominated so much of the art history of this country's recent times or in the anemic multiculturalism that inflects the current understanding of the country's supposed geo-aesthetics which replaces an abstract universalism (now synonymous with imperialist capitalism) with a food court notion of pluralism which is actually equally universalizing and ultimately even more attuned to the vicissitudes of capital. After all, if N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. really proved anything in their often underestimated work, it was that humour, irony and parody are not subversive of the market, but the ultimate marketing tools.

Modernism was, to a large degree, a reactionary tendency against the coming of a technologically advanced pop culture, that is, it was a hard "aristocratic" gesture against a soft and "plebeian" one. PoMo and Conceptualism were reactions to this. They don't aesthetically challenge capitalist imperialism, they extend it and make is seem heroic. As Benjamin Buchloh has pointed out, what these movements ultimately accomplished was the aesthetic validation of the bureaucratization of material life and, one should add, the enshrinement of a banal and masochistic form of subjectivization which lauded itself with a new kind of transcendentalist pose.

Perhaps the most telling instance of these trends was on display at Nuit Blanche, the softcore version of the Productivist dream of public art fairs. Dan Graham's work was there, sitting appropriately in the garden of City Hall and bewildering those who engaged with it. Functionally, it made explicit what kind of our tourist trap the city already was, offering a postcard into botched vanguardism. And if that wasn't to people's tastes, they could readily engage in the various re-enactments of the history of the avant-garde that were taking place around the city, most notably the re-performing of the chess match between Duchamp and Cage. The most interesting show in the festival however was one by Derek Liddington. "Allegory for a Rock Opera" managed to be the most intelligent engagement with the entire event. Using a campy set, he examined the attempt to bring 'high art' to the masses through opera, fusing a capella aria with Springsteen songs. What emerged was a freakish endurance test as the audience crowded around to watch these people exhaust themselves in what was achingly reminiscent of a brutal sequence from a reality TV show. Liddington would later extend this for his performance piece and installation "Coup de Grace" at Clark & Faria, although it lacked the over-the-topic masochism that made the previous work so successful, though it made more explicit the fantasy role of retro-modernist as a kind of pop culture heroic dandy.

Liddington also served as the curator for "Parts of a Hole," a group show at OCAD's Xpace. The show explicitly dealt with the legacy of Duchamp and Modernism. What resulted was a kind of kitsch avant-gardism, which is basically like a Che Guevara t-shirt or the resurgence of burlesque dancing. From Hugh Scott Douglas' thinly painted monochromes on linen with their material blandness to Ben Schumacher's toilet bowl cleaner, hair gel and oil on raw linen, to Liam Crockard's giant and useless tools, the works were positioned half way between homage and parody of tradition. Tradition and the historicized object are the essence of this glance backward that we've seen. The intense sentimentality that underlies so much work being done is both a masochistic performance of current art's irrelevance to the public and the attempt to Oedipally redeem it. There is no faith in Modernism at work here, but a faith in the idea of a heroic present and the present as the culmination of subjective history. Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Sara Cwynar's inflated consumer objects (a Milk Bone box) offered the maxim for the whole show with a line he culled from circling letters on the drug information panel of a giant Advil box: "History is under attack because it upsets us more than the pain of new problems."

Photo credits: Paul Petro, Curtis Amisich, CCCA, Clark and Faria, G1313, Painters Eleven

'A' is for animal.

2010-12-24T11:10:00.000-08:00

Amanda Nedham, Brian Donnelly and Nader Hasan
The fur trade created modern Canada, but for most of the country's subsequent history it was not the wilderness but the farm that formed the backbone of experience. In each instance, the vicious farming and brutalizing of creatures was essential to the economy. It didn't start with the white man, of course, it started long before that, but it was only with the establishment of modernity that it began to reach the industrial extremes made possible by technology. As Isaac Bashevis Singer once said – to the animals, we're all Nazis and the earth is an eternal Treblinka. One could define the history of Canada in three acts: the wild animal, the fur shoes and the lapdog. You can even add another act – the dog that wears fur shoes, a manifestation of cultural dementia that can regularly be seen on city streets. This is the moral essence of Canada.

Animals as a rhetorical device have become a commonplace over the last couple of years. It's not a phenomena isolated to Canada, or even Toronto, but it seems especially dominant here. Anthropomorphism is readily fed on the vagueness of urban life where things get thin and a little too fluid. It gives things back a little meat on some level. All the same, some artists I've talked to about it have worried that the whole thing is just a stupid cliché they picked up in art school. It's certainly a fad, and one that can be readily marketed and sold by galleries given the nation's cultural history, but is there more to it? This year it saturated much of what was on display and the variance in meaning generally wasn't that great, insofar as one can say that they have any deliberate meaning.

Anthropomorphist tendencies run deep in Canada, from aboriginal culture to "The Raccoons." It's something that could be mistaken for quaint if it weren't so profoundly pathological. This isn't the place to rehash the already familiar arguments about Canada's frequently acrimonious role as predator and parasite to nature, a relationship that has caused a range of neurotic manifestations from the work of Margaret Atwood to David Cronenberg and on. It has always been the fate of this country's culture to celebrate what it destroys and lives off of. We are a nation that happily wears the faces of our victims like a mask. Animals, like the land and the natives, are another part of that. It's usually the environment that animals live in that gets talked about. It's vaguer, therefore, easier. Plus, we live there too. Landscape dominates early Canadian art. Animals have been merely accessories for the most part until relatively recently, precisely when they, and the landscape, began to recede from easy view. It's not that naked bodies of dead and suffering animals aren't familiar. They're everywhere. Indeed, if you look at a lot of Lynne Cohen's early body of work, they are basically the wallpaper of Canadian culture.

This somewhat stuttered preamble leads now to a slightly more concrete set of examples from the past season. The first is the set of paintings which Brian Donnelly had on display at the Show & Tell gallery. The majority of them were done in portrait format, the figures rendered in close to a one to one ratio with the viewer's body, set on the wall close to their gaze: face to head. Generally torso and head with an awkward pose, they were sometimes fleshed out to full body pinup pose.

The figure is an anomaly generated within the general flow of the indifferent. His figures are situated in a vacuous space in a sense, but the nudity of this background also serves to bring further attention to it and its limits, to accentuate the way in which the figure is symbolically trapped and literally displayed. In spite of the presence of blatant references to the clichés of softcore porn (like Alberto Vargas and the way he articulated bodies, but one can also cite the whole sub-genre of animal mask porn that's been around for decades and has petered into the mainstream lately) or softcore nature porn (like Robert Bateman) there is no sexuality in the work. The physical relationship with the body is more fundamental than sex. There is no fusion, just a general programme of dismemberment, whether in the rending open of prey or in the assumption of alternating heads. There is no wilderness. The figure's only context is the gallery. The ever present theme of the wild in Canadian national art is a dubious presence in his work. Yet there is something remarkably Canadian about his paintings. His fixing of kitsch with death and morbid humour wouldn't be as perversely successful somewhere else; it would gain too much meaning.

Donelly's work is sensuous in a way that pure surface can be (the hair and fur in his pictures glitter), but it's an objective kind of sensuality. There's something cold and lacking intimacy; instead, there's glamour. The works of Amanda Nedham which were on display that the LE Gallery don't have that. Instead, they are smeared with the intimate, almost to the degree that it becomes performative. Her graphite and watercolour pieces depicting animal-product hybrids are never stark. There is an excess of detail, but this is often smeared, sometimes within the figure and sometimes extending out. The mark of her fingers are everywhere, but unlike the still apparent pencil marks in Donelly's paintings, her markings are to delineate a different kind of territory. They are performances of a specific form of tactile investment and of the pleasure taken in the deformation of material. If his work shows a libidinal vacuity in the interface with animal life, her's shows a pervert's enjoyment.

This performative aspect is completely different in her sculptures, which have the sense of inventive Halloween party installations. Like Donelly, there is an enormous amount of morbid humour in these images. Her works are even more playful and call upon art historical references from classical sculpture to Baroque art. But that doesn't change the fact that this humour, like most humour, comes from the tripping up of expectation, from the needling of the cliché. Rather than to snap off this though and push somewhere, the move bounces back. Humour, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is the admission that humanity is innately pathetic. Laughter is the defense mechanism of the ego. This narcissism is doubled in these works. You get not only the pathos of the blatantly human but the anthropomorph as well. Laughter is the giddy form of violence.

In both cases the figure is sewn together. The seams show; there isn't a harmonious synthesis but a humorous one. It isn't some Donna Haraway inspired hybrid; there's nothing that optimistic at play. Instead, there's monstrosity, in both the literal and figurative sense of the term. There's a kind of horror show being played out. Donnelly's figures can be seen as masked. They are uncomfortably positioned in the space between being human and becoming an animal, which is to say, realizing their animality through the loss of subjectivity (the face) and the taking on of the head. But it's a stunted move. The figures never get there. They're aborted and the head is just suspended over the face, still dripping with the foreign territory that hasn't managed to take over. There is still a surplus of humanity present.

Nedham's work also deals in this excessive humanization. It's less a question of sympathy with the animal, than it's anthropomorphization. When an animal is made to suffer, it is to elicit the response of human suffering. In other words, empathy, or narcissistic masochism. The figures are traps. In a very literal sense this is how they are presented. The creatures are captured and torn open as if by the devices of fur trappers, then ripped apart and sewn back together as mutants. They become isolated in pale spaces like Donnelly's creatures. Although without the glamour of them, they share in their enforced boutique quality. They are made victims to fashion. This is, after all, the purpose of the gallery, to sell these images of torture to the middle class to decorate their homes or to be resold at increase. The shock they illicit services this sublimation and its erasure of the screaming earth that we live on. It's a dominatrix routine.

But isn't this overloading things? Aren't these really just concentrations of camp? A pastiche of some of the most blatant and often farcical elements in the national imagination? In both cases, they can be easily fetishized, as any overview of the articles written about them will demonstrate for you. They have an accessibility. Even their particular humour is redundantly Canadian, a kind of comfort. In Nedham's case in particular, the obsession with her craft work underwrites everything. This is part of the attempt to redeem the work, to make it more humane in a sense by insisting on the subjective value of the artists and the aesthetic experience of the viewer.

The cult of craft is the easiest way to ignore actual content. It was in light of this fact that only a few blocks from the two shows being discussed, Nader Hasan, whose practice relies on an avowed attempt not to aestheticize things, put together a work that consisted of his collection of road kill, burned and defecated money and taxidermied cats. All elements were carefully set on little glass display trays suspended in the air in the windows of the Whippersnapper gallery. All of these floating corpses, dessicated and therefore no longer even meat, just items, suggested both certain Tibetan burial rituals and a trip to the pharmacy. In either case, what you had was a public display of morbidity. Nothing reminds people more that they are part of the natural economy of decay than having death placed before them, but while the spiritual dimension was lacking thanks to its casualness, its lack of demand, what was magnified was its alienation effect. There was a specific kind of objectivity to the work which was largely absent in the others discussed. Although any of the elements present in the piece could easily be found in the area outside of the gallery, highlighting them in this way made them seem precious, almost like boutique items. The only contagion the work offered was in the form of a distant display, a pseudo-iconic status for the dessicated that removes death one more degree, freezing it in time; in effect, rendering it as a set of cleanly delineated objects for speculation. This was a different kind of anthropomorphism, one which presented material life as a museum and, largely undeliberately, layered it in the rhetoric of anthropology and the aesthetics of window dressing.

But is that closer or further away from the beast within us all? While any of our views are invariably tainted by our subjectivization, there is still animality within us, a materiality which is ultimately more important than the banalities of subjectivity. Perhaps... although that may be too romantic as well.

Brian Donnelly
Amanda Nedham
LE Gallery
Show and Tell Gallery
Whippersnapper

An Interview With Rory Dean.

2010-12-05T05:41:00.000-08:00

When I was recently in Montreal, I managed to meet up with Mr. Rory Dean. He used to play basketball and drink beer with my little brother, the world's most infamous bagpipe player. That's not why I met up with him though. No one is that sentimental. Actually, it's because I've seen his work around and find it curious. Although it shares certain traits with some of the trends to be found in his generation of Canadian painters, it lacks the sentimentality that seems to afflict so many. That doesn't mean that his work isn't personal, it just doesn't stop there. It has other things to do.

Although one can see traces of the naïve tradition and folk art in his imagery, it's largely misleading. Unlike the hipster artists of Toronto, he doesn't seem to use these things ironically or earnestly, but with a certain dynamic cynicism that is worked out over the long production process.

After his mixed experience at OCAD, he returned to the countryside and spent years developing a series of paintings dominated by blue and children. "One of the reasons I started using children and painting kids was because when you're a child you do things and you don't know why," he explained. The reduction of colours and the palpable darkness, both literally and atmospherically, goes a long way to make the frequently kitsch images he uses as his source material grimace menacingly enough to be transformed into something different. "It's moody. I was in Merrickville. It was dark in the winter and I wanted to make some night paintings," he says of his limited palette.

We, more or less, grew up in the same village. It was once a bit of a sink hole in the Ottawa valley which was home to coke dealers, a strip club and several in-bred families, but it has since been gentrified, pushed the bordello from its borders, and its skeletal remains of old churches and Victorian houses have been filled out with mustard stores and Christmas ornament shops. Aside from its condiments, the village may be best known for the fact that Nicholas Cage shot part of one of the most wretched films of his rather inglorious career there. Or for its significance in Ontario culture as one of the few producers of canon balls until the end of the twentieth century. That said, it's still preferable to Toronto. It's better to be a peasant than a plebeian.

His recent paintings were featured in several exhibitions in Toronto ("The Dazzle" and "New Directions II: The Prophesy"). Unfortunately, however, images of innocent and evil children and the Ku Klax Klan haven't managed to attract the attention of buyers. They aren't exactly the kind of images that people would want to hang in their condo. As a slightly drunk gallery owner told me one afternoon: the market is in an upswing because young artists don't care about politics anymore. They don't want to offend people; they just want to give them something to look at while they're eating breakfast before work. I'm not sure I would go that far, but when most young artists are trying to do more than make IKEA friendly fodder, the meaning is either circumscribed or simply jokey. With Dean it's more difficult because his paintings can be equally careful and openly antagonistic.

He paints from photographs. They aren't chosen purely at random. A kernel of an idea comes first and then he searches until he finds an image which could work. Once he has a material object, he paints off of it, though sometimes he discovers that what works as an image, doesn't necessarily translate to a painting and has to be abandoned. Of his frequently disturbing choice of imagery, Dean had this to say: "For me the imagery just, especially some of the images from the 1860s of these guys dressed up like that, I personally found them frightening. I don't want to sound like I'm glorifying them or anything because I am not, but these costumes that they were making were original costumes. They're not like the KKK now where you can go online and buy them, they were coming up with these terrifying masks made of all kinds of weird things like hair... it was almost like a folk artist kind of thing and they seemed to have a lot of power to them... it just seemed like imagery I could use."

Of course, the Klan were just part of the world he was creating over the course of his series of blue paintings. There's a superficial resemblance, perhaps it's something of an homage, to the work of Gottfried Helnwein in these paintings, but the differences between them are more substantial. Helnwein's work is overtly theatrical, while Dean's is closer to cinema (the frequent 'close-up's and the movie poster type picture plane he often uses). Helnwein's work is always highly public and monumental, specifically when dealing with children, while Dean's is much more private. This hints at two different kinds of secrecy in the relation between aesthetics and the art object. For this reason, his use of subject matter serves perfectly for it provides a survey of exemplars of the excluded and the exclusionary: the ultimate victims of history (children), who suffer in secret, and those who regard themselves as history's victims (the Klan), who make suffering completely public.

The paintings started from black, built up monotonously over many layers in an obsessive manner until he had a chalky matte black surface to work off of. It could take a month to prepare a surface. "Just that process is painful," he groaned. Then layer after layer of the same thing is painted. While waiting for each layer to dry, he began watching documentaries about atheism and Jesus Camp. "It was a lonely, fucking painful process making those paintings," he confessed. Even though they haven't proven to be successful from a market point of view, they helped him grow a great deal as a painter. This process also include debating with himself and his friend Joe Becker about painting as he attempted to refine his own antagonistic position to a lot of what he saw happening in painting.

Of course, Dean might say I'm full of crap to try and work it out that logically. "I start with a really simple concept and ideally the end product is much more complex," he insists. "To make something that doesn't really make sense. That's the idea." All the same, the string of paintings he did were intimately connected and planned out. Inspired by his obsession with the old masters and many of the more traditional aspects of painting - like narrative - basic things which aren't really taught in art school anymore, he began piecing together a show. "A lot of these paintings, the original idea round them was that I was going to call the show A Sarcophagus For Vitriol and Vitriol was going to be a real person that I was going to make. I was going to make the girl. I did make the coffin. I carved it out of a felled tree and the paintings were going to be in a tomb you would walk in. You would see this sarcophagus and these paintings that would be related to her life but not really. They would connect to who this girl was."

His previous blue work was densely populated with ghoulish children who looked like they had walked out of horror films form the 40s and 50s only to be trapped in the settings of a Chardin painting. Monkeys made occasional appearances as well, but most of these characters dropped out as a weird mythological space devoid of any consistent time or space started to develop. "It was going to be a person from some place and time but totally made up," he said of his principle character.

A substantial part of these works is their large blackened frames. Highly tactile, they have a disquieting presence in contrast to the smooth and oddly dimensioned images they present. "The frame came first. I just had a simple idea that I would make this frame. I was actually working on a painting of Hitler and wanted to make it look like it had been to Hell and back. Like it had been through chaos or something dark. I just wanted that type of feeling to it. That's where the idea came first and then it just seemed to fit with some of the other paintings that I was working with and I wanted to connect them all together. It was more like a sculpture. At the time they felt absolutely necessary together; the painting without the frame did not feel whole," Dean explained.

The sculptural element of the works (bows settling on rusty nails in charred black frames) seem to recapitulate much of what the paintings do – playing off things that seem like extreme opposites but which managed to be both aesthetically harmonious and emotionally unsettling. "The bow, especially the first one I did, it was more like a symbol. Something silly like that. A simple juxtaposition of something black and charred and ugly with something that was really just beautiful, silky, pretty. Simple as that. Also the ribbon had references, it sounds silly to say, of Degas when he first used the ribbon and the shoes on the original encaustic ballet dancer. The original would have been ugly and dirty. The other big reference was that, at the time, I was watching a lot of mummy things and one in particular was this girl in Sicily... this six year old girl... and this girl doesn't even look real.... she's preserved in this box and she wears this beautiful ribbon. Once I saw that, I wanted to use that idea," he enthusiastically explained.

I could talk about how he splinters narrative, thus setting up a series of incompossible histories which lead to him consistently sabotaging depth and creating an almost elastic visual field. Or about how his work, perhaps quite unconsciously, seems to filter from the gory drive that's underpinned so much figurative work in Canadian art, but I won't do that today. Instead, you should check out his website to see more of his work. Right now he is settling into the rather different world of Montreal where he is taking the blue collar approach to painting: working at it from nine to five and looking for a new project.

Angela Grossmann – Three Thistles and Other Works

2010-12-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Angela Grossmann has been a presence in the Canadian art scene for decades. Coming out of the "Young Romantic" group of artists in BC during the 80s, she fastened onto a set of formal and thematic concerns that have been largely consistent ever since. Delinquents and marginalized people – whether mental patients, teenaged gangs, criminals or sluts – have been her dominant concern, pinned together by a carefully cultivated sense of tactility and mythology.

The tension in her works resides in the interplay between the discursive function of black and the cancellation of depth. Rather than appearing as distinctive worlds which can be projected into, they are processive; there is a sense in which they function only as heaps, as undigested artifacts. One could say that these heaps invite a sense of secrecy or have some undisclosed treasures, but this would be wrong. There is nothing lacking in the images. There is nothing hidden. They are always in excess. Her canvas is limpid and stressed rather than taut or soft. Its seams show because it is a collage too and plays this out more fully than fragmentary elements on a flat background could do.

Her characters are sexually ambiguous. Generally young, feminine and wearing the accouterments of school children as well as the clichés of Bohemian life. This only accentuated by the canvases she chooses (sails and sacks). Their expressions almost always seem to be caught. They are in moments documented by accident, usually looking away or ambivalent. Such a candidness of face contrasts with the often classical contrapposto position so many of her figures take. The posed bodies are then rendered with greater artifice. Their seams show in a way that is more 'real' than the documentation of their faces. Clothes break open in places, showing nudity which just becomes part of a uniform. The heads stranded like embassies to dead nations are a foreigness upon the bodies then exploited. This is an exploitation of their possible sensualities, all unfolded in a messy, inchoate set of blurs and juxtapositions that create a kind of black comedy when confronted with the tranquil stupidity of the languid or tense faces.

Unlike Surrealist collage, there is no pretense at seamlessness or unity. Her sense of material violence is greater. The failure of the Surrealists had been to place collage too much in the bounds of the clichés of pictorial realism, something they frequently denied they did but which they seemed doomed to do in reaction to DADA. The glue insists on the materiality of the image, on its nature as a heap and reflects a filthy kind of light. This is the element that she brings out most strongly.

Her work mocks voyeurism. There is no decontaminating distance to make it possible. Rather than a glance, there is a glare, in several senses of the word. First, a glare by her characters, whose faces carry an unknowable subtext. Rather than implying some psychic depth though, they create a certain force of repulsion that forces attention to be dispersed over their bodies where there are plentiful clues about their possible lives though no facts. The glare in their eyes is both biting and a taunt. There is also a glare thanks to her heavy use of glue. It seems more pronounced than in much of her earlier work. Large patches of dried glue are visible in spaces on the figures. These serve to both magnify and blur the fabric beneath them and also offer a delicate surface, one full of small cracks, fissures and slight pollutions of colour.

The bodies aren't rendered as skeletons but as an agglomeration of disparate matters. The strength of the vertical in her work is misleading. While the lines of the figures are clear enough, the nuances of their collaged 'flesh' makes them more complex. These are arranged in stuttered patterns, stitched together to suggest a body. Her figures, or characters if you like, function as inorganic bodies – milieus of filth and trash which are amassed together. Although they have a strong sense of volume, they aren't sculptural, but work by elliptical description. The lines that she adds and the elements which she subtracts give no sense of lack. There's always a certain excess, a way in which details fall away as too many elements. In this way, there is no past in her paintings, no memory, just a kind of recording of the perfect.

Angela Grossmann
Galerie D'Este

Katie Pretti's Vanitas

2010-10-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

Katie Pretti's latest exhibition, "Vanitas," is composed of ten 88" by 75" inch pieces which, when I viewed them, spanned across the four walls of a side room in an office furniture store. An unlikely place you could suggest, or maybe not. After all, business people die too, perhaps even more than other people do. As Cioran once put it, "Only owners die."

The reminder of the universality of decay is fundamental to the vanitas and the momento mori. An insistence on the fleeting nature of existence was traditionally opposed to the infinite. When ownership was possible, that is, when there was a soul and a duty to safeguard it for God, this opposition could readily hold. But even in our secular age, such superstitions have hardly been eroded. Historically, the entire concept of Right is indebted to this article of Christian dogma, albeit rendered in an even more stupefied form. Our age (I would hesitate to call it a period) is an age of faith, for capitalism is nothing if not a faith of extraordinary proportions. The vanity which thrives within it does so largely out of the dread of death and in the attempt to safeguard against it with ever more paranoid means.

There are all sorts of ways you could think about these new works of hers and their channeling of the vanitas tradition, but we will reserve ourselves to only one or two. We would like to think about how they relate to the tradition of the still life and what stillness connotes from an ontological as well as aesthetic standpoint. The morbid space which the vanitas long ago established, the stillness of the grave which it calls upon and the immanence which this stillness remains in the shadow of, is played out differently here. Since her figures do not properly register as objects, only as fuzzy aggregates of material, they never enable the settling of accounts with the composition of the plane that the momento mori relies on so much for its pathos. There's a kind of symmetry in the traditional compositions of the genre that allows for the viewer to find a centre. They are locked in: a stationary moment of contemplation without the vagueries of the sublime. The immanent and the eternal both equate with death in a moment which operates as a canker sore within duration.

In Pretti, there is a kind of stillness, but it is not the stillness of a void, but one which is suspended within the negative space of the propulsive morbidity which takes over the ground of her images. She replaces meditation with a kind of excoriating emission. There's no sentimentality, only the sensual. Traditionally, the vanitas marked a kind of frontier for these two things, but all of this collapses in her work. The twin elements of the immanent and the eternal are no longer given the same differentiation. Instead, they become interchangeable, placed within the flux of the general where sex and decomposition are indistinguishable. This ties closely into one of the other elements which is important in the work and that is the nature of the gestural abstraction. Immediately within the gesture, there is already a power of indeterminacy. A gestural indeterminacy denotes a mode of activity within a grid where the fluctuations of the material can never be predetermined but instead functions as the marking of an intensity that has passed through it. The marking itself is not purely arbitrary but follows the continuity of this intensity. The gesture does not provide an illustration but a diagram of this movement. However, the gesture itself is indeterminate since it can only be determined by a process of inscription which is external to its corporeality.

Corporeality is manifest in her paintings in the tension between the rendering of the mass of inchoate figures and the horizon. There is a strange horizon, something which is complicated by the absence of a potent horizontal or vertical pull to the image. Instead, there is a play on weight. What could have more gravitas than the vanitas? But what could possess more bathos than the orgy? The distinctions actually no longer matter. Both humour and pathos would require a centre, but what she deploys instead is an almost Stoic streaming of convulsive figures around a crack in a primary form. As the figures multiply without ever registering, accumulating as so many traces of their possible tactility, they produce the visual equivalent of cacophony – it's noisy painting. The horizon functions as a silence, but this is true only if one conceives of silence as the space wherein a sound resonates without relationships. The horizon does not provide a ground for the figurative piles that she accumulates, rather it operates as the echo, the yield of their weight.

Rather than create a stillness upon which would need to be projected the force of decomposition, she produces a vibrating matter that undermines the soul's pretension for vitality. Ultimately, there can be no contemplation, for death, like everything else, is in a state of constant fluctuation and disintegration. There is no quiet in the grave, no respite, only the oscillations of noise. It is a world without faces but also one without pores. A world with a remarkable impenetrability and yet this is precisely because there is no interiority.

In spite of all of these curls of fat, there's a remarkable flatness to the works. Done in a mix of oilstick, watercolour and pastel, there aren't any shadows, only densities of colour and degrees of opacity. So unlike the common traits of the genre, this lack of shadow (the symbolic extension of death) also involves a lack of trompe l'oiel. There are good reasons for these omissions. Hallucinations require depth and a certain metaphysical terror which is absent in the works. Rather, there is a nearly pornographic form of materiality that would mock such pretensions.

Katie Pretti

Duke & Battersby's Lesser Apes at Jessica Bradley

2010-10-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

Perverts and Primates

I visited the new Duke and Battersby exhibition twice. First on opening day, but it was filling up with people blathering and opening days are always bad days for looking at art. It didn't help that my companion had walked out, unable to watch all of the decomposing creatures on the screen. According to them, that couldn't be art, though why that offended them so much when the morning we had spent in a butcher's market surrounded by eviscerated pigs and goats did not is rather circumspect. This banal personal anecdote... should I go on? My companion was also suffering from a parasite which they had accidentally consumed in Iceland. Apparently, goats shit in waterfalls and this had somehow streamed to their lips, entered their body, become hyper-productive and thus rendered the host body slightly emaciated and intensely lethargic. ...so this personal anecdote: why if not because it is somehow related, and by more than just the empirical fact of the intersection of this exhibition and these symptoms?

The new show by the duo is centered on a video piece which cuts together found footage and material that they captured themselves. It's narrative, but in an unusual way. While it tells a story, it doesn't have a plot. Instead, it narrates it as a series of interludes and letters, polemics and poetic songs. All of this is done to support the tale of the woman and the primate that fell in love. They seem to battle for acceptance, or maybe it is just for the perversion of the norm. Part misanthropy, part evangelism: deliberate or not, the work emits an eccentric kind of Christianity.

Actually it was somewhat reminiscent of some of the work done in Russia under the necrorealism heading. In particular, the Evgenii Iufit film, "Bipedalism." However, the Russian film gravitated to a point of indifference and erosion, whereas this work seems intent on heightening to transcendence. While the Russian work, with its equally curious plumbing of biological ideas, was about being polluted by history, "Lesser Apes" is about a different kind of production, one which doesn't concern the creation of new taxonomic categories but of smudging the categories. It is never a smudging of their legibility, that's for certain, for one of the most blatant things about the work, and about their work in general, is their lack of categorical smudging. There's always a certain clarity, one of givenness or of giving; a certain concern with the ordaining of things, albeit in a way which is perverse, or better, not immediately redundant.

They spell it out this way: cross species love, the carnal smudging of creatures, can only be pure if it happens under the rubric of love, that is, in empathy. To contrast the love of woman and primate, one observes the sexual life of the hive and the flower. The natural perversity of this relation between flowers and bees is pushed to an extreme when the Chinese use workers as the sexual conduits with flowers. This perversion, one which is economic as well as strictly social, is admonished because it does not work as an empathic structure, that is, as a subjective fiction. The love between a 'pinky' and a primate, however, is purely fictional, or as they gloss it in a rather Joyce Wieland move, feminine.

"Novels are at the core of what it means to be ethical." In effect, empathy is the fictionalizing of the world – its perversion, either through an imaginary exercise of the state apparatus, as the video's characters seem intent on doing, or by way of personal mythology. The cats which are placed in jars or replicated as toys through the work of labourers are trapped in these spheres of fiction, removed from the pollinations of the world but nestled within the confines of their tableau – the pervert as producer of goo-gaws and these objects as the necessary completion of the totalization of this 'unlimited subjectivity'.

By way of contrast, Lars Laumann's piece "Berlinmuren," playing at Prefix, details the long love affair of a woman with the Berlin wall. The woman who narrates the piece goes to great lengths to stress an antithetical kind of perversion, one which is pure because it is objective, because it possesses no fictional quality. This isn't empathy, it's sympathy, something which takes place not via two organic clumps trapped in species form with readily penetrable ducts, but between objects which can only relate through surface, tactility and vibration. In fact, the piece ends with the damnation of fiction, exemplified by David Hasselhoff and the subjective 'victory' celebrations over the wall, depicted as the inglorious exploits of garish and brutal primates.

"Lesser Apes" at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects from October 16 — November 13.

Duke and Battersby
Jessica Bradley Art + Projects
Prefix

Brendan Flanagan at The Angell Gallery

2010-10-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

Molten Meat Puppets.

Brendan Flanagan's new paintings concentrate on moments which are peripheral. The action always seems to be taking place off to the side. His figures stand like the stage hands of a Greek tragedy, forced to watch the heroic actor walk off the stage to have his eyes gouged out or his entrails eviscerated. Bored, inured, perhaps even shocked: it's impossible to say with the lumpen impersonators that feature in his works. Standing or straddling, they are stuck in a motion whose resolution might never salvage it from the absurdity they are currently stranded in. As such, they document the ambiance of an event rendered into material form. They are not tracings of the sensation of these mysterious and unknowable events, nor are they their echoing.

With the body delineated as so many lumps, pores and crevices, the architecture that surrounds them takes on a more colossal stature. Sometimes, like the figures, it seems on the verge of collapsing and pooling into an indifferent mass, but much of the time, the architecture rises to a sinister height that only intensifies the crude and grueling gravity that affects them.

The faces of his figures are fashioned as lumps, more akin to elements of landscape than the perforations that supposedly hold the soul. They often function as masks, but masks which only point to their nature as meat. He plays jokes with this quality. In "Costume Party," the only way to tell that there are actually costumes on most of these pallid meat creatures is because some of their heads are squares. For the figures, nothing is hidden; all is on display. He doesn't paint human beings. Instead, inevitably, we're in the space of meat. He paints meat in human form. In fact, beings seems to be precisely what is pushed to the edge in his works. They aren't beings but figures, pure and painterly but rippling with sensation. There is nothing abstract enough about them for them to seem like characters. They are too concrete to have souls. While there is no mystery in the figures, only a force which cannot be broken down into communication, there is a secrecy around them.

"Row" and "Mass" feature crowds of suited figures who lurch into apish forms, their excitation forcing an involution of types. Each figure finds echoes throughout the group. Each action is retarded; merely the flailing of an appendage on a body to which they all belong, these subtly distinguishable idiots who could at any moment revolt and fall into a welter of soft colours. Indeed, the colours which make up his interiors aren't merely softer compliments to those of the figures. Defiantly unmeaty, they are resolutely flat. Not even scraped down, they are often airbrushed, giving them a haunting ethereal sheen. This flatness is an extension of the violence of the frame. His figures, trapped in the frame and gorping out, suffer the additional violence of the grid that underpins them. One couple collapses on it. Others stand transfixed under it as it begins to drip on them. But it is when the paint flattens and hardens into an opaque aquatic colour that it illustrates the most violent aspect of his imagery. It is not a convulsive or melodramatic violence, but one which is still, cool and calm: a collection of gently vibrating tones that hushes the shrillness of the figures. This is the violence of the soul: the violence of architecture: The Absolute. A God who has no body, no meat, and therefore despises it and tortures it.

This kind of intensity is new to his work. The play between the convulsive and the cool isn't a matter of contrast but of negation. In his earlier paintings, the power of this negativity was absent, but now it functions like an incredibly idiosyncratic variety of chiaroscuro, one which can only make sense according to the world of painterly densities that Flanagan creates. One could say that his earlier paintings were too melodramatic, too expressionistic. These new works succeed in being more unsettling because of this. There's something more disturbing about them and, at the same time, more humorous. It's a humour which is part sardonic and part sad, somewhere between a laugh and a cough.

Brendan Flanagan
Brendan Flanagan's "Interiors" at the Angell Gallery from October 1st – October 30th

Manny Coon at OCAD

2010-10-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

Shary Boyle: Flesh And Blood At The AGO

2010-09-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

Shary Boyle has just unveiled a substantial exhibition of her paintings and sculptures at the Art Gallery of Ontario. "Flesh and Blood" was curated and organized by Louise Dery and Galerie de l'UQAM. It will be travelling the country over the next year. Most of the work on display is new and was created explicitly for the show.

The exhibition is spread out over four rooms and encompasses a wide range of her trademark images. Combining characters from old fairy tales and the cliches of our times, she channels her figures into a highly personalized mythology, stripped down to their symbolic nudity and condensed in a way which makes their significance elusive while their libidinal presence is explicit. She then decorates her pallid figures with jewels taking the form of vomit, blood, excrement and other bodily fluids. The distinctions between bodies are often unclear. Copulating bodies collapse into each other, sometimes in pornographic detail, sometimes by sheer vagueness. Most of her figures are small and porcelain, or polymer and clay, with some elegant nuances of detail and others that seem more like punctuation marks. These curious objects would seem at home on my grandmother's knickknack shelf if it wasn't for all of the monstrous sex. Others, like the scarecrow and figure copulating on a haystack, seem more like frozen moments from a forgotten Ken Russell film. Meanwhile, dotting the walls of some of the rooms are her charmingly twisted paintings, notably the "Highland" series which depicts the kinky exploits of various highlanders and exciting new uses for plaid. They are interspersed with minor Rococo paintings and the work of Frans Snyders, harmonizing with the show's general tenor of a particular kind of bourgeois nastiness.

Such a front and center exhibition at the AGO for a relatively young Canadian artist is pretty rare. Aside from the fact that Boyle has actually decided to stick around in Canada, she manages to embody a lot of what's been going on in the art scene in this country, although always in her own very particular way. On the one hand, she embraces a rigorously theoretical, political and conceptually based practice. On the other, she displays a disciplined enthusiasm for traditional craft work. Although one can often find these two tendencies at odds, either polemically or in market terms in the works of many, they are perfectly melded together in her work.

When looking at the intricate and delicate details that are apparent in so much of her body of work, it is easy to forget their extremity, to ignore the fact that these are aesthetic celebrations of actions more macabre and violent than what is commonly found in slasher films. Casting such imagery in stylized porcelain figures distances the actions they display from their shocking character. It isn't shock art, it's more circuitous, more seductive and in many respects, more successfully erotic. Porcelain is a hard medium, both in terms of craft and tactility. Yet, in no small part because of its longstanding cultural marginalization as part of feminine culture, whether in the sculptures of the Rococo or in the dolls of the Victorians, it creates the illusion of softness, of gentility. It is precisely this, historically misogynistic, misunderstanding of the medium that she exploits in her work as a vehicle to examine the constantly collapsing boundaries between the carnal and the carnage of history.

It isn't for nothing that the pale figures which populate Boyle's work only seem capable of registering as creatures with physical processes in colour. Falling from their metaphysical grace into the carnal world of colour, these lose their whiteness as they merge with a world of shit. Their excretory functions are pungently hued and transformed into jewels. The Freudian, and for that matter Bataillan, aspect of this scatology and its commentary on the value of culture is hardly subtle.

Much like fellow Canadian Marcel Dzama, she engages with history on the level of the voyeuristic and fantastical. However, it is never either of them that act as the voyeur in their phantasmagorical recasting of our continent's gory colonial history. Rather, they act as the distanced surveyor of a society that seems incapable of recognizing its own viciousness in itself, which pushes it into more monstrous and ludicrous cultural forms as much as into ongoing wars of imperialism.

One should be careful when recognizing the political import of the works though. While they are blatantly political, it is never in a sloganeering or polemical sense. In fact, certainly in the case of Boyle, it may be in many respects far more ambiguous than intended. What differentiates them both is also substantial. While both of their works concern the often repressed genocidal impulse and history which has dominated North America, the rhetorical, and ultimately political cast they make of it is decidedly different. Dzama very consciously affiliates himself with the radical avantgarde of the turn of the twentieth century but filters it through Outsider art to arrive at a specifically nuanced attack not only on mainstream art, but mainstream society at large. For her part, Boyle, while embracing the traditionally feminine, is also embracing the more radical aspects of the Rococo tradition. In doing so, she touches on the aristocratic and distancing from the social majority.

The soft and feminine has a long history as the subversive, long before feminism would claim it. Even for the ancient Greeks, the soft was regarded as a passage into decadence, a moment when the swing to tyranny would occur. The dread accorded to it has continued well into our day, along the way explicitly coming out in the polemics of the French and American revolutions, which were resentful wars against a coquettish softness, as well as in the battles of the fascists and the communists against the enemies they claimed. While nothing has ever been less militant that the soft, nothing has ever threatened the solidity of social and military power with as much violence.

What is truly subversive in the exhibition is the deliberate pleasure which Boyle cultivates in the spectacle of this violence. One of the most interesting things about her work is the way that she, to use an old phrase, 'aestheticizes violence'. They're sadistic pieces cast in a radicalized softness. The exhibition isn't simply about a bunch of tantalizing or shocking objects; it's more about the audience that filters through the porcelain world she creates. In fact, the use of porcelain is achingly appropriate since the work is about the repressed asshole of human consciousness and society, which reaches its most sublimated form in the institution of the museum. It is here that Boyle plays an openly perverse game and her subversiveness comes to fruition. The museum goer is oriented less as a viewer than as a voyeuristic sadist who can't help but enjoy the scenes of rape, torture and mutilation as they are played out with a coquettish viciousness.

Flesh and Blood runs from September 15 until December 6, 2010.

Shary Boyle
Art Gallery of Ontario

*Note: This is the somewhat extended version of a review originally written for BlogTO

A Part of Our Heritage - Paul Émile Borduas

2010-09-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

One of the heritage moments that used to haunt TV.

Movie Day: General Idea's Shut The Fuck Up.

2010-08-31T08:37:00.000-07:00

Julian Schnabel at the AGO.

2010-08-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

Below is an article I wrote for BlogTO about the new Schnabel show at the AGO. Strangely enough, I recently wrote a paper claiming that Cindy Sherman's vomit pictures were, at least in part, her way of pissing on the Schnabel phenomenon. At the press junket, I listened to him speak to a bunch of people. He kind of rambles without saying anything. It's not a grasping way of talking; I just don't think he has much other than specific banal things to state. That was fine, if rather underwhelming, and most of the time I just stared at his hardened mass of hair while wealthy old women milled about asking him pseudo spiritual questions and some journalists preened in front of their cameras. During his opening spiel, he said that Canada seemed nice, sort of like America 50 years ago 'before it went to shit'; Toronto was as erratically designed as Texas and looked like a dysfunctional computer chip and, of course, that he was one of the greatest artists in the world.

Julian Schnabel: Art and Film at the Art Gallery of Ontario from September 1, 2010 – January 2, 2011

Famed American artist Julian Schnabel has mounted a massive show of his works in various media at the AGO. The show will be opening to the public on September 1, but the media were let in for a sneak preview of the gargantuan undertaking.

I was a tad nervous about going since I was sure his pajamas would be nicer than mine. I decided to take my Maosist uniform out of the closet just to throw him off. The usual art journalist herd of people in black and badly jarring style choices were there in full force. We were loaded onto the elevators to be sent upstairs to meet the man and his curator. It was all rather nice as far as press conferences go and they played music from the Velvet Underground and the soundtracks to Schnabel's films as we waited. He arrived, not in pajamas, but in plaid shorts and a shirt that made him look like a lumberjack taking a vacation on a cheap cruise line. The curator, David Moos, came to the podium and tried comparing Schnabel to Reubens and Delacroix, casting him as the latest incarnation of the heroic painter creating monumental works. Of course, what he didn't say was that, unlike those two painters, who created monumental history paintings with big intentions, Schnabel basically paints monuments to himself.

Schnabel was one of the major art stars of the early 80s when there was a controversial 'return to painting' after it had supposedly died. Recognized as the beacon of the Neo-Expressionist school, he was lauded by plenty and his works were selling before they were even completed. He was a major player in the new art market of the Reagan era, the kind of artist that dealers dream of. His actual significance in aesthetic terms is still fairly dubious though (and I mean dubious, not controversial). Known for his giant paintings made of cracked pottery, he fused abstraction with a kind of naïve figurative painting which posed itself at odds with the minimalism and conceptualism that had haunted art through the late sixties and seventies. While the market eventually tamed those movements, the kind of work which Schnabel helped popularize – depoliticized, aesthetically innocuous, subjective, decorative – was perfectly made for the new class of Wall Street tycoons and the return of conservative politics in America. His massive paintings are ideal for the foyers of corporations or the summer homes of CEOs.

Why he's significant now is largely because of the profile he's gained as a filmmaker, directing movies like "Basquiat," and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." No one involved in the exhibit seems to have any illusions about this, thus the name of the exhibition. And it's a big part of what the show is about. It highlights his involvement with the film world by showing several early paintings that contain explicit references to films and film actors. It also contains some rather nicely textured black and white Polaroid blow ups of actors like Christopher Walken and Mickey Rourke among others.

Schnabel has never had any problem promoting his own genius. At bottom, what Schnabel's work has always been about is casting himself as the world's greatest painter. There's something tongue in cheek about it when he likes to proclaim that he's the greatest artist since Picasso, but only to a degree. At best, his work is actually more like a second rate Picabia's, but with greater marketing finesse. Whether all of that should be taken positively or negatively is pretty debatable, but what ought to count is the paintings themselves.

His work is all about scale. The bigger the better. The size is genuinely impressive, genuinely cinematic. His brush strokes are clear and huge. In fact, that's all they are. Scale is made overwhelming because that's all there really is. There's little actual content. The attentiveness and nuances of his massive strokes do little other than to announce his own ego. His paintings aren't much deeper than him stating that he is a great painter. All the same, the plate paintings (there were two of them hanging) are still nice and stand out as what's most interesting about his body of work. That's essentially because of their heaviness and their visceral, material quality, something which is lacking in most of his subsequent work. The fact that the earlier works are in a gradual state of decay only adds to their charm.

The other works, homages to movies, to surfers, to artists, are rendered in varyings styles, although size is still what trumps everything. For example, a few of the portrait paintings look like the kind of kitschy folk art you can find on cheap Portuguese pottery, only massively blown up and stuck in an ornate frame. The effect of scale on these images makes them slightly grotesque, but rather than charming, they have a weird glamour. It is precisely this element that also comes out in his portrait of Andy Warhol. Unlike the type of deathmask glamour which Warhol embodied though, Schnabel's is a sentimentalized glamour, removing ambiguity and replacing it with homage; removing the coldness and replacing it with a fuzzy coolness for nostalgic hipsters: an ideal move for the art market of today.

Movie Day: Artist in Montreal

2010-08-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

Dir. Jean Palardy (1954)

This short film introduces us to the "automatistes," followers of an abstract art form that developed in Montreal. The movement, initiated by Paul-Émile Borduas, is explained by the artists themselves when narrator Bruce Ruddick drops in at their cooperative studio. The films also captures painter Paterson Ewen at his home and joins the crowd at L'Échouerie, the artists' rendezvous spot. Dr. Robert Hubbard, chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada, comments on non-objective art in general and automatism in particular.

Reality Check at Clark & Faria: Karin Bubas, Douglas Coupland, Graham Gillmore and Derek Liddington.

2010-08-16T09:37:00.000-07:00

The Young Fogeys

At first glance, there isn't really that much uniting the works on display. Not until you probe a little more and realize that they are essentially bound by a kind of faith. Sometimes this is slightly detached or doubtful. Sometimes it's smug or fanatical. It's an attempt to have faith in the present: the present not so much as a temporality, but as an object which can be contemplated. It isn't ownership that's the question. After all, there is no ownership in faith, only the faithful and their contemplation. Therefore, the works are a fetishization of the present.

Why the hell would anyone want to do this? Well, like any other adventure in faith, however wise or misguided it might be, it is, at bottom, a matter of desperation. One becomes desperate for the present because it becomes clear that it's never existed. There has never been a present anywhere and never will be. So what becomes active in the process is the misapprehension of things, specifically of temporality itself, because it is the immediate world that is experienced as death. Or more accurately, the immediate world is death and the misapprehension of this is what constitutes temporal consciousness' subjectivity.

Graham Gillmore plays this out in operatic terms. Actually, they're more like the terms of a Turkish soap opera I used to watch. Appropriating text from an evangelist, he sets it out as a lengthy stutter where each letter is isolated on its own meta-page within the flatness of the pictorial plane. The great Book which is the basis of such religiosity is fragmented into discrete elements, each of which is insensible on its own and which, together, sing in a garbled voice of the implausibility of the present. For the evangelical after all, the present is a kind of suspended time, one between the Fall of the past (one of his images is placed halfway between two floors of the gallery, acting like one of the levels of Hell) and the infinite future that arises at the end of time. While Gillmore may be using this ironically, every action which he performs is actually in complete conformity with the Christian passion which it takes as its object.

Karin Bubas' work continues her multimedia obsession with banality and nostalgia (at this point, it's hard to really make a distinction between those two things most of the time). In her earlier work, these tendencies took on the more established form of a kind of mildly critical examination of sites of longing, whether that was her photos of grandparent's home or her paintings of characters from Dynasty. In both cases, it was a rumination on the vanished world which may exist as the emotionally residual but was recast as an enticing ephemerality.

Her take on a current cast of soap characters (The Hills), attempts to insinuate this same kind of residue into the present through a process of faux antiquing. The visages of the stars are each painted in a kitsch 80s style, the kind you would often find the family portraits of sitcoms of that period done up in. The present is always rear projected, the matte background for the images themselves. By projecting the recent past into the distant past, into a past which the painter likely has little conscious experience of, it is not an alienation effect which is created, but a sentimentalization - the opposite of Brecht's materialistic dialectics. In its place, there's an empathic virtuality which is predicated on the negation of its facticity so that it can be subsumed within a subjective vacuum. That is to say, within the dread of death and corporeality.

Within this context, the inclusion of the work of Derek Liddington actually makes sense. He portrays himself holding hands with Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman. The liner notes say it's an arm wrestle but that's the only thing that actually gives it any direction. The vacuity of the image, and its inability to even render this hackneyed and repressed form of violence in representation, is the manifestation of a strategy of corporeal negation. It may seem like a gentle geste, but it's full of a kind of snide cruelty: his hands function as a self-aggrandizing sneer in the continuing pathology of contemporary art's venal production of it own self-loathing. It's an allergic image based in an abreaction to naked sensation rendered as a sterilized icon. For this reason, its close proximity to Douglas Coupland's image is pertinent since it is, after all, a test strip for the libidinal investment in vacant iconicity.

Karin Bubas
Graham Gillmore
Douglas Coupland
Derek Liddington
Clark & Faria

Alex Kisilevich at Angell Gallery

2010-07-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

A Sitcom About Death.
In a world with no specific sense of fashion but a very particular taste in textiles, awkward teenagers are trapped in bubbles and forced to socialize, even when society seems to have left them behind. But they might be slightly optimistic since Jesus has come back to save them, but then again it might just be some hipster who had wine thrown in his face for being a creep. Those images spell out the kind of world which photographer Alex Kisilevich depicts in his work.

It's a world which is in some respects reminiscent of José Saramago's "Death With Interruptions." In that novel, death takes a break. People stop dying. At first, everyone's happy, and then it all falls apart because it is rapidly realized that the majority of human society and relationships rely on the inevitability of one's demise. Without death, life is unbreable. While Saramago turned this premise first to satire and then to sentimentality, something different lurks in Kisilevich.

The works on view at the Angell Galley are culled from two separate series: "...and then you die." and "Bubble Troubles." The carefully constructed planes of his images sometimes seem like stills from a sitcom pilot which no network would pick up. Wallpaper, or even the floral patterns of tablecloths, adds to this. In his images, death is the wallpaper; or, rather, it is the atmosphere which delineates his objects. Demise is not rendered as a threat, in fact, living is the threat in his images.

There's an ongoing routine involving people trapped in bubbles. These shield them from the world yet place them in a kind of transparency akin to that supposedly experienced by angels. They are panes, in other words, through which the environment which surrounds them can be viewed. These bubbled figures make the pictorial space into an object, a threat. It is, of course, a completely banal threat, as far from the sublime as possible. It is a threat greeted with boredom. Unlike indifference, boredom is an intensity which is devoid both of neutrality and of investment. Instead, it operates as a kind of hovering or buzzing which expends energy in an erotics of exhaustion. It's hard not to miss the sexual jokes that fill his work, whether they involve people trapped in rubber, the eerie libidinal tension between male and female couples of divergent ages, or that most sexual of images, a cigarette, burning alone into a pile at the centre of some flowers.

Unlike someone with a similar set of works, Charlie White for example, whose work is more grotesque and anxiety-ridden, Kisilevich's works are morbid, though in that uniquely Canadian way which is too repressed to be romantic. Rather than anxiety, there's a discomfort smothered in so much politeness that it takes on perverse dimensions.

While morbidity is a common enough theme in art, it is rarely dealt with in terms as awkward as these. Few human beings have ever died with dignity, let alone suffered with it. But the spectre of such phenomena are here rendered with the same sensation one might feel while watching a morbidly obese person trying to slip into a pair of ill-fitting pants. Playing on the disequilibrium that underlies the most banal aspects of life, the images find their balance in the possibility of death. Death is the condition of possibility, but this very possibility is constantly undermined by the inability of it to come to fruition. Death is frustrated everywhere in his images. A taxidermist is a salesman who is so overstocked, the dead animals he deals in have finally taken over his face and his space. The gaze of his figures, often cast down or into the void of the frame, as though they could have been looking there forever and will continue to do so in a complete suspension of action.

Alex Kisilevich
Angell Gallery

2010-07-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Appy-poly-logies,

I have not been posting much lately. There are a number of reasons for that. One is time. Research papers, a job and my photo work take up a lot of it. Plus, I've been writing the goo gaw report for Bl**TO for the past month. It's not real criticism, of course, more like looky loos for the bored. But that's quite alright as long as it encourages people to actually go to a gallery once and awhile. But I promise there will be more, once I run into something that gets under my skin a bit.

Movie Day: Kienholz on Exhibit (1969)

2010-07-07T06:37:00.000-07:00

Part of what doomed me to an interest in contemporary art was a visit I took with my parents to the National Gallery in Ottawa when I was a child. It was there that I first encountered the work of the ed and Nancy Kienholz, one of the great art couples, as well as admirable artists in their own rights.

The theatricality, the ugliness, the tactility and the crudeness of their work fascinated me as a child and has remained a constant presence in my own aesthetic. I grew up in rural Canada and a lot of it looked remarkably like the installations they put together. There was, and still is, an almost choking degree of familiarity in their work for me. In fact, it has been this visceral aspect of their work, more than the polemical elements, that has left a lasting impression.

But enough of this rather sentimental introduction, thanks to some determined soul on Archive we can now present this fascinating documentary by June Steel about the work of the Kienholz's at a pivotal point in their history.

Jack Burman at Clint Roenisch – William Eakin at Stephen Bulger

2010-06-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

Morbid Fascination.

Although I've always had a morbid sensibility, something which comes in no small part from growing up as the scion of a family of undertakers, photographic documentations of death have always struck me as well... odd. There's a discomfort involved for most people in such images. Decay of the flesh and the vacuity of the eye sockets often makes people cringe. It's a strange game of empathy, or narcissism as least, though the two things are essentially interchangeable. However, for me, being familiar with corpses all of my life, wandering into Jack Burman's show at Clint Roenisch's gallery was almost like going home. That eeriness, combined with the gallery's charming colonial cottage décor, and the utter indifference to my presence demonstrated by the people running it, created a meditative atmosphere.

Ever since its earliest days, death has always been an obsession of photography. The massively popular trend for post-mortem photography (and ghost photos) enjoyed by the Victorians has been having something of a comeback lately. But the basic functioning of the medium itself - its reliance on the scar tissue of light and chemistry and the freezing of moments - as well as its role as the bland mortuary attendant of history has marked its essentially morbid character just as much. Since photography is, as Sontag among others have observed, ineluctably a matter of death, it seems redundant to actually take photos of things which are quite literally dead. And that's ultimately what strikes me as the problematic issue when photographing the dead. It is less a question of morbidity than of sentimentality. Much as is the case with most pornography, there is something almost pious leaking through this rather different form of carnality.

Burman doesn't strictly photograph the dead, of course, something which those writing about him often seem to miss. Instead, he photographs a highly mediated kind of dead, the dead in suspension – the dead of museums and the mummified dead. The long dead: crystallized and often reified by chemistry into documentations of life. By virtue of this play on the basic redundancy involved – the dead held within the medium of death - there is actually very little about the dead or death in his work. Instead, it's an institutionalized embodiment of death. The sense of contact or contamination is almost non-existent. It's much more like going to visit a taxidemerist's studio – death reduced to a goo gaw for the living room. His often monumental photos are less about death because of their monumentality, which makes them melodramatic. In fact, they are essentially the documentation about how different social institutions paranoiacally attempt to extract something from death and make the process of decay stillborn ('decay' demarcates the threshold of the world's greatest orgies, as any maggot or worm testifies).

They are lovely photos, of course. Clean, clear, with precise details and set out in a classical way with highly conservative framing and a careful colour scheme. They are, in other words, photos which are essentially informed by a museum or curatorial aesthetic, one which strips the rawness of decay away to present what amounts to a kind of airbrushed biology – a post-mortem glamour photography. This is also their strength, because it points to the specific kind of anxiety which underlies the fascination with such images. It's an approach to death several steps removed and constantly mediated by technology and ideology. It's an approach to death which is so fundamentally anti-septic that it never actually approaches the dead, only the shadows of the thing that carry what death leaves behind. In this respect, it comes close to documenting the most puritanical kind of living, a kind of totalitarian life which is sealed in and segregated from the real threat of materiality.

Curiously enough, you can wander just a few doors down the street to the Stephen Bulger Gallery and see an exhibition which deals far more profoundly with death, although it seems like this is rather foreign to its intentions. William Eakin has made a career out of rescuing discarded photos from the bins of charity shops and plays the charity forward, blowing them up and mummifying them once again. If photographs steal the soul, what he does is essentially soul murder.

His carefully selected polaroids from the fifties and sixties are intended to offer the same 'optimism' which he saw springing from the early period of the Polaroid generation. However, the naïve optimism of that time has been replaced with something else. It would be hard to think of Eakin's work as naïve, although it is a position he assumes for rhetorical reasons. His work is carefully framed, both literally and figuratively, within several frames. Unlike the polaroid's easy immediacy, his work operates at several removes from the instant moment. Scanned, blown up and distorted, it gains enormous texture as it is placed upon layer after layer of display material and then suspended on the wall. Together with the other images, they stand as a kind of sedimentary layer that's been unearthed. These fossils of optimism are transformed by their museumification. Removed from their sentimental context as discarded skin from the flux of the everyday, they are placed in an entirely foreign context, one which becomes entirely historical and social rather than esoteric. That is where their reborn optimism lies – in the faith in the continuity of the everyday in spite of time's erasure.

What gives the works their force, however, is their marks of decay – the layers added by time as it strips the subject's of the photos of their lives. The scratches, stains and splatters that have collected on the surface of the images, effacing their original content, replace it with the progress of their death. They become a kind of biograph of morbidity.

Clint Roenisch Gallery
Stephen Bulger Gallery

Even Closer: Holly Farrell at Katharine Mulherin

2010-06-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

The Absurd Angst of an Action Figure.

Holly Farrell is currently showing some carefully balanced paintings at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects. The show is made of a series of paintings of Ken and Barbie, sometimes together, but mostly alone. It's a fascinating show. One which is about fascination and which manages to raise all sorts of disturbing implications about the nature of viewership and empathy, as well as concerns about what constitutes a still life and how it differs from a portrait.

Immediately, one wonders if you can you even paint a portrait of a doll? If a portrait is meant to convey some hint or peek into a subject's inner world through their stance and gaze, what does a mass produced object relate? Of course, it's not as though Ken can feel anything, or has a psyche of any kind, or does he? The thing is, it doesn't actually matter if this is a painting of a doll or not. It's far too easy to dismiss it that way and one looses the really unnerving thing which pulses underneath these portraits which is the interrogation of what constitutes a face.

Painting dolls isn't new, photographing them even less so. There's been a lengthy history on these counts. In general, such procedures are split between spats of nostalgia and a conflation of fetishism combined with a critical analysis of the nature of representation and identification. While a doll may be an innocent object, the forces which go into their creation usually aren't. They certainly aren't when it comes to Barbie and her coterie of associates.

Even if these are portraits of pop culture icons, there is nothing about them to ally them to pop art. In fact, they invert the basic scheme of pop, which was to turn real people into iconic commodities which could be reduplicated to give the illusion of fatal charisma. There's a very different kind of fatalism at work here though, one which is predicated on a detached singularity rendered palpable by the fact that the paintings render their subject on a colossal scale.

The paintings don't work as criticisms of icons of femininity or in any of the usual ways in which the Barbie image is frequently appropriated. While the Barbie paintings are pretty, I use that word carefully, the thing that really stands out in the exhibit are the works featuring her erstwhile companion, Ken. What's most impressive about the paintings is the degree of anxiety which seems to be infused in his image. Barbie actually comes off as almost non-descript. Her droopy eyes and flowered background provide her with a relaxed context. She seems distant and disinterested. They are pictures of elegant boredom. But Ken is a different case altogether. His glance is forced and full of a terrified innocence. His eyes hover over his face as if they were an alien power. He nearly always appears suspended in a void.

One of the most primary distinctions between the two figures is the way in which their necks are depicted. Hers is soft with delicate touches of white as the head and neck meet in slight shadow. By contrast, the space where his head attaches to the neck is articulated with a harsh line. His head is clearly detachable, a foreign object on his body. Ken has a unique part symbolically in the history of male icons. In fact, he is probably the most exemplary of masculine icons to be created by and for the female gaze. He is a complete fetish item, every bit as much as one of Bellmer's dolls. His joints can be taken apart and his head exchanged. His infamously ungendered body is smooth and thin to the point of fragility. Even his ill-fitting clothes seem to be applied to him by some external whim, forcing him into an idealized frame within which he could readily collapse.

It may seem absurd to say that a portrait of a Ken doll can possess pathos, but it does. There's no hint that Farrell is attempting to disentangle these prejudices of viewing from the process. Rather, it seems to be embraced whole-heartedly. They aren't still lives for a still life documents objects which have been placed into the world and into a context separate from their making. There's something existential about still lives. But that's not what's at stake here. These 'objects' never enter into another world. There is nothing else. They tell you nothing; instead, they enact the creation of a face and the affective possibilities which that entails. Even if the projection of emotion onto a portrait of a doll is absurd, it is not absurd because a doll feels no emotions. Rather, it points to the absurdity of empathic coding – a concrete system which dictates emotional investment through an abstract geometry.

His face is always rendered at dead centre in perfect symmetry. The space surrounding him isn't so much negative as void. Unlike his female companion, he exists in a blankness. This lack of context is only intensified by the constant change of clothes, and careers, that the series of portraits places him in. While she is a figure of ideal beauty and, therefore, an absolute, he is a figure of almost superhuman blandness, readily decapitated and transported. The context in which Ken's face are placed does not function as negative space, but as the extensive power of the face which has the function of an apparition or epiphany. A kick.

A face is a complex thing. One's humanity is subsumed within this grid of holes and lines, but the face is more profound that humanity. Resting always within every face is the inherent inhumanity of this structure, even while human codes attempt to interpret and control it. As Gilles Deleuze once put it, the face is always a horror show; it is always something anterior to, and in excess of, the life of the subject.

Katharin Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects

Holly Farrell

Costa Dvorezky at The Engine Gallery.

2010-06-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

Costa Dvorezky, who I've written on previously, has a new show opening at the Engine Gallery this week.

The kind people who run the gallery asked me to write the essay for the show so I got an advanced look at it. He shows several distinct sides of his work this time around which makes for a unique viewing experience that I would encourage anyone to indulge in.

The show runs from Jun 24 until Jul 18. You can read more about it, here. You can also read the full essay that I wrote on his website.

Animations by Benoit David

2010-06-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite artists in Montreal has started releasing videos. The unfortunately under appreciated photo-sculptor Benoit David has made a series of animations of his fascinating decompositions.

Although I generally loathe photo manipulation work, he manages to make his stuff gritty and effectively sculptural and retains a corporeality which is often lacking in digital photography. Transforming his photos into animation is an interesting move, adding a new kind of gestural quality, and providing a very different layer to his already complex work.

At some point I'll actually try to write something intelligent about this. Until then, you can check out his website.

Benoit David

We Are Wild at Xpace.

2010-06-05T08:55:00.000-07:00

Nathan Cyprys, Dianne Davis, Sherri Dawson, Brendan George Ko, Meryl McMaster, Darren Rigo

Nature is one of the most dangerous notions that human beings have ever fostered so I've always found it perplexing, and disturbing without equal, that so many of the art works which seek to deal with it seem so utterly innocuous. Perhaps that's merely imaginary on my part, having spent most of my life living in villages or the woods. It's the urban imagination that invents nature as its other, when it is, in fact, merely its double, albeit a double in different clothes.

All images of nature are absurd. The plane, particularly in photography, seems unable to cope with its porousness, its extraordinary lack of depth. Depths are for cities. You can only have depth once you've built a sewer. That may be an overly sentimental attitude. Of course, it is one of the cardinal cliches of Canadian cultural identity that one gets one's identity from the land.

The majority of the images in the exhibit are in squares or portrait type rectangles. These shapes eschew the strong horizontal of the land and stumble into a stunted verticality where bodies, when they are present, rest near the bottom of the frame. This serves to further accentuate the power of the frame, suggesting the 'outside' nature of these images while simultaneously placing them on an inside which may not be cloistered, but is certainly segregated. There is no sense of flight to nature, no departure, and all of this is crucial to the gesture which underwrites the entire operation with its parodic sense of metaphysics.

The 'return to nature' and the battle against it for survival, have been two of the essential myths of modernity. The former finds itself represented in a way that verges on the clownish, albeit a clown bereft of makeup or accouterments, in the photos of Nathan Cyprys. Unlike Spencer Tunick, who uses the nude in a landscape basically as a means to reinvent some of the more bland cliches of the still life genre, Cyprys' images of the nude human figure in a landscape retain anxiety. The off centre figure sometimes seems to be a piece of trash, sometimes an abandoned tribal statue and at other times just a particularly pale element of the land. Its features are distinct by difference, but not distinct enough to have an identity. Rather, they are a literal parody. The body attempts to return to nature by being buried, inserting itself within the possibilities of two worlds, but it's completely unclear that it ever left or full penetrated either of them. There is no narrative to allow the body nudity or clothing, instead it always wears a costume, one which is only another doubling of this stalled movement.

It's hard to imagine what nudity in nature would be. Perhaps there is a kind of nudity there, as we can see in the images where the bodies of trees are lit in such a painterly way. Night robs them of the robes that sunlight gave them and the attendant cliches which make the bush invisible. Dianne Davis' works show nature in unnatural light and turn the woods into a studio. That's as close to nudity in nature as anything is likely to get. It is the nudity of the double which casts its glance back and mocks the viewer who imagines that there is a nature out there somewhere.

One of the most intriguing things about the exhibit, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps in irony (perhaps it doesn't matter either way), is the way it fashions nature as a sort of boutique. Each of the images is too small to be a monument and not small enough to be intimate or sentimental. Rather, they seem set out like shop displays or a wall of advertisements – slogans for a world devoid of language yet still encapsulated in the semiotic forms of advertising. This is echoed in the works by Meryl McMaster which resemble stripped down fashion photography or in those by Darren Rigo where fields are rendered as display rooms for stacked objects objects. The humor in all of this is biting and the irony is cruel. Nonetheless, there is still an underlying, if thoroughly ambiguous, romanticism that suggests that nature was once something other than this, though that possibility is only that – a possibility, and one which cannot be verified. That may be the point after all, that the 'we' of the title is the urban consumer in the wasteland of Toronto where people fantasize that there is somewhere else, that is, that they could actually be someone else.

Xpace
Darren Rigo
Meryl McMaster
Brendan George Ko
Dianne Davis
Nathan Cyprys

Carlos And Jason Sanchez At Nicholas Metivier.

2010-05-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

The magic of violence.

The latest exhibition by brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez is culled from photos from the past five years and offers a survey of their fascination with the violence which, seemingly, exists on the cusp on everyday life. Although all of their carefully composed and staged photos imply immersion in some sort of narrative, their strength, and even their theme, is the point at which the narrative becomes no longer tenable. In fact, they aren't narrative pictures at all; they're descriptions of metaphysical states.

The liberation from narrative and its vortex of meaning comes in the form of violence. This is true in more than just the obvious sense. Although their work utilizes the aesthetic stupidity of photojournalism on a certain level, it does not so much represent violent acts as it seeks to capture the essential pulse of what violence is. This is rendered in a battle between the banal and the beautiful and it is violence which functions as the magical principle upon which all else depends.

In 'Stigmata' they overtly play on religious symbolism and horror movies to create a sense of rupture from the everyday. But this also comes out on a purely formal level. They play against the canonical representation of the Divine, decentering the subject on a grid that breaks up and skews diagonal. The tiles of the bathroom literally echo the grid and its skewering while the hair of the model echoes the Christ of Durer. Added to this, the figures in the image, carefully posed in a highly mannered way, are 'cropped' in a manner that causes the situation to lose all cosmic aspect and be reduced to a moment of intimacy and embarrassment. This is extended by the photo's parodying of pathos. Rather than beads of messianic blood or tears, there are hyper realistic droplets of water suspended on the woman's face, devoid of any affective value and gliding over the pretensions of emotional depth.

Scale is crucial in the work of the brothers. For 'Stigmata' that means truncating things, but for most of that work it means creating a general field which renders pathos vague or trivial. This strain of contextual indifference is carried on in the majority of the photos. Nearly always shot in landscape format with the most of the figures decentred within the frame, the human subject is rendered insignificant while nature gains in crucial importance. Human bodies barely cast shadows and when they do it is merely as an echo of some inanimate object. This is not a romantic nature, nor is it a nature that is chaotic, on the contrary. Nature comes across as a perfectly organized and completely calm world. Tightly gridded and devoid of any injection of sympathy, it is thoroughly indifferent to the violence of human subjects. It's even more mute than the colour palettes most of the images contain.

This idea can also be seen in the extreme wide shot of the crematorium which is made up almost entirely of a wooded area and a blanket of snow. The vertical progress seems endless, but it is abruptly cut off and disavows any of the metaphysical pull that the vertical thrust so often holds. The crematorium itself is essentially a blank spot at the edge of this ellipsis. The idea is also present in the shot of the remnants of the atomic bomb dome where even the people in the park around it, acting essentially as litter, are indifferent to the carnage of history. In 'Friendly Fire', blood, presumably from a dead soldier, is on the ground, but it looks more like a carefully shaded shadow cast by a rock than a scene of death. Adding to the lack of anything indicative of dramatic tension, the focal values that delineate the rock in the desert landscape deny the foreground substantial force.

Violence looms in the photos as the force of temptation; the desire to speak with nature which steadfastly refuses to answer or even acknowledge a voice. All actions are futile and result in silence. There are no words, or even letters, in the images. They have all been carefully removed. This push on anonymity is best exemplified by 'Masked' in which a figure hides their face by a balaclava. The loss of the face is doubled by the black back of the mirror into which the figure peers. The black void connects to the lines of the blind, pulling them into the foreground with the face. Verticality, which we saw previously to be of import in the crematorium, is repeated here as a strategy of denying the 'normalcy' of the subject. This ritualized action is a bid to enter into the magical realm of violence. This force, which is present in 'The Everday' in the form of an explosion with a mysterious, only partially glimpsed, figure at its centre, is also the force of the non-banal, of that which could be rendered beautiful if the context were different. However, these instances of violence are never schematized as the beautiful. That would work too far to redeem them, both ethically and aesthetically. Instead, they retain their neutrality and indifference, which is the true force of violence when it has retained its magic and stayed apart from the capture of the subjective ploy.

Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Sanchez Brothers

That Hideous Strength by Lauchie Reid at Narwhal.

2010-05-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

The first solo exhibit by Lauchie Reid of Team Macho provides a charming and sinister splash amid the many galleries of Queen West.

Reid's small oil paintings are done in a mix of turn of the Twentieth Century styles. This serves several purposes. It reinvigorates, without pastiche or irony, a style which has become marginalized by art history and plays at reclaiming them for the marginalized. But these are images of the exclusive as much as they are of the excluded. In fact, Reid consciously plays on this shifting of institutionalized aesthetic choice by placing Andre Breton among the characters he paints and problematizing claims of aesthetic progression and the nature of the avant-garde.

The use of Breton is a rather obvious way by which Reid alludes to his affinity with Surrealism. This isn't merely the case insofar as the artist uses various dreamlike and absurd images, but in the way that the pictures are formalized. For all of its fantasy, most of Surrealism was extraordinarily formally conservative when it came to the way it used framing, symmetry and paint. Its reduction of academic painting standards into easily swallowed, if not easily digestible, images was essential to its subversive ethos. More than a perverse conservatism though, Reid seems to share in the paranoia that was essential to that earlier movement and which informs the entire range of his aesthetic choices.

The historicized patina of his work creates a sense of distance from the subject matter which is rendered all the more fascinating by its weirdness. As much as the works depict an alien past, they simultaneously subvert the continuity which ties them to the present by creating a past populated by aberrant types. The tension in the works resides in the discrepancy between this objective anonymity and the mood of violence which seems to make it a necessary reaction. Such a tension springs from the attempt to form an identity, but one which is not that of an individual, but that of a group.

The surfaces of the paintings are flat and deny any substantial depth. Shadows are little more than smudges. The darkness, or in some cases, whiteness, as with the images of snow, isolate the figures, accenting the fact that they have no context. The figures are abstract, their identities indiscernible. They are rendered as a garish set of types who are not contextualized enough to function as stereotypes. As such, they are sensible by bearing a familiar resemblance to types without being accorded the same status. This is an important move because it denies them a contextualization that would allow them an identity. They are images which seem to demand anonymity. Too vague to be characters or caricatures, they have masks rather than faces. All the same, the small size of the paintings makes them curiously intimate, though not inviting.

One could read this set of operations in a number of ways. It could be a metaphor for his role in Team Macho and their ethos of group identity. It could be a slightly pessimistic search for authentic codes or a concession to their implausibility.

That Hideous Strength by Lauchie Reid

Martin Brouillette – La Chambre Grise at Galerie Domique Bouffard

2010-04-29T18:33:00.000-07:00

Martin Brouillette's latest series of paintings investigate voyeurism and the cult of perfect beauty in one of its most contemporary guises - internet porn. To do this, he uses the ephemeral and random images that make up so much of the online world and combines them with an inter-textual layer from Thomas Mann's Death In Venice.

The combination is both thematic and, at times, literal, as names from Mann's text are scrawled across some of the paintings. Mann's turn of the century meditation on the 'voluptuousness of doom' is given a contemporary reinvention. The contaminated sewer world of Venice is replaced by the viral world of the internet superhighway. An intellectual's decline into myopia is transformed into a mindless lurch into anonymity. The decay of Nineteenth Century civilization is replaced by the Twenty First Century's nihilistic decadence. Of course, in both instances, one can accord a predatory tourism, the first in respect to the history of nations and the other to the history of individuals, as the source of this decay.

While Mann couched his version of pederastic lust in the guise of a perverse form of neo-Platonism, nothing quite as grandiose seems to be on show in Brouillette. But the straightforwardness of his appropriation of internet porn is not simple and is only half the equation. With the internet, Plato's cave is reborn and, with it, so is the spectacle of beauty and its many deceits. Even the idealized forms are replayed, but they are given an important twist through the way he uses his paint. Rather than Pythagorean ideas, the forms are transformed into heavy gelatinous blobs and smears that sit upon the surface and denude the illusions of the photo inspired images to revel in their material nature as paint.

The images of young males are rendered in light and delicate hues, mostly blues and pinks, which are reminiscent of the soft colour palette of Victorian children's portraits. They appear like those tinted photos rather deliberately in order to point at the nostalgic vacuum that the predatory libido falls into. The softness and flatness of what are essentially mock photos allows for the principle point of contrast in the images to be between the supposedly recognizable and the added layer of paint, which is terse and corporeal but indeterminate.

The boys in the images are flattened and idealized, purified in a sense through their function as icons. The thick paint that smears across them is a heretogenous substance which is lumped together and wiped across the faces. Sometimes the paint creates a mottle of hues and sometimes one which would be deliberately inoffensive if it weren't for its thickness. These smears are a surrogate form of ejaculate. The gesture inverts the Platonic one which was so crucial to Death In Venice and by which the material could reach the transcendent. In this, they cease to be fantasy images and become images of the residue left by fantasy as reality takes hold again. One of the more intriguing issues which the exhibition raises is tactility. It is paint, in its most base form, not as a representation of ejaculate, but as an instance of it, that offers the greatest tactility.

Martin Brouillette
Gallerie Dominique Bouffard

David Moore – Colere Druide at Circa

2010-04-26T17:21:00.000-07:00

Established multi-disciplinary artist David Moore had new display at the Circa Gallery. The title of the show suggested the comic figure of an angry gnome, and, to be sure, gnomes were present, though far less the lawn ornament variety than an intriguing parody of ancient sculpted creatures. The exhibit comes across like a collection of artifacts from some mythical war between druid gnomes, conscious, mobile saws and hybridized trees. As absurd as that may sound, it's skewering of old and new variations on such themes was refreshing and, thanks largely to its various ellipses and some nice touches, proved both tactile and fascinating.

Although nothing approaching a narrative was offered, there were enough teasers to tantalize the imagination. The elements cast around the room were tokens to suggest some large and violent struggle. Such possibilities were not simply part of esoteric games though; there were references dropped to ancient myths here and there. This was the case not only for the overt presence of the gnomish figures who popped up on one end and another, but in the minotaur-like head that was perched upon a vertical trunk with a set of feet dragged behind it on rope. Perhaps the most telling, if the most ambiguous, element was the proliferation of severed limbs which were strung out on ropes across the room. The superimposition of flailed limbs carved from wood and tree hollowed of its wood to leave only bark created a spectacular display of carnage reminiscent of Senecan tragedy.

The application of motifs of violence rendered into 'nature' was carried along from one station of the exhibit to the next. Each provided a monument to a grisly encounter where victims and victors were impossible to glean. Sawdust was transformed into gore and saws, the instruments of destruction, were rendered as placards of domination. The segmented remains of the trees were huddled together, not quite touching, leaving gaps and lines that could be peered through. This was augmented by the substantial, and naturally occurring, holes which allowed the viewer a clear look inside. The interiors were delicately lit and suggestively sculpted with rib patterns on their interiors. This heavy corporeality was offset by the presence of lengthy lines of thick rope which broke up the space and made a grim circuit between the remnants of violence.

One of the most disarming aspects of the exhibit was actually the appearance of cobwebs. On two of the sculptures, they could clearly be seen with fragments of sawdust and bark caught up in them and stranded in mid-air. They offered a delicately morbid touch and an extra layer of context to the sculptures. Their apparently random nature and generation by some external force which was neither narrative nor that of the sculptor, placed the work itself into a broader context where it was further divorced from subjective intimacy and re-organized as merely another element caught in the indifference of nature.

Moore at Circa.

Costa Dvorezky at Galerie D'Este

2010-04-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

Nestled amid the boutiques of lower Westmount, Galerie d'Este was displaying paintings by the Russian born and Toronto based painter Costa Dvorezky. The paintings, created over the past two years, have thematic consistency, offering up a series of bodies suspended in mid air. The figures, largely divers or gymnasts, are stranded in poses which stretch their bodies out in ways that render their stances ambiguous. Their extremities lurch out of frame, but these aren't images of movement. Movement requires a stability of space and time with the surface of his canvas makes difficult if not implausible. These could just as readily be stationary bodies torn up by space than the other way around.

The bodies seem to have been isolated from photos or video and stretched across the canvas. They don't strike easy poses. Instead, they take on a form which distorts the limbs, creating small crevices of indeterminate matter. This is intensified by the density of the paint which often gives way to show the grain of the canvas beneath. The way skin is manufactured is remarkably violent. Each variation in shade is slathered on with distinction, the edges of each variation appearing like a scab on closer inspection. This sort of corporeality is echoed in the way that the painter cuts the canvas, making digs into the paint to muck up the lines of the grid. The accent added by a multiple of diagonals also makes the figure more distorted while it striates a classical geometric set-up. It does this by disturbing the solidity of the figure with open cuts that deny the body its illusion of solidity, making it more phantom like and placing the bulk of material in the element of grounding.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of his paintings is the way in which the figures are grounded. The layering of the paint does not allow for a foreground and a background to be established. In their place is a force of suspension which mirrors that of the bodies. This could have led to superimposition and blurring but instead results in a field where the ground is continually shifting in juxtaposition and denies determination. There is no distance. Even shadows are rendered only as the decomposition of body elements. The surface never comes across as flat. Rather than distance, there is the density of the paint which operates as a skin, every element of which enters into a kind of absurd echo with other elements of the canvas creating a sense of what logicians sometimes like to call infinite regression.

These procedures externalize the grid, constantly pushing the viewer out and refusing to establish a clearly delineated plane. The painting can not be consumed; rather, it forces itself on the viewer. As such, the viewer can not operate as the integral function of the image but merely as a rejected interloper, increasing the voyeurism which much of Dvorezky's earlier work, notably his sado-masochistically themed works, hinted at. This is a voyeurism which is perpetually unsuccessful; the image always exceeds the comprehension and makes a game of this strategy of frustration.

Dvorezky
Galerie D'Este

Diyan Achjadi - The Further Adventures of Girl.

2010-03-24T17:31:00.000-07:00

Diyan Achjadi's exhibit at Oboro is an intriguing take on the powers of iconic representation. It's been touring around the country and this time finds itself in an appropriately decked out venue. The exhibit is comprised of prints, video, and installations which spread across the entirety of the red gallery space. From wall to wall one encounters the face of the iconic 'girl' who is multiplied in each medium. She's a flat and simplified medley of many of the cliches of girlhood rendered into an easy to swallow and mass produced form. Cartoons, posters, flags and little sculptures reminiscent of lawn ornaments all cross reference her figure in a series of reds and lush colours. Sometimes it feels like looking at Dora The Explorer filtered through a post-Superflat version of Maoist propaganda.

My ongoing body of work, Girl, centers around a single, awkward, cartoon-character, a forever-flat golden-skinned young girl of unspecified ethnic or national origin, dressed in a simple red or pink dress with knee-high socks and mary-janes. She is the only character in her world. Sometimes she is alone and isolated, towering over a landscape punctuated by puffy explosions in bubble-gum pinks; other times she is multiplied into a perfectly uniform army, marching and exercising in formation. She exists in an imaginary space, pink- and red-hued, where she may be both the heroine and the victim of a series of vague actions in changing urban landscapes. Each picture functions as a still from an unmade animation, deliberately illustrative but frozen out of context. -Achjadi

Girl roves through bright landscapes littered with destruction. A child soldier who regards the explosions and disasters around her as little more than props in a game. There isn't really a narrative in the work, just an impressive circulation of energy. It starts out seemingly innocuous, like a little bit of children's TV and, through its repetition and its re-articulation, gradually becomes obvious as a technique of aggression. Perhaps most interesting is the way the work challenges the idea of brutality and militarism as they're commonly accepted. The soft colours and simple features make the work easily palatable and inoffensive. Her child soldiers are deadly and aggressively cute. They are less violent than they are happy and indifferent to the world around them. It's the brutality of babes.

The work seems to raise more questions that it answers, but that may depend largely on what you think it should be saying. There's little present in the work to actually counter the interpretation that this is a clean cut presentation of utopia. Although the artist coaches many of her statements on the work in the vein of social criticism, none of that is actually present in the images she creates. They're attractive and decorative and this is self-consciously reflected in the work, with the girl waving flags of herself, perfectly enclosed in her own narcissistic paradise. As Momus once said in respect to certain trends in Japanese youth culture, it's a celebration of 'cute fascism'.

Diyan Achjadi
Oboro

Cooke-Sasseville - The Golden Cupcake

2010-03-22T07:59:00.000-07:00

When you visit Cooke-Sasseville's work at ArtMur, you walk down a little red carpet. Spread across the wall you will find a set of seriagraphs. The object represented therein is ambiguous. Rendered in a phony gold hue, it could be a chocolate bar or it could be a bar of gold. Either way, the serial number vanishes from the face of the object as bite after bite seems to be taken. Or perhaps it is merely decaying over time... none of that is resolved. After walking past these overly flat images, you enter a darkened room. At the far end, the carpet halts at the base of a little pillar upon which is displayed a a golden cupcake encrusted with jewels and sitting upon a revolving tray under subtle lighting; a kind of fusion of upscale cake store and diamond store.

This isn't food - it can't be eaten; it isn't even the simulacrum of a food. Instead, it is a double of food which engages in an entirely different process of consumption. The term 'consumption' itself is ambiguous when applied to the work since it blatantly takes part in such a problematic rendering of the term. Everything which is doubled is food that has been rendered inedible, though it is redeemed from uselessness in two ways. First, by being aesthesized and therefore losing its abjectness and being made Human. Second, by becoming objects which can be bought and sold on a different market. These two redemptions, via the consumption of the market and the intellect, aren't without irony, and even a certain pessimism. The viewer is led along by the nose to perform this redemption and, at the end of it, it's not so much a treat as a turd forced out in a parodic act of sublimation.

The mocking solemnity of the cupcake, its quality as a fetish item and it's unsubtle sense of fecality (its childishness, its sterility and its uselessness) all play into this. Rendered into metal, the object also parodies the fillings which would cake the teeth of those who consumed the real thing. This is not quite the mockingly subversive surrealist object, though it does ambiguously raise the banal to the seemingly beautiful. Nor is it the radically perverse Sadean fecality, which predated the Freudian notion about the relationship between shit and money. The Golden Cupcake, the banal raised to luxury item, is not made into an object of convulsive beauty, but points to the gaudiness of the everyday and the pretentiousness of the normal.

Cooke-Sassesville.
ArtMur

Lalie Douglas: All is not as it seems

2010-03-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

Montreal artist Lalie Douglas' early works often featured deliberately folksy objects, in particular, stereotypical houses. Whether fashioned from ice or toasted bread, these seemed to be the crystallization of her earlier work, which focused on collection and accumulation of homely objects. Her work over the past few years has moved more in the vein of creating self-destructing installations and ephemeral performances. The shift in many respects was basically an inversion. Rather than extending the banal to the lasting by collection, she began creating strange doubles of the banal, almost cartoons of it, and accumulating viewers as the object was destroyed. It is this tendency which is most predominately on display in her most recent work.

When visiting Douglas' new installation at Circa, the visitor is instantly halted in their tracks. You walk straight into the guts of a fake house front. The wooden structure, still baring the pencil marks of its design, is propped up and cages the visitor in, offering them a step ladder and various binoculars to look through in addition to a series of windows. Each set of binoculars offers a different tableau in the distance of a house being ravaged by fire. Through the windows, you see much the same thing, as the 'house' you stand in is reflected back to you by mirrors and you notice it's on fire. All the seams show; the lights are obvious, the colour backgrounds limited by white; all of the tricks of scenography played out in full nudity. They cease being tricks and become props of disillusionment.

There's more to this exhibit than simply an exposition on the nature of fakery though. Douglas seems to be an exponent of the notion that the fake is at its most interesting when all of the seams show, that is, at the moment when it ceases being fake at all, when it drops out of the battle for verisimilitude. It is the melodrama of reality without an other that is actually being played out. The fake isn't fake anymore and it is reality which loses its grounding in the process.

The stakes for this are blatantly played out. The actual object of representation in the work is the transient viewer who finds themselves reflected back in the mirrors facing off with the models. The visitor is isolated and sent back to themselves. They become their own vanishing point in what amounts to something like a Zen joke. If this wasn't enough, the plurality of vanishing points which the work creates decentres the subject, denying it a fixed position or a reliable pose.

Most of the exhibit is a void of white, painted in a way so that all of the edges show there too. Like in many of Douglas' other works, where the exhibit is a momentary thing, one which tends to decompose in situ, the same dynamic is at play in this exhibit – a kind of flunking museum exhibit for a fictional world. This time, however, the guest is the one who is exhibited and decomposed by the situation she has created.

Circa
Lalie Douglas

Christophe Jivraj: 1,5-1,5 at Skol

2010-03-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

This exhibit is part of an ongoing project by Christophe Jivarj. The current installment of the broader project focuses on images which are too suggestive to be documentary photographs but suggest something which does not easily co-habitate with common notions of the erotic. These are photographs of the partially clad physically handicapped people he works with.

The body is disabled in the image, but this is not because it is an image of a disabled body. As far as photography is concerned, the idea of a disabled body in the medical sense doesn't really mean anything. You can't photograph a medically disabled body any more than an able one because they do not exist on that plane. Such a naive representation would be an absurdity. This issue is played out in a different way by destabilizing two of the most generic genres in photography. On the one hand, there is the social realist portrait. The compassionate voyeur, a la Walker Evans, (or as the notes indicate, Jivraj pays tribute to Shelby Lee Adams) who stalks their way into the private lives of people to capture their souls. On the other hand, there is the pin up or centerfold. The anonymous voyeur who gazes for a glimmer of the soul to catch a cheap thrill. These two things collide in the photos and both are disabled in the process. The photos do not manage to fetishize either the soul or the body. This is not to say that the work is not sincere or that it is in any sense mocking. Far from it. But, whether intentional or not, the implosion of these two tendencies when they come in contact like this manages to significantly alter the figure.

The photos overtly use all of the pretenses of these genres, most notably in their performative lack of pretense which is rendered all the more self-conscious by the way in which the models are posed. Placed in the most standard of erotic poses, they stare into the camera and disfigure the pose by failing to achieve the appropriate stereotype. Additionally, the figure is rendered in a kind of void which, though it uses the details precious to porn and to documentary, does so in a way which is essentially negative. The foreground of the images is always blurred, suggesting a kind of lurch into intimacy which is immediately displaced by the strong focus of the rest of the image. The body is centred in negative space and its centrality renders the banal details of life into something with even less life than a cheaply painted backdrop. The divorce between their figure and the world they inhabit renders the surface of the image excited, and this excitation is only increased by the fact that it jars so much with the banality of that world. The discovery of such a point seemed to be a guiding factor in how the series of works were named.

The numbers (in the title) correspond to a non-verbal form of communication that several of the models use. As they have a limited vocabulary they have no words for beauty, sex, sexuality, nude, nudity, etc. The only word that the models liked for the title was ‘body’ which corresponds as ’1,5-1,5’.- Pablo Rodriguez

The gesture of these figure, their desire manifested as something which escapes the established code of the generic sexual figure, is what gives the work its strength. It's also why there is so little too distract from this moment. However, such a moment is not allowed to be crystallized. Instead, it continues to function by resonating across the series of images. The figure does not speak its desire. It's debatable whether it even communicates it so much as makes it palpable.

Skol

2010-02-19T05:51:00.000-08:00

Department of Eagles video for the single "No One Does It Like You."
Directed by, Patrick Daughters and Marcel Dzama.

Marcel Dzama – Of Many Turns at MACM

2010-02-18T20:23:00.000-08:00

Winnipeger Marcel Dzama has emerged as one of Canada's major artists in recent years. In spite of his fashionability in New York hipster circles, there's something almost embarrassingly Canadian (ie. repressed, geeky, passively spiteful) about his work. Much of the exhibit was culled from shows he did at David Zwirner in New York in recent years. It is spread out over three large rooms. One was dark, delicately lit dioramas and the other two were typically white rooms whose exhibits were largely comprised of drawings, paintings and a few sculptures and combines.

His obsessions and their continual permutations were cleanly spread out, though their organization was somewhat elliptical. Although the introductory room of dioramas firmly anchored the work in the history of art from the first moment, the rest of the exhibition drifted rather aimlessly. This may have been deliberate. For while Dzama clearly plays on the history of art, one of the other major things at play seems to be the dismantling of history through art.

Appropriately, the first thing one encountered when entering the exhibit was his homage to another Marcel, Duchamp's infamous Étant Donnés. Whereas Duchamp effectively did away with narrative, providing an instant which was impenetrable but taunted the viewer with the idea of penetration (a splayed vagina), Dzama expands it to create a narrative event, but one which is nonsensical and mocking. Although it suggests logic (the phallus) it degrades the idea with fairy tale motifs and, while retaining an intense eroticism akin to Duchamp's in some respects, it extends the ironic distance. They are both childish images, that is, images from the impenetrable mind of the child, the mind that sees only images and glides upon the surface. While Duchamp's achieved a secretive innocence and retained it, Dzama's couldn't be further from it. He hides things in a different way, one which is also playful, but without the violence which the earlier Marcel's work entails. Dzama's work is a fantasy about innocence.

Innocence can never be known better than when it is in the context of violence. The issue of victims doesn't come up in this. There is nothing less innocent than the idea of a victim. For this reason, the violence which circulates through Dzama's work never labors long under meaning. It seems to taunt the viewer to look for meaning but shirks any accumulation of it. It's a luxurious violence, one from which you cannot salvage a lesson or a readily stored value. The paintings pay delicate tribute to the children's books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the early illustrations of the Indian campaigns. The violence which saturates his work is that of a mock history, as many of the titles found in his works serves to indicate. Atrocities of colonialism are flirted with everywhere, particularly in his drawings, whether this is played out between human figures or between humans and animal hybrids.

This may be what is most striking about the work – its thoroughly amoral and ahistorical recycling of history. In this, he is akin to, and suggestively indebted to, the work of Outsider artist Henry Darger. Darger's complicated drawings made through tracings and collages of exactly the kind of works which Dzama borrows from, also weave their way through the goriest aspects of history and attempt to come to them with the eyes of a child. But unlike the profoundly, if rather esoterically, Catholic Darger, Dzama's works don't betray much religious feeling. Nonetheless, his dioramas in particular, continually play on the motifs of devotional art while apparently skewering any kind of spiritual ideal. Instead, they play up the artifice and the materiality of their form.

The material quality of Dzama's work is remarkable because it brings something about art practice to the front. When artists appropriated Outsider art and handicrafts at the turn of the last century, it was cloying, and largely experienced as cloying by the public and critics. Now, it has become almost cute and this cuteness makes the violence in the work more palatable. Much like the muted colours and the lack of gore, once again indicating the very surface focused kind of violence he concentrates on, it's a carefully orchestrated form of aggression, almost a passive-aggressive one. Indeed, the futility of this aggression to do anything within the context it exists in is displayed everywhere. This is especially the case in his other homages to Duchamp, his mini-museums, the Boîte-en-valise, that he dedicates to his master. Only, it is now no longer an aggression against museum culture and art history, but a way of winkingly acceding to it; a terrorist rendered as fake folk art for the bewildered.

Dzama at the MACM.
Dzama at David Zwirner.