RMVaughanink

Type Cast 18

2006-05-27T15:49:00.000-04:00

Douglas Coupland baffles me.

Oh, I don’t mean the actual person Douglas Coupland, whom I’ve never met, nor do I mean the assorted works of novelist/artist Douglas Coupland, many of which I’ve read and seen and enjoyed.

What I’m talking about, to be perfectly Coupland-esque, is the brand called Douglas Coupland, the multimedia whirlwind that produces everything from institutional art exhibitions to coffee table books to public parks, and, of course, those zeitgeist-catching novels that kick-started the whole enterprise. And here’s the baffling part - how does such a successful brand garner so little respect in Canada’s (admittedly limited and very cranky) media and arts circles?

Everyone I know (and I travel in terribly smart sets) has read at least one Douglas Coupland novel, but few will admit it. Most curators in my acquaintance would love to get a Douglas Coupland art show booked into their humble spaces, because his name alone packs ‘em in – but they won’t say so publicly, or at least not until the deal is done.

Despite boffo sales (and even the occasional positive, but always begrudgingly so, review), Douglas Coupland has never won a large Canadian literary prize, not even for his more mature and less snarky novels, such as Hey Nostradamus!(about a school shooting) or Miss Wyoming (a sexy update of Joan Didion’s classic Play It As It Lays) - novels that have not only far outsold most of the Big Important Books we give prizes to, but also novels which actually attempted to speak of the times we live in, as opposed to, say, 19th century Nova Scotia or the bomb-scarred fields of the First World War. What gives?

This is where Coupland’s transition to a brand comes in. Douglas Coupland the artist has been so successful that his individual works are no longer perceived as singular creations within an artist’s history, but as indistinguishable and interchangeable products in a branded line. A new Coupland novel (or art exhibit, but I’ll leave that problem to an art critic) is rarely assessed on its own merits, as a stand-alone cultural object, but as part of the designated output of a kind of one man corporation – as if he were simply making the latest variations on a sneaker or a ball cap.

Granted, a novelist will return to similar themes over his or her career, and writers do develop a recognizable style, but when one reads assessments by critics of Coupland’s novels today one gets the sense that the reviewer has not read a Coupland novel since the publication of Generation X, Coupland’s first and career-defining novel (and a book that, because it became so closely identified with, and vilified by, the post-Boomer generation, arguably started the whole Coupland brand problem).

Never mind that over the years Coupland has matured into a first rate novelist and observer of the contemporary scene - our Tom Wolfe, minus the Southern-fried misanthropy – some people will not allow Coupland’s reputation to grow with his writing.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Coupland is Canadian and Canadians mistrust success stories. In our studied, anti-populist literary culture, anybody who sells that many books must be a fraud, a low-brow huckster. Furthermore, Coupland has committed a cardinal sin in English Canadian arts – he’s become good at more than one thing.

English Canadian arts circles consider it uppity and crass when artists stray from their humble clay-throwing pits and dare to write poetry, or - gods of tenure forbid! - throw the whole notion of “mastery” and monkish devotion to one discipline into question. No wonder Coupland lives in cheery Vancouver, where the worst thing that can happen is a shop clerk might neglect to wish you, like, a super spiritual day.

Even the characters in Coupland’s latest novel, jPod, get in on the bashing. “Oh, God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel”, says one character in the novel’s opening chapter. “That asshole.”, says another. “Who does he think he is?”

Who indeed? Might I suggest he is, in fact, the most important novelist of his generation?

Coupland is not a master stylist, nor is he overly concerned with the poetics of prose. His stories are often meandering, mirroring the lost, disaffected urbanites he portrays, and he does sometimes appear to be reaching for large messages that his fiction can’t quite carry (there’s that grudging tone I mentioned earlier).

But what separates Coupland from the majority of Canadian fiction writers, and makes his work so important, is his keen desire to experiment with how popular fiction is constructed, even how it looks on the page. Coupland bucks against realist, linear narratives - the dominant and domineering mode of Canadian fiction - and yet he still manages to reach huge audiences. Naturally, this drives the lit establishment insane with jealous rage.

But those of us who want Canadian fiction to become as adventurous as Canadian art or film owe Coupland a debt for blowing the dust off our literary mantelpiece, because Coupland is a great popularizer of experimental fiction. He’s so good at selling non-traditional, art-damaged novels to audiences raised on the plain speaking of Morley Callaghan and Margaret Laurence that there is now a vast (and potentially reachable) audience of experimental fiction readers – i.e. his readers - who otherwise don’t know Robbe-Grillet from Julia Roberts.

To wit, jPod is classic Coupland.

The novel’s multiple narratives fold in on themselves in loopy tangles. Drug and technology-addicted players slide in and out of focus like targets in a video game. The story, such as it is, revolves around the dead end lives of a pack of youngish people working for a soulless game design company – people driven to self destruction by the circular, snake-eating-its-own-tail knowledge that their creativity is directly contributing to the demise of their own culture. The novel is repeatedly interrupted by long chains of numbers and computer code, Chinese script, anagrams and dingbats, nonsensical Asian-recast English, and inane chat room conversations. There’s even a Douglas Coupland character, who turns out to be a malevolent bastard high on his own fame and money. The Birth House this ain’t.

Decades from now, students will read Coupland’s novels to learn about millennial culture and its anxieties the way students today read Dickens to better understand the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. Children will sit at Coupland’s knee, wiping their surgically altered noses with recycled pages of Giller winners, fully amazed by stories of the good old days of laptops and ecstasy, wi-fi and affordable west coast housing - tales from the last good years before everything went to hell.

Type Cast 19

2006-05-20T15:50:00.000-04:00

Every winter, tens of thousands of Canadians pack their carry-on bags with shorts and tee-shirts, saunter down the airless aisles of winged buses, cram their ample, down-vested bodies into seats designed for small children and happily nibble desiccated peanuts until they arrive in beautiful, tropical Cuba.

The sun instantly scorches their vitamin D deprived bodies a cheery pink, smiling servers greet them with fruity rum milkshakes and beach towels, and, for one heavenly week, they do nothing but eat, drink, cultivate melanomas, watch the locals replicate, (with those charming accents!), outdated American pop hits, and forget the name of their chamber maid.

What few of them consider, or even look for, is the other Cuba, the real Cuba - an impoverished island state run by one of the world’s nastiest authoritarian regimes. They don’t witness the regular fuel and medicine shortages, the fetid prisons, the debilitating culture of fear and suspicion, the lack of basic protections from arbitrary government bullying, or, less dramatic but no less worrisome, the daily scrounge for food and clothing. But then, what kind of holiday would that make?

If future visitors to Cuba took along a copy of Jose’ Latour’s ripping good crime caper Havana Best Friends (hidden, of course, in their checked luggage, as Latour’s books are banned in the socialist paradise), they might at least read about the Cuba tourists rarely see, even if they don’t particularly want to visit the mangy streets Latour so vividly describes. Or, they could read it simply because it’s a wildly entertaining, plot-driven page turner that’s as difficult to put down as a cool coconut filled with mango daiquiri.

A Cuban take on the never-fails Maltese Falcon formula – characters discover a fantastic, storied treasure, then many more shady and strange characters turn up and proceed to cheat, lie, and kill to get the treasure – Havana Best Friends (McClelland & Stewart, $22.99) is so jam-packed with crosses, double crosses and back-flipping, sideways reach-around betrayals that it would take a mathematician to sort out the intricacies of the plot. Let’s put it this way: you literally don’t know what to expect from page to page, and that’s what makes the book so entertaining. Readers won’t get lost – Latour is too skilled a writer to let his plot run away from him – but the attentive page hound will be gleefully surprised by the many ways Latour finds to convey baser instincts at work.

I loved this book. Latour combines the cynical, spare and cutting style of Raymond Chandler with P.D. James’s keen interest in human weakness and the psychological roots of crime. Plus, the book is a kind of Rough Guide to the difficulties of life in Cuba for actual Cubans, especially those who scratch out a living in Havana’s cramped, crumbling warren of aging, state-managed apartment blocks. As a crime writer, Latour works the classic angles (because the classic angles still work), but as a novelist with an eye for social realism, Latour reminds me of the great Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who brought to life the rough streets of Cairo, the alleys and markets teeming with hookahs, hookers and honking cars, by presenting what he saw as plain fact, without editorializing or preaching. And, like Mahfouz, Latour has had plenty of visits from pesky state censors.

Meeting up last week with Latour, I expected to find myself in the company of a serious, burdened man – Latour is, after all, an exile. Instead, I spent a chatty half hour with an energetic, compact fireplug of a man who not only loves to talk about his work, but loves to talk, period. Sulky, slouchy Canadian authors please take note!

Although I tried not to turn the interview into a rehash of Latour’s troubles in his native land, because one supposes he’d rather talk about his work than his political misadventures, Latour was anxious from the start to explain that all the deprivations endured by his characters are based entirely on fact. And that’s also why he now lives in Canada.

“I wrote five books in Spanish, but then I had a problem in Cuba and knew I wasn’t going to be published anymore,” Latour begins, putting it mildly. “Now I have written two books in English. It was extremely difficult at first. It took me three years to write my first book in English.”

A “problem”? Does he care to elaborate?

“Oh, sure! I had several reasons to leave Cuba. For one, I was totally sidelined as a person. In 1994 I wrote a novel called The Fool, based on a corruption scandal that happened in the Cuban military in 1989. Everybody knew that this corruption was going on, so I wrote a fictional book about the problem. And this book was considered counter-revolutionary, even though everybody knew about the situation, and when I protested that the book was based on facts, the authorities said that this bad chapter in our history shouldn’t be used as a source of inspiration for artists. I stood my ground, and that was that.”

“To be sidelined can mean anything from being sent to jail, which happens to journalists and activists, to having your career stopped. If you’re a writer, your books won’t be published, if you’re a painter, your work won’t be exhibited. Nobody will learn that you exist. Cuba is an extremely political society in which obedience is indispensable to achieve results, in any field. If you question the government, you can’t work. It got to the point where I was being followed and visited by officers of the Ministry of the Interior, who wanted me to co-operate with them in certain ways – give information about other artists – and when I said no, they said I would suffer the consequences. And so would my children. So my family and I left.”

Given the climate of intimidation Latour worked under in Cuba, it seems almost natural, even convenient, that he has chosen to write about crime, to create novelistic worlds where characters live clandestine lives marked by anxiety and mistrust.

“I believe in what I call factual fiction. I think that the writer has a responsibility to try to be factual, to have the details correct. And I have always been interested in power, in how power shapes lives and what people will do to get it. So, the crime novel is a good place to explore this.”

“Remember, when I was young I was a revolutionary too. I know the real stories. So, nothing I do in my books is accidental.”

Type Cast 17

2006-05-13T15:49:00.000-04:00

I was raised in a family overshadowed by secrets. At 41, there are still huge chunks of my parents’ history I know nothing about, and now that my father is gone and my mother has become the merriest widow in New Brunswick after Mrs. McCain, I’m unlikely to uncover any more useful material.

This is not an unusual predicament for children born to pre-Me Generation, pre-talk show parents. My parents’ generation believes that talking about the past, especially any nasty or shameful events buried in that past, only causes hurt feelings, useless drama or worse. I still battle an inherited superstition that says if you talk about bad things, bad things will happen. In my family, silence isn’t a golden treasure, it’s insurance.

Reading Bernice Eisenstein’s gripping memoir-cum-comic book I Was A Child of Holocaust Survivors (McClelland & Stewart, $32.99), I was surprised to find myself nodding with recognition at Eisenstein’s depiction of her own haunted family and its attempts to shield her young mind from the horrors of the Shoah.

Now, let me be clear: I am not Jewish and do not pretend to understand the Jewish diasporic experience. Furthermore, and far more important, in no way would I ever compare my family’s particular turmoil (juicy as it might be) to the unimaginable suffering and unique evil of the Holocaust. Nobody in my family was ever hauled off and murdered by fascists, so of course whatever commonality I or any other non-survivor reader might feel with Eisenstein’s story must be understood to be, at best, a kind of thematic familiarity, a mere glimmer of understanding – but it’s a damned powerful light.

As Eisenstein’s book unfolds, we learn about everything from the daily domestic rituals practiced by her mother and extended family, to the intricacies of kosher cooking, to her aunt’s love of singing Yiddish songs and on to her own life-long affair with books and movies – and all of this seemingly mundane material, from the bread baking to the bat mitzvahs, the fodder of a hundred such family memoirs, is occluded and darkened by the ever-present shadows of her parent’s terrible experiences during WWII.

The Holocaust is not merely a bad memory, Eisenstein shows us, it is her family’s permanent, default reference point for everything that followed. It’s as if Eisenstein’s parents began life in Technicolor and were abruptly, malevolently forced to forever after live in black and white. Eisenstein’s keenly observed (and gorgeously illustrated) depiction of a family burdened by too many unspoken fears, of a house weighted with remorse and unresolved (indeed, impossible to resolve) traumas, will speak to anyone who has ever grown up in a home papered with secrets and whispers.

In one telling chapter entitled “The Group”, Eisenstein recounts how her parents created a separate social world comprised entirely of fellow survivors, and how, even in the most innocuous social moments, that group always preserved “an air of a reunion being held. They adhered one to the other with the kind of bond that would be hard to duplicate – at times, it felt, even with their own children.”

Therein lies the fundamental disconnect that makes Eisenstein’s narrative so compelling. While everything around her constantly refers, in hundreds of big and little ways, to the evils of the concentration camps, she, as a child of survivors but not a survivor herself, can never fully share the experiences that so profoundly shape her world. It’s a blessing and a curse, to be fortunate enough to have escaped her parents’ fate and yet to be continually living with the consequences of that fate – all the while knowing that no matter how much you learn and listen, you will always be an outsider looking in.

How Eisenstein manages to avoid bitterness is well beyond me. As a bit player in my own parents’ dramas, the silent epics of neuroses and disappointment that I sensed (and overheard) as a child but was never given full access to, I still wonder what I have not been told and still resent being expected to tip-toe around the invisible furniture.

But Eisenstein’s memoir makes it very clear that her parents and their friends not only wanted to protect their children (and were willing to accept the psychological risks of that strategy), but, for practicality’s sake, had either to carry on with their lives or give up entirely. In other words, they had to chose between a calculated silence or a waking nightmare. This heroic determination to simply proceed with ordinary life, to live as fully as possible, fills I Was A Child of Holocaust Survivors with luminous moments, with acts of quiet, sensible courage, occasional bouts of melancholy and black humour, and a handful of joyous (but ever-alert) attacks of the sillies.

Eisenstein’s childhood was full of ghosts, but the ghosts never won. “If, over the years,” she writes, “I had a sense of benign parental neglect, eventually I saw it differently. The circumstances of my parents’ lives had taught them to guard their stories … once outside, I would discover my own.”

This sounds like a better solution than any therapist ever offered me: If you can’t get to the bottom of a family secret, go get your own life. Amen to that.

Type Cast 16

2006-05-06T15:48:00.000-04:00

I first met playwright-novelist-essayist-activist-filmmaker-madman Darren O’Donnell over a decade ago at one of Sky Gilbert’s raucous, determinedly theatrical parties (yes, I am a namedropper, but, trust me, the context is important here).

Standing out at one of Gilbert’s parties is no mean feat. On one side of the room you’ve got flamboyant sex workers, on the other side gorgeous trannies in festive array, and scattered throughout the house, like bowls of chips and dip, are some of Canada’s loudest actors and artists.

Nevertheless, O’Donnell, who, on the surface at least, looks like an absent minded archivist, caught everyone’s attention with his very serious plans for reviving the (then, and arguably still) moribund Toronto theatre scene. The quickest remedy, he told us, was to blow up Canadian Stage (at the time, a bastion of middle-of-the-road theatre specializing in Broadway and West End imports), preferably during an opening night. We all laughed, of course, until we realized he meant it.

Since then, O’Donnell has written a string of provocative, award-winning plays and one acclaimed novel, acted and toured in many international productions (his own and others), and continued to work in small Canadian films – in other words, he’s now a bona fide part of the very establishment he once considered obliterating.

And yet, he remains apart. For all his success, he’ll never be an Albert Schultz or a Sarah Polly, or even the next Michael Healey; primarily because O’Donnell remains committed to the kinds of activist causes most people, those who stick out their lean, beginners’ years in the arts, give up by their mid-30s, when the real money starts rolling in. At the tenderized age of 40, Darren O’Donnell still wants to change the world.

And, he’s got a plan. O’Donnell’s eye-opening new book, Social Acupuncture (Coach House Books, $17.95), began as a straight forward printing of his hit play A Suicide-Site Guide to the City - itself a rambling treatise about everything from 9/11 to dream therapy to the inherent artificiality of theatre - but grew into a collection of related essays and a how-to on the re-invigoration of the arts via “social engagement”.

O’Donnell’s core argument, that art must save itself from becoming an irrelevant academic pursuit by finding new ways to connect with larger issues and social justice concerns, stems from a puzzling paradox he discovered while doing research on the rise of the so-called “creative class”. Since the late 1990s, urban planners and civic revitalization experts have argued that cities need a healthy amount of “creatives” to fully bloom, and that artists, designers, writers, etc create an urban climate conducive to economic and social well being.

Why then, O’Donnell wonders, are artists completely left out of any real political loops? If we’re so valuable, why aren’t we more powerful?

As he notes in his essay “My Life is a Conference”, “making everyday life creative … has played directly into capital’s slippery ability to sweep things up and put them to work. The city becomes a place of constant culture, where the cultural workers are only barely compensated for their labour … in the civic-boosterism talk of the creative city, the grateful participation of the artist is taken for granted … Artistic production for the sake of one’s own career is initially exciting, until one begins to understand that all this work tends to benefit others who are higher up on the economic scale.”

Higher up than O’Donnell, for sure. In the kitchen of his ramshackle, book-strewn apartment at Lansdowne and College, O’Donnell puts his frustrations on the table.

“If I’m this great maker of cities, I want in on the decision making. I want in on the ground level - in on discussions about immigration, transit, public spaces, urban growth, etc. Otherwise, I’m just decoration for the tourists.”

Social Acupuncture takes its name from O’Donnell’s belief that, like medicinal acupuncture, art can create “small interventions at key junctures (that will) affect larger (social) organs.” Because, he argues, artists are unlikely ever to be let into the real spheres of power, artists interested in social change must reconfigure their work to act as a kind of “healing needle” on the public body. As he puts it during our conversation, it’s not enough anymore to be worried about, for instance, beached whales and then create a painting of a beached whale or make a play about a whale who loses her way. Simply representing a problem no longer solves the problem, if it ever did. What one must do is make art with the people who coax the whales back into the water.

“Artists,” O’Donnell explains in his usual feverish pitch, “have gone from mirrors of society to hammers smashing society to nothing at all. We’ve become irrelevant, and it’s mostly our fault. A small way to re-start the process of making art socially engaged is to redefine what is art. I’m not talking about creating more “community art” initiatives, because those are always regarded as second class, or at best kind of cute – you know, painting murals with kids in gangs, that sort of thing – but about creating a kind of art that is just as rigorous as “serious art” but is also fully engaged socially.”

And how do you do that?

“By using the problem you’re addressing in the art work. Identify who benefits from an inequality and who holds the power, then find a creative way to call attention to that imbalance and correct it – even if you only fix the problem for an hour.”

This all sounds good, but the sceptic in me wonders how this formula differs from the misguided, traditional liberal view of art as a vehicle for social and moral improvement?

“I’m not advocating do-goodery, because do-goodery is ultimately charity, and charity replicates and re-articulates power imbalances. I want to find out instead if there are ways to engage communities and materials in a way that’s useful for them and interesting to me. If I do something that benefits us both, I’m not replacing one power imbalance with another. It’s not about artists making sacrifices for the greater good, it’s about artists making work that satisfies them too.”

“What I’m advocating is an aesthetic of and for civic engagement, something that people might not readily, at first, be even able to identify as art – socially engaged art that is just as rigorous, considered and well-crafted as abstracted, personal art.”

I conclude our talk by reminding O’Donnell of his blow-‘em-up years, and suggest that maybe he’s a more considered and well-crafted piece of work himself these days. He scoffs, sits back, and shrugs.

“I don’t fool myself that I have any means to effect anything. What I’m advocating here is a very nascent practice, an exploration. But even if it fails, at least I’ve tried to do something more than provide a distraction. I mean, I hope I have.”

Type Cast 15

2006-04-29T15:48:00.000-04:00

When interviewing Emily Schultz, it’s hard not to compare Tammy Lane, the befuddled hero of Schultz’s gorgeous debut novel Joyland, to Schultz herself – both author and creation are small, big-eyed creatures, both come from small towns (in Schultz’s case, the hamlet of Wallaceburg, Ontario), and both are prone to moments of deep silence that are either signs of equally deep thought or a paralysing shyness, or both. The major difference, of course, is that Schultz is about 20 years older than her already world wary heroine.

Canadians produce coming-of-age novels at about the same pace and with the same reliability as the French produce mid-life sex romps. Alice Munro wrote one, Mordecai Richler wrote one, W.O. Mitchell’s classic Who Has Seen The Wind is taught in schools (well, public schools at least, and sometimes with the dirty words blacked out), Camilla Gibb got rich and famous from hers, and Derek McCormack’s was made into an acclaimed short film. Even I wrote one, but the less said on that subject the better.

So, I must admit I approached Joyland with mixed feelings. Already familiar with Schultz’s writing from Black Coffee Night, her blunt and darkly hilarious collection of short stories, as well as from her tenures as editor of Broken Pencil magazine, This Magazine, and the Pocket Cannon project (a collection of naughty stories written by famous writers under the cloak of anonymity), I knew that Joyland would be well written, but … another puberty novel?

Happily, Joyland is far from “another” anything. Set in a fictional small Ontario town in the early 1980s, the novel follows the lost wanderings of tween aged Tammy and her very confused brother Chris, a video game junky. When the titular video arcade Joyland closes down, Chris spends his summer tumbling, like a player caught in an endless video game loop, from one discomforting, pre-sexual adventure to the next. Tammy watches her brother and begins to understand that the world she inhabits is far more complex, and menacing, than she has ever understood – and it is Tammy’s laser beam observations that move the narrative.

Unlike many similar heroes, however, Tammy is not a precocious, all-seeing wise child. Schultz gives Tammy exactly the right amount of brain power for her age, and Joyland revels in the half-understood world Tammy witnesses. Because I hate coming-of-age novels wherein the central kid is smarter than the reader and sounds more like Woody Allen talking to his shrink than an actual child, I loved Joyland. Tammy Lane is the most convincing child protagonist I’ve encountered in years – a cross between Lynda Barry’s innocent smart ass Marlys and Judy Blume’s truth-seeking missile Margaret. Schultz leaves the editorializing to the reader, letting us fill in the blank spots in Tammy’s knowledge with our own experience.

On a quiet Sunday evening in the dark back corner of the Gladstone Hotel’s Melody Bar, the reluctant interviewee, dressed in an innocuous black cotton dress (the better to hide with), admits she wrote Joyland in an understated style she calls “impressionistic”.

“I want to get the feel of things, not explain them. I want to write down what it feels like to do simple things, like put a cup on a table or open the microwave door, and then see if I can make that sensation match the moment in the story. I’m more like a telegrapher, and that style, that pixelization, works with the theme of videogames, with the way early videogames looked, like assembled fragments and bits of colour.”

“It’s also how the kids in the book relate to the world, from videogames – they break everything down into small moments, to better understand their world, because the bigger view is too complicated. “

“Also”, Schultz adds with a shy shrug, “I’m kind of a failed poet, so I pay attention to the way words sound next to each other, in really short sections.”

As we talk, I try to resist the temptation to ask the cheesiest question in the book – how much is Joyland an autobiography? But the novel is so achingly accurate in its depiction of early pubescence, I finally crack and let my inner hack run free. Schultz is saintly in her patience.

“I chose to make Tammy that age, 11 and a half, because at that age you are living between childhood and early adulthood. Tammy is not me, but I did go back and read my diaries from that age, and what surprised me was how in a matter of months my depth of knowledge changed. The world just sort of hits you at some point, and you have to adapt. And I was a videogame kid, part of the first generation of videogame players, but I didn’t hang out at the arcades – that was boy territory.”

“I didn’t think I was trying to write another “Canadian family book”, but I guess I did, because Joyland is so much a book about place, which is very Canadian, and about wanting to escape from a small place, which is archetypically Canadian. So, I’m fine with the label now.”

Schultz has become something of a media event in the last while – a major newspaper labelled her one of the “Best Writers under 30”, or some such thing, a few years back – but Schultz isn’t having any of that fluff. Before I even complete my question to her about the hazards of peaking young, of being called a best-of anything while one is still in one’s basement apartment years, Schultz cuts me off with her first uninhibited laugh of the night.

“I was never called Best, I was called Prominent – you know, like a nose. Let’s just say I’ve been lucky. My goals with this book were pretty simple. First, I wanted to see if I could actually do it, actually write 300 pages of text. After that, I wanted to see if the 300 pages were worth reading. And after that, I tried to give them an impact, make them hang together. Anything else will be more good luck.”

If Joyland gets the kind of attention it deserves, maybe Schultz might, just might relax enough to give herself a tentative (but not too hard!) pat on the back.

Type Cast 14

2006-04-22T15:48:00.000-04:00

Everything I never needed to know as a kid I learned from books. And then some.

Although neither of my parents pursued a post-secondary education, they hardly let that stop them when it came to dishing out dire warnings about what happened to people who didn’t take up reading. As my mother succinctly put it, “If you don’t read, you end up on the welfare”. This was no idle threat – “the welfare”, a fate somewhere on the calamity scale between prison and “the mental”, was a very real possibility in rural New Brunswick. I went to school with kids who clearly disliked to read, and to bathe, and my parents convinced me that the two disinclinations were interrelated.

By the time I reached reading age, my older brother had already amassed a well-mangled collection of Golden Books and first readers. The Golden Books were singularly unremarkable, and deserved all the punishment he gave them. Fluffy bunnies got lost in the woods (in the middle of the afternoon, the idiots) while plucky puppies chased butterflies down dark, hollow logs. All that frolicking was supposed to be very exciting, but I lived next to the Atlantic ocean - a place where people regularly got into real trouble, usually while drunk.

The first readers were no better. With titles like Helicopters and Gingerbread and Sunflowers and Jellyfish, they were about as titillating as the local United Church’s Dimes For Delhi campaign. I craved books that would take me away from my charm and adventure-starved surroundings.

Luckily, my father spent part of his 1930s childhood in New York City, and he kept a cache of Little Big Books from that era stashed in his desk drawer. The desk drawer was a forbidden zone, so naturally I riffled through it at least once a week.

Little Big Books were compact picture books, about the size of a coffee mug (or a child’s hand), laid out like photo-novellas. On one side of each left/right spread was a line drawing depicting the action described in print on the other side. So, if you didn’t know what the word “keelhauled” meant, you just looked at the picture of the poor pirate being dragged across the bottom of the ship. The drawings were lurid and curvy, in the gleefully horny way many cultural products from that morally lax, impoverished decade were, and never failed to present both male and female protagonists in the most flattering, clinging clothes. Ah, innocence.

Most of the titles in my father’s Big Little Books collection were print versions of popular films and radio shows from the time (such as Buck Rogers and Little Orphan Annie), and were therefore alien to me, but the successful format was adopted by other publishers who focused on classics. Tarzan, Great Expectations, and Moby Dick all got the pictorial treatment, to much lasting effect, but the book that swallowed me was Dracula – a novel I still adore today.

The editors smartly cut out much of Stoker’s original text, especially all of Professor Van Helsing’s boring God-mongering and, for obvious reasons, Dr. Seward’s drug addiction and Lucy Westenra’s sluttiness, thus paring the tale down to one of invader vs. protectors, evil outsider against a family – a compelling narrative when one’s entire existence revolves around the home and the primal fear of losing one’s family is so keen.

Count Dracula was every boogeyman rolled into one red-eyed monster, a creature without remorse or depth. Like a shark, he existed only to kill. I was entranced by this display of undiluted malevolence. All the books and films produced at the time for children paled in comparison. The villains were only mildly evil, and more often just misunderstood, and the heroes were more bumbling than valiant. I grew up in the age of the anti-hero, the ethically grey and forgiving 70s. As an adult, I’m grateful for this useful fuzziness, but as a child I wanted, as all children do, absolutes and rules.

The more I read and re-read Dracula, the more the pictures and the words blended together. My experience of the book became cinematic, literally a moving picture show. And, no matter how often I read the story, I experienced the same overwhelming sense of dread as the narrative built to a climax. I would hypnotize myself with terror, becoming at times Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, or Mina Harker. I could feel the Count at my back, his fangs and claws dripping gore down my neck. I was a melodramatic kid, to say the least.

At some point Dracula was taken away from me. The official reason was that the book was a valuable collectable - but even parents without post-secondary education know a nut case in the making when they see one. To my eternal shame, I tried to recapture the magic and the fright by reading all of Baum’s Oz books. But Dorothy Gale is no Lucy Westenra, and talking trees just aren’t much of a scare once you’ve been held down in the sand and had a half-dead dogfish squished over your face.

After the Oz books, I spent five years wallowing in superhero comics, and then went on to read Stephen King’s anxiety-making masterpieces The Stand and The Shining, followed soon after by Harold Robbin’s The Lonely Lady, during which I experienced all new kinds of horrors.

I feel sorry for child readers today – their books are so timid and cheerful. Apart from the notable exception of the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman - a genius fantasist Christopher Hitchens has rightly called “the most dangerous author in Britain” - there’s not much out there designed to instil terrified wonder in a young mind.

Dread is a useful emotion, a feeling that should be learned, and mastered, at an early age. Like a vaccine, fictional dread inoculates you against the inevitable anxieties to come. Even in my most worried adult moments, I’ve never been as certain of my impending demise as I was sitting behind the couch with Dracula in my chubby hands and my mother’s rosary wound around my neck.

Type Cast 13

2006-04-15T15:47:00.000-04:00

Moral panics over art are few and far between in the post-modern era, and aesthetic panics are non-existent. It’s a blessing and a curse, this complacency.

Of course, a work of art will still upset people and politicians – the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” exhibition earned the ire of Mayor Giuliani in 1999, and, just this winter, a handful of cartoons depicting the Prophet sparked violent clashes around the world – but such reactions are prompted by the content of the works, not their artistic value. Nobody complained that the cartoons of the Prophet were poorly drawn.

A new book by the London-based novelist and historian Ross King, a native of Saskatchewan, looks back at a time when the way a work of art was actually constructed, how it looked, caused social eruptions and even death. His fascinating history of the early years of the Impressionist movement, The Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism, is not only a study of the rise of this now-beloved painting genre, but is also a history of a time when words like “ugly” and “repellent” were used to describe art without relativistic apologies.

The art world is full of people who were widely ridiculed before they became icons – the ravishes to raves story is a cliché. But it’s hard to imagine that paintings that now sell for tens of millions of dollars were once described, as in this 1873 review of an exhibit by Monet, Degas, Pissarro and Cezanne, as “debaucheries … nauseating and revolting”. And that’s just the mild stuff. Cezanne was accused being “no more than a kind of madman, painting while suffering from delirium tremens.” Manet’s work was compared to the work of lunatics in an asylum, and was generally considered ignoble and brutal. Wags in periodicals passed around the story that the new painters were all opium addicts and that they achieved their effects by loading their pistols with tubes of paint and firing the wet bullets at the canvas.

King’s book is peppered with such juicy jibes and misjudgements, but the book never bogs down with he said/he said (all the key players were men). Fast paced and wickedly detailed, King’s figurative and literal blow-by-blow of the scandals, intrigues, and outcries that followed his heroes reads more like a thriller than a history. The emotional core of the book is the compelling Mozart vs. Salieri-like narrative played out between the great Manet and one Ernest Meissonier, a forgotten painter who, in his time, was the toast of Europe. While Manet struggled to find acceptance, Meissonier glided through life, painting one precise but lifeless historical painting after the next.

As if all this drama were not enough, King layers his tale with a precise and politically charged history of Napoleon III’s oppressive Second Empire. While the French were busy modernizing and experimenting with new aesthetic ideals, they did so under the constant and murderous threat of political and legal censure. The art world of the day was a pale mirror of the truly treacherous political climate. Thus, The Judgement of Paris makes a strong case for the argument that Impressionism, like many great experiments, thrived not in spite of the dictatorial government of the day but because of it. Put simply, the stakes are higher for artists when they can go to prison for making unpopular art.

What can be learned from King’s recounting of this pivotal moment in Western art? As someone who makes and writes about art, I must admit that my first impulse after reading this book was to hide under the bed. What things have I written about art and artists that I now regret, or am at least willing to reconsider? Am I going to turn up in one of these books someday, as yet another idiot who didn’t know genius when it bit him on the bum? Critics, be warned.

My own neuroses aside, King’s book is an excellent study in how art can be both damaged and nourished by restrictions. While no-one wants to end up like poor Jules Holtzapffel - a painter who, upon learning that he had been rejected from the 1866 Salon (a government-sponsored exhibition of new art), promptly wrote “I have no talent … I must die”, and shot himself in the head – it is likely that had the Impressionists been fully embraced by the art establishment of the time, they would have disappeared or been co-opted by power. It was only their thwarted conviction that they belonged inside the elite club of artists that drove them to eventually become an elite club of artists (those that survived). Hunger for recognition is a powerful motivator, and nothing motivates artists like an entire social system geared to promote mediocrity and sameness.

Which brings me to the inevitable comparison between the time depicted in The Judgement of Paris and today. Conservative foes of public funding for the arts in this country, and even some decidedly not conservative artists, have been arguing for years that government-funded art leads to art that mimics the aspirations of the government – or, at best, to art that is inoffensive and palatable. I disagree, because I know that bad art gets made no matter who is paying for it.

But reading King’s dramatic account of the turmoil caused by Impressionism, of how people once marched down the boulevards of Paris chanting “Assassins! Assassins!” to decry the narrow-minded decisions of Salon jurors, makes me nostalgic for a time I have never actually experienced – a time when art and culture mattered enough to make people march in the streets.

Type Cast 12

2006-04-08T15:47:00.000-04:00

When the great Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem passed away in late March, at the well-earned age of 84, I was reminded, for the umpteenth time since turning 40, that my youth is gone.

Lem was my favourite author when I was in university. I wrote papers about his work, studied the (very small) handful of literary essays written about him at the time – science fiction, like popular culture in general, was not well regarded in academic circles back then – and scoured used books stores for pulp anthologies that included his short stories. Lem, who was aptly named after Saint Stanislaw, the Polish patron saint of youth, was, and remains, the perfect author for those first university years, the early 20’s, that buoyant time when one is finally away from home and experimenting with new realities and new ways of seeing the world(s).

Obituaries of Lem have predictably focused on the film adaptations of his work, and not without some good cause. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solyaris, a Russian adaptation of Lem’s novel Solaris, is considered a masterpiece. Personally, I feel the film lacks Lem’s devilish sense of humour - but perhaps Russian humour, like German pop music, is an acquired taste. In 2002, Steven Soderbergh attempted to turn Solaris, a baffling and philosophical novel even in its most lucid passages, into a spooky clockwork thriller starring an appropriately confused looking George Clooney. The results were mixed, to be polite.

But to only remember Lem for his success at the movies is to do a great injustice to a writer who was easily as important to world literature as more name-brand speculative writers, such as the Nobel laureates Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marques, or Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. Like Jules Verne a century before him, Lem predicted a future world that was only a generation away from his own. Unlike Verne, however, Lem did not fixate on the mechanics, on fabulous machines and impossible gadgets – Lem’s predictions dealt with the deeper question of how the human psyche would be changed by the abrupt expansion of knowledge. Yes, people do fly around in zippy space ships in Lem’s fiction, but it’s what happens inside the ships, and inside the minds of the passengers, that matters.

Lem’s Tales of Prix The Pilot, a collection of interlocking short stories, invites the reader to journey through vast, empty oceans of space with a practical-minded but prone to depression astronaut named Prix - a kind of Everyman of space travel. Wandering from galaxy to galaxy with no apparent mission, Prix is a Kafkaesque character, a lonely, lost soul forced to navigate a series of looping time warps, dream like fugues, and universes that inexplicably reverse and turn inward.

Prix’s misadventures, charmingly (and deceptively) recounted in spare, story book language, are now read as a kind of primer for the wild, reality-bending theories of quantum physics that followed decades later – especially chaos theory, which attempts to explain random behavior within determined systems and, the current darling of physics studies, string theory, which proposes that reality is multiple and is made up of highly flexible (and thus unpredictable) strings of energy. In other words, Prix is lost because being lost is, paradoxically, a key part of the natural order.

Lem’s masterpiece Solaris has even more immediate implications for contemporary readers. In the novel, a band of space travelers encounter a huge, nebulous entity that could be a planet or a spectacular creature. The passengers soon learn that the ever-churning planet has the ability to instantly alter their reality, to literally make their dreams and nightmares come true. Of course, their competing desires and attempts to sort the real from the manufactured drive the entire crew mad.

Lem’s dream spinning planet/monster is a perfect metaphor for our desire-driven virtual age. Like the sentient blob that hovers below the ship’s crew, the internet sits beside us every day. It too is an unimaginably large ball of information that can, in a click, satisfy every need. People live entire lives in this separate reality, in everything from chat rooms that allow them to create alternate selves to elaborate game worlds populated by millions of fellow gamers. One can now create a whole other life in these virtual spaces, a detailed and emotionally satisfying life limited only by the creator’s imagination.

The inherent warning in Solaris – the tried but true reminder to be careful what you wish for – has never been more important, especially as youth (at least in the priviledged western world) are increasingly opting out of this familiar reality in favour of more pliable, and more exciting virtual realities.

Hopefully, the brief flurry of interest that always follows an artist’s death will grow into a renewed respect for, and study of, Lem’s work. Half a century after he discovered it, we are finally living in Lem’s world – and we’ll need all the help we can get.

Type Cast 11

2006-04-01T15:46:00.000-05:00

Today being April 1st, the real first day of Spring for those of us who can’t tell an equinox from a solstice, I figured I’d do some Spring cleaning and come clean about my less than thorough reading habits.

As someone who writes about books and publishing for a living, and occasionally writes and publishes books that couldn’t provide a living for a cave bound hermit, you’d think I’d be one of those voracious readers, a bespectacled, hump-backed book spelunker who reads everything from great classics to high trash, from Balzac to Bezmozgis to Batman.

The truth is, I have been avoiding the single most popular form of literature to emerge since the invention of food labels, the sure-fire seller that keeps publishers afloat in every land where women are allowed to read. Of course, I’m talking about Chick Lit.

Call me a snob, call me a misogynist, but books about shoe shopping and pillow fights and crying jags in fancy department store tea rooms just don’t hold my attention. And I’m gay, so I at least understand the designer references. And I’m a drag queen, so I even get the makeup tips.

But all these books about chipper young women (many of whom, suspiciously, work in media or publishing) finding love amidst the dark, beery forests of urban sports bars – in between bouts of daydreaming about French neuro-surgeons in Prada slacks and whining about their ass size - strike me as nothing more than updated Nancy Drew serials with husbands as the end goal, not the capture of swarthy thieves, and weddings in Martinique, not malteds with Dad, as Nancy’s reward for good behaviour.

Well, colour me a hep-less schlep. There’s a whole subgenre of Chick Lit out there I knew nothing about until A.H. Varmung’s debut novel Shy Heels landed like a leather bustier on my innocent, tartan slippered feet. It’s called Slut Lit, and Varmung is already its reigning queen.

Originally from Coal Harbour, Nova Scotia, Varmung grew up in a family of earnest United Church ministers but, as she puts it, “I learned real fast”. At the already-tenderized age of 17, Varmung fled to Calgary, where she made a small fortune walking on oilmen’s backs – “the slut’s primer”, she calls it.

When the first oil boom went bust in the 1980s, Varmung packed up her studded sandals and moved to Victoria, where, under the pen name Peggy Bruin-Vole, she wrote a very popular gardening column, “Potting Shed Pickup”, for the Vancouver Sun. However, life among the rhizomes and shade shrubs left her unfilled, and Varmung began an online career as a webcam “exotic manicurist” (“There’s a market for everything”, she reminds me). Things were going nail polish smooth until some snoop at the Sun discovered Varmung’s secret second career and ended her lucrative love affair with muck and mulch.

“After I got sh*t-canned from the Sun, I figured it was slink or swim for me, so I started writing porn. At the time, porn stories in magazines paid really well, but now with blogging everybody’s an artiste erotique , there’s a million Anais Nin wannabees, and the market has totally collapsed. But I had a good thing going for about five years. My specialty was transparent-rain-coats-and-no-underpants. Very big with the British.”

Varmung’s progression from columnist to porn near-star to first time novelist is, according to the woman who lived it, “the logical outcome of a life spent exploring myself,” (and that’s putting it mildly).

Shy Heels is a simple enough story, with a plot line borrowed from Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine – well, mostly not the magazine). Young, fair-haired Lindy MacFarlane leaves her humble, southern Ontario town of Aurora Gulch to become assistant photo editor at New York’s glossy Flaunt magazine. She settles into an apartment with a lesbian ceramics artist, a Caribbean-American legal aide named Hortencia, and Martin, a gay activist with a taste for vinyl short shorts. Hijinks ensue!

Lindy, it turns out, is a calculating minx, and she quickly duvet surfs her way into the publisher’s chair, proving that Sharon Stone was wrong when she famously claimed that one can only screw one’s way to the middle. But when Martin contracts AIDS and Hortencia’s mother dies and the lesbian ceramics artist (who, curiously, never seems to get a name in the novel) loses both thumbs in a tragic public transit incident, Lindy rallies to their sides - providing love, patience and succour, and, most important, opening the warm heart she never knew she had.

It embarrasses me to admit that when the whole gang assembles around Martin’s death bed and the lesbian ceramics artist models a lopsided heart pendant for Martin out of a dried up block of mauve Sculpey, I cried harder than I did when Nancy Drew’s dog was kidnapped by a mysterious, swarthy man in The Case of the Locked Medicine Cabinet.

“Yeah, the ending really gets people,” Varmung admits, “especially after all the raunch and roll, I guess you need a little healing, or at least an anti-fungal. But, you know, I knew from the minute I decided that Martin was originally from Wyoming that he had to go. I mean, those boys are innocence itself, and if I killed off Lindy, well, there goes the sequel.”

“The movie people (Varmung sold the rights to Shy Heels to Reese Witherspoon’s production company before it was even published) are thinking one of the guys from Brokeback Mountain should play Martin. I forget which one dies in that show - the blonde? Well, they’ll work it out.”

Lindy fans won’t have to wait long for the sequel. Guy Heels, wherein Lindy marries a hunky billionaire transvestite, is due in time for the Christmas market.

Type Cast 10

2006-03-25T15:46:00.000-05:00

If, as the saying goes, politics is show business for ugly people (who said that, Sheila Copps?), than fiction writing, in Canada at least, is show business for invisible people.

For the last several months - ever since the fall book sales figures came slouching in - the publishing world has been full of stories, some apocryphal, some verifiable, about the Great Sales Slump of 2005. Fiction, we are told, is moving off the shelves at about the same pace as Nsync re-issues.

Like the alleged Hollywood slump of 2005 (isn’t it heartbreaking to hear people complain about only making 100 million dollars instead of 150 million dollars?), the fiction slump has bred any number of theories, almost all of them from people who do not actually write fiction.

To find out if the sales slump is real or imagined, and, far more fun, to give writers an outlet for their always amusing anxieties, I solicited views from fiction writers (and one editor) from across the country. Not surprisingly, there are lots of opinions and no hard facts. These people aren’t novelists for nothing, and facts are for sports writers.

Jason Anderson, a Toronto arts journalist whose first novel, the very funny entertainment-world satire Showbiz, came out last fall, wonders if any artist should ever expect an audience.

“I have no illusions. Whenever I see those Nobody Buys Novels stories, I’m always amazed that people ever bought novels in the first place, the novel is really commercial. If you’ve written a difficult literary novel, why is it strange that nobody has bought it?”

“For my own book, I was happy to have acquaintances buy it, the ring beyond family and friends. Just because you created something, it’s egotistical to think there’s an audience for whatever you do – you have to constantly create an audience. Sometimes people in the arts in Canada think that they are owed an audience, but I think you should be happy with whatever audience you can find.”

Sally Cooper, the Hamilton-based author of the critically-acclaimed novel Love Object, is wary of all the doom-saying and, like Anderson, flips the question back to the audience.

“Nobody I know who loves fiction has suddenly switched to non-fiction. People like a balance, sure, but lovers of fiction will always buy it and read it. I'm always wary of trends, anyway. Fiction's not going anywhere; neither are its readers.”

Sabine Campbell, Fredericton-based editor of the legendary literary journal The Fiddlehead, and the Montreal novelist Peter Dube, author of Hovering World, both cite economics as a factor in the overall decline in book sales.

“I can say that a) our subscription rates seem to be down a bit this year and b) that our fiction contest isn't drawing as many writers as it used to”, Campbell admits.

“And I know that I'm buying fewer books myself. I tend to lend and borrow among friends and go to the library more often. Books cost so damn much.”

“So am I saying prices are to blame? Not entirely - perhaps the ever increasing number of books is a problem too.”

Dube echoes the supply-demand argument, and questions the marketing strategies employed by Canadian publishers.

“I suspect the problem – as usual – is the business model. Publishers put out more and more books, looking for the next big thing – which makes it hard for any title to stand out. They then stack up their marketing behind a very, very few books compared to what they actually print. And the marketing budgets get allocated on the principle of it being easier to sell more of what is already selling than to sell something new and different – all in the interests of maximizing short term profit in an increasingly competitive arena, versus audience (and author’s career) development.”

“So, if memoirs are selling, flog more of them until they stop selling. People tend to buy books they’ve heard of (especially in a market where unit prices have been raised to the roof in order to offset the cost of all those books printed that didn’t sell). More titles with higher prices, with less attention given to any of them must necessarily equal a tiny handful of books in a handful of genres being the only ones to move.”

See how the Hollywood model is never very far away when one talks about selling cultural products, be they ballet or books? As Dube notes, if one thing sells, publishers will find five more of the same thing – kind of like those Hollywood executives who keep turning old television shows (Bewitched, The Dukes of Hazzard) into stinky movies (ditto), just because Mission: Impossible was a huge hit.

As you read this, I guarantee you some Canadian editor is primping a memoir of drug addiction set in Saskatoon and an ecclesiastical mystery based on Krieghoff’s painting of Montreal’s Notre Dame cathedral.

Warren Dunford, author of a trilogy of hilarious murder mysteries – his latest, The Scene Stealer, is out in paperback - echoes my cynicism, and has a few choice words for the nation’s editors.

“If fiction sales are in a slump, it may be because many of the new Canadian books feel like old Canadian books. Publishers keep putting out subtle domestic dramas and tales of historical angst. Obviously that's led to some very fine literature, but not many people want to step into those dire worlds over and over again.”

“Books have to hold their own as entertainment in today's culture. People want to feel excited about reading a new book, not just dutiful. That means that books need to offer really compelling stories, not only character portraits. Unfortunately, the idea of a 'Canadian page-turner' still feels like an oxymoron."

To end on a more philosophical note, I’ll leave the last word to Vancouver’s Michael V. Smith, author of the award-winning novel Cumberland. Although Smith leads a double life as a notorious drag queen, he’s no Silly Sally when it comes to the bigger picture.

“I think a lot of the decline in fiction has to do with the current political climate. With the war in Iraq, and post-911, I suspect we're a lot more interested in current affairs and politics. People are hungry for facts, and truth. We're not getting much truth nor much analysis in the media. Fiction is often seen as escapist, because it concerns itself with the construction of alternate worlds. “

“Perhaps if there were more books being written like Handmaid's Tale, Canadian books with politics, social commentary, criticism, satire even, rather than domestic dramas of middle class angst, we'd see more fiction flying off the shelves.”

Hear, hear!

Type Cast 9

2006-03-18T09:17:00.000-05:00

I covet new novels by Cape Breton born Lynn Coady with the same fervour that foodies covet aged truffle oils and free range goat pomades, or whatever those nasty little turds of mouldy blue cheese are called. A Lynn Coady novel will instantly transport me back to my ancestral homelands, the old country, the expletive scorched valleys and cod dappled mounds of Atlantic Canada - where people are cheerfully morbid, argumentative for fun, and as unapologetically bilious as, well, icky cobalt goat cheese.

With a handful of wildly entertaining novels and a growing collection of sparkling short stories, Coady has created a body of work that positions her as the anti-Alistair MacLeod. You won’t find any of the familiar stereotypes of Atlantic Canadians in Coady’s books – no stoic, hard bitten natural poets ennobled by grinding poverty, no long suffering seamen’s wives wandering the harbours wrapped in shawls and seaweed, no toothless fiddlers full of gingery wisdom. Coady smartly leaves that nonsense to the lighthouse-haunting romantics.

What you will find in a Coady comedy is the most thunderous cacophony of oddballs, cranks, lunatics, bores and ferocious talkers created since the heyday of Preston Sturges . Critics of Coady’s fiction stumble over themselves trying to unravel her ease with screwball antics, and heartily praise the way she seamlessly blends the mundane pursuits of her hapless characters with madcap pacing that would send Kingsley Amis reeling. Some devotees have even attempted to mine her work for Life Lesson gold (Coady does set all her works within some form of loving family dynamic, albeit one as cracked as a dropped plate), but I suggest the reader look elsewhere for psychological reassurance – Coady’s characters are simply too wily to pin down.

Coady’s new novel, Mean Boy, is a juicy coming of age tale set within the satire worthy halls of a small PEI university. A mix of St. Urbain’s Horseman and Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, with some Montgomery-esque pictorials thrown in for colour, Mean Boy follows the fortunes of aspiring poet Larry Campbell, a working class boy desperate to leave behind his unimpressive beginnings and become a great writer, just like his idol and professor Jim. As Larry grows more and more fond of Jim and increasingly separated from his origins, the Trilby-Svengali relationship turns hilariously sour. Reading Mean Boy is like eating an entire bag of salt and vinegar chips – the most tongue-blistering bits, the searing, sharpest crumbs, wait like jellyfish at the bottom of the bag.

Coady’s great strength is her keen ear for dialogue (which I imagine is pointy and elf like – her ear, that is, although the dialogue is pretty sharp too), and I’ve always wondered if she was one of those writers who lingers in coffee shops and scribbles down found conversations. From the comfort of her Edmonton home – lying is so much easier over the phone – Coady swears she makes it all up.

“No, I don’t take notes. I’m not an eavesdropper, but I am a snooper. I’m not the kind of person who carries around a notebook, but every once in a while … There is some dialogue in Mean Boy that I overheard on a bus from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver. This woman sitting behind me was just going and going, and I had to write it down.”

“Growing up, I was pretty quiet. I learned about people by listening to how they communicated their thoughts. And I grew up in Cape Breton, where everybody is kind of blustery, and the conversation never stops. People talk in Cape Breton almost as if they’re talking for comfort.”

Setting a novel in a university, even if the university is as treacherous as a coal pit, is something of a departure for Coady. Her previous fictions were primarily set in the working world, the world of shifts and lunch pails and taverns. Is she trying to land a tenure track job?

“I think setting this novel in the academic world is kind of a natural progression for me. The place I first encountered people who were not working class people was at university, like a lot of Canadians who come from similar backgrounds as me - and Larry’s progress does somewhat mirror mine, except my coming of age was more internal.”

“What drew me to this setting was that while a university might be located in the middle of nowhere, as are most of the universities where I come from, people come to the campus from all different backgrounds and make it cosmopolitan. I wanted to write about those important but vulnerable first years when you leave your family and meet other people from other classes and places, and realize that you don’t have to be one way for the rest of your life.”

This being Canada, I have to raise the topic of regionalism. Coady and I have both railed, in various venues, about how the literary world in Canada only seems to appreciate Atlantic Canadian fiction that re-affirms non-Atlantic Canadians’ ideas about the area - how the smartest thing to do, from a marketing perspective, is to write a sentimental, sugary tale featuring sad but brave Down East peasantry. And yet, Coady continues to return to the region for her inspiration. Is she crazy or just cantankerous?

“It’s not deliberate, it’s just the place where my imagination sets itself, whether I want it to or not, my psychic ground zero. But the longer I’ve been away from home, the more I feel I’m moving away from home as a topic. I feel that maybe Mean Boy is my farewell to the region.”

“You know, there probably is an expectation that my books be about the Maritimes, but the people who sell my books would probably be happy if the fiction moved away from there, because it might be perceived as limiting. I also suspect I’d do really well if I was to write something very lush and gothic about Maritime life, something very melodramatic and turgid, which I don’t want to do, needless to say. I react against that kind of thing - strongly.”

Type Cast 8

2006-03-11T09:15:00.000-05:00

Counter to popular opinion, you can indeed tell a book by its cover – in fact, it’s really the best way to make decisions about books. I always check for raised type on paperbacks, because raised type – or, better yet, a peek-a-boo cut out – tells me that I am in for a quick, blissfully un-taxing read, and that there is a strong possibility that said book will contain scenes with demons, vampires, or werewolves. The taller the type, the higher the monster quotient.

However, since I started this column I’ve learned that what you can’t tell from a book is practically anything at all about the personality of the author. I’ve read terribly serious books and expected the authors to be as solemn and unsmiling as judges, or Michael Ignatieff, and then discovered that the gloom peddlers are back-slapping, good time party hounds. Conversely, I’ve read goofy books about silly subjects and then found myself on the phone with authors who could give Poe a run for his black crepe and crypts. Authors are as unpredictable as newly elected Liberals, minus the chauffeurs and hair cut allowance.

Case in point: the American humourist, performance artist, novelist and part time pugilist Jonathan Ames – a man, at least on the page, who has more demented fun than Gary Glitter at Toys ‘R Us. Racing through Ames’s latest book, I Love You More Than You Know - a brisk, laugh-out-loud funny collection of essays chronicling Ames’s sexual, spiritual, and, um, genital misadventures - I imagined that interviewing Mr. Wild And Crazy would be like trying to hog tie a racoon. I even did finger warm ups before I called his New York City home, figuring I’d have to type fast and hard just to keep up.

Instead, I found Ames to be a careful speaker who chooses his words deliberately, and a man more than a little inclined to take his time with a question. Perhaps the fact that I shamelessly flirted with him via email (he’s a foxy number, and mostly straight, which only goads me on) made him feel cautious toward me. I can be very seductive, as long as I am not visible. Or perhaps he was just sleepy. Or perhaps he was bored. I’ll never know for sure, and hopefully won’t find out in his next collection of essays. I can just imagine the title: Fat Canadians Talk Too Much.

At any rate, Ames was hardly the ribald raconteur one would expect from reading his work, and that lead me to try to uncover the man behind the monkey, the Mickey behind the Pluto, the middle aged father of a twenty-something son behind the gonzo, tranny-chasing, celebrity barroom brawler and boulevardier of Brooklyn.

The first thing one notices about Ames’s writing is his skilful conflation of blunt potty mouth humour and an overtly sentimental, Erma Bombeck-ish devotion to all things domestic and familial. How does he pull off this balancing act?

“Well, I guess I blend them by being up front and honest – and the mix makes them more interesting . If the moment calls for it, the both sides of my life, the ridiculous and the human, just go on the page . But there’s no scheme, I usually write my essays the night before they are due, so maybe it’s just panic and confusion. But, you know, ultimately it’s just storytelling.”

Ok, so he’s no Joan Didion, not a writer overly concerned with the intricacies of his art. There goes his creative writing gig at Columbia. But let’s find out about the action man side of Ames. What on earth drives him to get into so much trouble on a regular basis? Is he self destructive, or just on the hunt for good material?

“I do go into my Perils of Pauline moments, but I don’t intentionally try to get into trouble. Honestly. I do like the strange things in life, I’m drawn to them - but I’m not necessarily entering into “crazy situations” just because I’m looking for something to write about. It’s just that I seem to have an inner magnet for crazy things.”

So far, so mild. And mild-mannered – Ames speaks at a glacial pace, and politely pauses between thoughts to allow me to catch up. I begin to suspect that he’s scribbling out a thank you note, on embossed stationary. Where’s the sexy rebel, the bad boy whose muscle-man boxing photos I’ve been ogling on the internet?

One more try: I suspect Ames’s reputation as a super freak has garnered him a devoted following among frat boys and bookish jocks, that he’s a hero to young men seeking lurid adventures. Wrong again.

“I’m not sure who my audience is, but I suspect lately that I’m writing for women. I’ve had a few young male writers come up to me, but the people who write letters to me are mostly women. I don’t see myself as a kind of “guy writer”, or any brand of writer. And looking at oneself in those categories is kind of like staring in the mirror and wondering who you are – I don’t really do that, I just want to entertain the reader. I do want to push certain boundaries and not be limited to a certain audience, and I’m not really marketed to a specific audience.”

Now I’m getting jealous. Not only is Ames not giving me any Norman Mailer attitude, he’s actually rather likeable - a humble, misunderstood chic-lit author who just happens to be trapped in the body of a prize fighter. The ultimate literary cross-over, Ames is a marketer’s sticky dream. Why do I even get out of bed?

Type Cast 7

2006-03-04T09:22:00.000-05:00

If recent election results (remember the election?) and our Winter Olympics performance (so well behaved, so pot and judge bribery -free, so boring to those of us who only watch the Olympics for the scandals) are reliable indexes of our national mindset, Canadians are swarming to the medial standard like blowflies to bull pucks. The lowest common denominator is not just a point on the grid anymore, it is the grid. Yes, this country is in it’s annual mid-winter funk, our pale days of brine and neurosis, our macaroni salad days.

But let’s take a more global perspective and put our bad hair months in an international context. Even in our worst moments, we’ll never be as insignificant as Luxembourg or iron-deprived as most of Britain. And, of course, right next to us is the world’s greatest collection of low ballers, mouth breathers and layabouts - an ever expanding empire of browless wonders who spend their days gutting catfish, spelling phonetically, and washing with sticks. And I’m not talking about the good people of Greenland.

It is one of the great blessings of living in Canada that whenever we feel that we are wearing the ugliest sweatpants in the mall, we have only to drive 20 minutes south for a quick ego boost. And with the arrival of American humourist Dave Dunseath’s self-harm book Aim Low: Quit Often, Expect The Worst, and other Good Advice , you don’t even have to dust off your passport to get an all-you-can-eat portion of Yankee mediocrity.

Dunseath is a Nashville session drummer who, according to his author bio, has recorded with Lee Ann Womack, T. Graham Brown, Billy Dean, and Dan Seals. If, like me, you have never heard of any of these artists (my taste in country music begins and ends, abruptly, with Dolly Parton), well, that just proves Dunseath’s point. He’s a nobody, he proudly asserts, and Aim Low will teach you how to be an out, proud and happy loser too.

Broken into Big Issues chapters such as “Money”, “Love”, “Work”, and “Parenting”, Aim Low offers easy to read instructions on how to expect nothing but the least in any given life situation, and, Dunseath’s argument follows, thereafter learn to be happy with what little you have.

It’s not exactly Buddhism, or a monkish, Christian piety that’s being proclaimed here, but the idea of succeeding by failing, of having no goals or desires and therefore no disappointments, does have its precedents in both Eastern and Western philosophy (not that Dunseath would ever advocate attempting to read such texts). But his arguments are best understood as a kind of po’ white trash response to the endless striving, sacrificing and self-evaluating offered by middle class gurus like Dr. Phil. Let the educated and privileged worry about the morally upright or spiritually sound paths to contemporary happiness, Dunseath tells the reader – they’re the only ones with the time and money to fret over such things.

Some of Dunseath’s advice is surprisingly sound. On money, for instance, he reminds the reader that “whatever it is you do for a living, you probably had a pretty good idea going in what it paid”. So don’t waste valuable energy complaining about your crappy wages. On the merits of saving, Dunseath offers the sobering assessment that “you can never save enough – ever. Whatever you think will be enough, won’t be. And it’s a bad omen. … Whatever you save will be matched by a serious problem costing at or more than the relative value. In other words, save it and you’re just begging to blow out a knee or an engine.”

On the thorny subject of forgiveness (a thriving talk show staple crop, watered regularly with telegenic tears) Dunseath provides a handy cut out page, complete with a dotted line along the edge and a little illustration of a pair of scissors in case you miss the point (as will most of his target audience). Forget all that soulful breast beating and cut to the chase, proclaims Dunseath’s Forgiveness Affirmations fridge note: “When I make a horrible mistake, I should rectify it immediately with an apology. But if an apology alone is not accepted, I’m gonna see if a hundred bucks will smooth things over.”

Words to live by, and probably the best deterrent of bad social behaviour since public flogging. If I had to pay out a hundred bucks for every fit of rudeness I’ve spat at the world, I’d have to write three of these columns a day.

Americans can screw us on softwood lumber, drag us into their interminable culture wars and send us diplomats who act more like pro wrestlers than statesmen, but we will always be thankful to southern cousins like Dunseath for the priceless gift of odious comparison.

Brown and snow packed as our grass may be this winter, at least the lawn is not covered in rusty truck parts and plant pots made out of KFC buckets.

Type Cast 5

2006-02-18T09:10:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has been to my house for dinner knows three things. One, I don’t eat critters of any kind, not even semi-sentient prawns or probably-not-sentient fish. Two, I can’t cook anything - anything at all. I have burned canned soup to a hard crust and forgotten to drain the water from macaroni and cheese before adding the orange powder. The less I cook, the longer my guests will live. And three, I know the 2-4-One Pizza delivery number by heart, and the delivery guy calls me Richard.

I’d like to claim some deep spiritual cause for my decision, taken at age 17, to stop eating the local fauna, or at least come up with a sound ecological reason – but the truth is I am pathetically vulnerable to sentimental notions about nature and animals, and meat is too difficult to cook. People die every year from undercooked chicken. People like me.

Because of the above food issues, I detest cookbooks. Cookbooks remind me of the Sears catalogue - just as the sweaters never look as good on me as they do on the glossy pages, the food depicted in cookbooks is as different from the indifferent slop I prepare as Avril Lavigne is from Rita MacNeil. Cookbooks are hateful anxiety machines designed to breed disappointment, self-loathing and a unnatural attraction to coriander.

That is, mainstream cookbooks - the kind that focus on presentation over information. At the other end of the shake and bake spectrum is Victoria chef Sarah Kramer’s simple and scrumptious La Dolce Vegan! Vegan Livin’ Made Easy - an unpretentious, straight forward cookbook that will teach you how to make tasty meals and snacks without harming a single hair on a mammal’s head, your own included.

I consider any text with the subtitle “made easy” a pointy gauntlet thrown at my slippered feet. So, I tried two recipes from the book: a salty seaweed noodle soup that tasted like a slow stroll along a seaside harbour caressed by warm breezes (consider that line my audition for a wine column), and a tangy, dairy-free “cheeze” sauce that took about 4 minutes to make and saved a bin-bound plate of pale, over-boiled broccoli. Baste me in yeast flakes, I can cook!

Kramer is not surprised by my sudden conversion.

“I’m so proud of you! I write cook books for people just like you, who think they can’t cook. Cooking is not hard, you don’t need a funny hat. I have a test for all my recipes: if my friend, who will remain nameless, my dear, wonderful friend who can’t make toast can make the recipe, then anybody can do it.”

With sales of her cookbooks topping 100,000 in Canada alone, Kramer clearly knows how to reach the animal-free audience. And we’re not the easiest crowd to charm - the no-meat community can be fiercely judgemental and militant. How does Kramer handle being a spokeswoman for our notoriously cranky clan?

“I call those negative people the Vegan Police, and they drive me crazy. I guess I am a sort of spokeswoman, but, honestly, all I get from the vegan-vegetarian world is love, love, love. Any negatives I hear just bounce right off me. I try not to get involved in any community squabbles over who’s a good vegan and who’s not, and just do my own thing. When people ask me for advice, I tell them to pay attention to their own stuff and be the best eater that they can be. Finger wagging doesn’t work.”

Still glowing from my seaweed soup triumph, I ask for a simple tip to keep me from living on take out.

“Always have the staples around. Always have a can of chick peas, a tub of tofu, some soy milk and brown rice – from those basics you can grab some veggies and build a whole meal.”

Easy for her to say. Whenever I cook with tofu the results look like, ahem, pre-digested materials. What am I doing wrong?

“Tofu is like shoes, you have to try many, many types before you find the right fit. There’s soft tofu, which is good for smoothies, desserts and dips, medium, which is good for scrambling and faux cheesecake, and then firm, which is good for grilling and stir fries.”

“The other thing you need to know is that tofu is like cake flour, it doesn’t have a lot of flavour so you have to add things to it to make it edible. Marinating helps too – otherwise it’s just a blob of nothing.”

Type Cast 4

2006-02-11T09:04:00.000-05:00

Writers are naturally counter-intuitive people. With all that thinking time on their hands, the bounty of options grows hourly. It’s maddening, but it makes for good plot twists. And unusual career choices.

Take the case of Emily Pohl-Weary. The Parkdale born and bred 32 year old novelist, anthologist, biographer (her book Better To Have Loved, a biography of her grandmother, the prolific science fiction author Judith Meril, was a Toronto Book Award finalist and winner of a 2003 Hugo Award) former Broken Pencil editor, and all-around literary starling has, for some inexplicable reason, decided to endanger a thriving career by publishing her first book of poetry, Iron-On Constellations.

Poetry? She might as well take up model trains or start writing for the International Socialist newspaper (actually, both hobbies undoubtedly have larger followings). Writing poetry is the one sure way to literary obscurity and pennilessness. Not even poets write poetry anymore. All the poets I know are busy preparing non-fiction manuscripts, histories of podiatry and monographs on degu husbandry - i.e. something that will sell.

Oh well, at least the poetry is beautiful. Pohl-Weary is a natural poet with a sharp set of observation skills. Her poems are succinct narratives, tiny novellas that detail the easy (and sometimes very uneasy) exchanges that pass between lovers, friends, familiar strangers and everyone in-between. Her poetry is hardly shy, and does not seek to cloak raw drama (sexual, emotional, or her own unflattering ego melodramas) in flower-stuck metaphor.

When Pohl-Weary does venture into more flighty terrain, she makes sure the reader is with her for the ride by couching her more fanciful extensions of imagination in plain and often rough language. The trade in poetic obscurities and intentional opaqueness that plagues so much Canadian poetry, particularly the more academic brands, makes Pohl-Weary testy.

“I am an anti-academic in everything I do, especially in poetry,” Pohl-Weary tells me over the phone as a video game twitters along in the background.

“I think there’s something morally wrong about writing that makes people feel stupid. Plus, it’s boring. I’d rather read a mystery novel than some puzzling academic text.”

What’s the game in the background?

“Oh, how embarrassing! I’m playing Civilization. Do you know it? The goal is to conquer the world.”

So much for all that democratic talk.

“Yes, yes, I know. What can I tell you? It’s soothing. I got addicted to games at the same time I was writing Iron-On, when I was stuck at home for months with an illness. Between 1998 and 2000, when I was quite sick, I found it was easier to focus on writing for shorter periods of time, so it just seemed natural to write short poems. But I kept going over the poems again and again, writing and re-writing, so I didn’t really make good time in any business model sense.”

Are you a compulsive rewriter?

“Yes, I can’t even read stuff once it’s published because I want to rewrite the sentences right there on the page.”

Or, one might guess after reading the very personal subject matter divulged in Iron-On, scratch out the words altogether.

“I was pretty scared to publish this book at first, because it’s so personal, and I deep-sixed it for a few years before I showed it to my publisher. And now that it’s out, I’m kind of hesitant about the kinds of questions people ask me. Whenever I give a reading, people come up to me and ask me really, really personal questions and I have to find a way to politely deflect them.”

“I realize that when you dig into someone’s brain by reading their book, you want to find out from the author what’s true or not true – but sometimes people lose any sense of boundaries.”

Given that Pohl-Weary comes from a family of public people – her mother Ann Pohl is a prominent leftist activist, her grandmother Judith was nicknamed “the little mother of science fiction” by her mid-century peers, and Pohl-Weary’s grandfather is the iconic speculative fiction author Frederick Pohl – you’d think she’d be more than used to living in a fishbowl.

“I grew up in Parkdale fending off the johns and the junkies like every other little girl, and at the same time I had an activist, very social family that was in the public eye. I didn’t grow up with polite society rules. My grandmother’s dildo was auctioned off for charity after she died! So, I don’t have those appropriate/inappropriate filters that other people have.”

“The result of this strange childhood is that I just want to stay honest, and honesty requires a kind of innocence. If you allow yourself to experience the world you’ll see the ugly, the gorgeous and the unusual all at once. It’s sort of like having two voices inside my head.”

Perfect for a poet.

Type Cast 3

2006-02-04T09:43:00.000-05:00

Oprah Winfrey says she feels duped, conned, hoodwinked and bamboozled by memoirist James Frey’s falsified account of his years of drug-addled bad behaviour. I would like to respectfully suggest to La Oprah that the fault is all her own.

I am loathe to pick on the world’s most popular television presenter because I actually enjoy her show –well, most of the time. The hysterical audiences are a bit much to take, and Winfrey’s increasing religiosity strikes me as a vulgar attempt to solidify her position as the Mother Teresa of Talk.

But it’s hard to argue with anyone who can actually coerce North Americans to read. And, like any novelist, I would sell my brother’s kids to get Winfrey to pick one of my under-selling books for her club. (The kids, by the way, range in age from 19 to 12, are well-behaved, healthy, and kind of cute, if anyone’s buying).

My difficulty with the whole Winfrey/Frey uproar is that I doubt Winfrey’s own show would stand the honesty test she’s applied to Frey’s book. Even a casual viewer of the show will realize that the guests – the non-celebrity guests, at least – have been thoroughly coached before they appear on the couch. They cry on cue, reveal their secrets in carefully planned sentences, and know exactly when it’s their time to talk and Winfrey’s time to judge.

When Winfrey’s cameras venture out to the homes of the sad suburbanites she interviews, the subjects re-enact their traumas in front of the lens with concise, well-rehearsed accounts of their troubles. In other words, they perform for the show. They are acting. The stories might be true, but who knows how much the presence of the camera, indeed the chance to appear on international television, affects the way the guests describe their lives? The temptation to inflate, overstate or otherwise colour their accounts to make better television must be enormous.

Can Winfrey swear on a stack of Toni Morrison novels that all of her guests have told the whole truth? Of course not, nor should she even try. News broadcasts are hardly objective retellings of events, so why would a chat show have a higher standard of verisimilitude? And remember, when Bill Clinton’s memoir came out Winfrey gave the former president and renowned liar the full gushing treatment, no questions asked. Pot, meet kettle.

But criticizing the moralizing excesses of a television chat show is too easy – the very format of such shows demands that there be an absolute right and an unquestionable wrong. The core problem with this entire non-debate is that the real and much more complex issue has been wholly overlooked – the issue of how and why we read in the first place.

Winfrey’s book clubbers treat books like medicine. They read the downtrodden memoirs and hard-luck novels Winfrey favours with the expressed intention of looking for the next great “healing” device - as if writing, or any form of art, existed only to make one feel better about oneself. Obviously, art makes the world a better place, but mostly by accident. No artist sets out to create a work specifically to cauterize a social wound – no decent artist at least.

Any societal benefit gained from a piece of art is purely incidental, and highly likely to change over time. For instance, we do not read Uncle Tom’s Cabin today because we wish to abolish slavery, but because the book is a riveting story of oppression and survival. At the time it was published, however, Lincoln himself declared that the book had done no less than start the American Civil War. Similarly, John Herbert’s classic 1965 play Fortune And Men’s Eyes - which when it debuted was read as a scathing expose of the terrible conditions of Canadian prisons - is still performed today, despite all the reforms it prompted, because its poetic depictions of psycho-sexual power dynamics between men still resonate. In another fifty years, the play may be remounted as a camp farce or as an historical romance, or not at all.

But when you treat literature like a cheap psycho-therapeutic tool, as Winfrey’s book club does with an almost pathological neediness, and expect the assembled words to cause reliable psychological effects, you are bound to be disappointed. Using literature to get over, say, your childhood sexual abuse is akin to fixing a leaky sink with a bucket of pudding. Literature is too porous, too slippery, and too full of questions to be turned into an emotional version of the South Beach Diet.

Cultural theorists have been arguing for decades (rather successfully) that no two people ever read the same book in the same way and, even more disconcerting, that every time you read a text you re-invent it – thus making any questions about the reliability of a text abjectly moot.

Furthermore, when the act of reading is so inherently untrustworthy, relying on a book to “heal” you and then feeling cheated when you find out the book is a fabrication and not a prescription is, well, stupid. Every book is a fabrication and you’re the one holding the knitting needles (or, in Winfrey’s case, the entire sweater factory).

If you read for medicinal purposes, you’d be better off eating the pages – they’re just full of cleansing fibre.

Type Cast 2

2006-01-28T09:43:00.000-05:00

A literary agent of my acquaintance (ok, ok, my literary agent) told me a revealing story about how Canadian literary culture is perceived outside of Canada. While at a European book fair, he was approached by a Finnish publisher who, like any good Finn, was already loaded by 4pm.

“A Canadian!”, the publisher bellowed. “Tell me please why all your books are about middle class ladies who don’t have any problems?”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, drunk or sober. If one more press release passes my desk promoting yet another earnest Canadian novel about the sad lives of three generations of bookish, overly sensitive women looking for love in the suburbs of Saskatoon, or, worse yet, in 19th century Newfoundland, I’m going to swear off Canadian fiction altogether and only read bathroom books with funny pictures of cats.

I just can’t take it anymore – enough with the naturalism, the kitchen sink kitsch. Why are so many Canadian books afraid of story, of plot, of action?

Of course, I have a theory (Nietzsche used to console himself with thoughts of suicide, I have my beloved theories) – Canadian fiction is stuck in its own past. When the CanLit Renaissance took place, forty or fifty years back, almost everyone who wrote also taught at a university. At the time, pop culture was considered unworthy of the halls of academe. Literary naturalism and realist fictions were privileged over speculative or fantastic fictions, because, it was thought, only children and half-wits liked to read about monsters and space ships.

Now you can get a doctorate for studying books about space ships and monsters, but the literary scene in Canada is still married to the idea that realistic narratives are more important and more literary (and therefore of a higher grade of writing) than speculative narratives. Add to this elitist ideology the marketing mantra, prevalent in Canadian publishing circles, that women read fiction and men read non-fiction (a foolish and sexist notion), and you get an annual flood in the Canadian fiction lists of so-called “women’s books” – interchangeable novels set in the domestic arena that deal with realistically-portrayed family crises.

If these marketing schemes are true, it must also be true that women don’t want to be entertained and prefer instead to be empathetic, to have a little cry underneath their reading lights. Whoever thought that up has never met my fun loving lady pals.

An interesting case in point is the recent reception in our presses of George R. R. Martin’s delightful and wildly entertaining A Feast For Crows. Martin is the dominant name in fantasy fiction today, with around 3 million books sold to date. His books are sprawling epics depicting battles between knights and witches and thieves and priests, set in landscapes dotted with menacing mountains, treacherous swamps, and mysterious forests full of hungry wildlife. Every page of A Feast For Crows is full of life, action, sex and head chopping, and Martin’s extensive cast of lurid characters rivals that of any of the Russian pot boilers you were forced to read in school.

Yet, when A Feast For Crows came out this fall and instantly climbed to our national bestseller lists, the Canadian book press almost wholly ignored its arrival. After some searching of major newspaper archives, I found two articles about Martin himself, but no proper reviews of the novel. In terms of sales, public profile, and popularity, Martin rivals even our top purveyors of tea and torment fiction. Why the cold shoulder?

Chris Szego, manager of the Bakka-Phoenix bookstore, a shop specializing in speculative fiction, has an interesting theory.

“The modernist movement is still dominant in literary culture, especially the post-WW2 idea that a fiction is worthless unless everything ends badly. But a lot of science fiction and fantasy literature doesn’t end this way, because the books are based on the conflict of good vs. evil, and end with the triumph of good.”

“In Canada, we have the added problem that there is an established preoccupation with landscape in our writing. So, if you’re making up a landscape, creating a fantasy space, it’s supposed that the writing can’t really be worth anything. Furthermore, the powerhouse publishers of genre fiction are not located in Canada, and that means that when it comes to treating genre fiction with the same respect as realist fiction, there’s another layer of distance, a perception in our media that speculative fiction is an American thing.”

Szego has a few choice words for us newspaper types too.

“No offence, but the truth is most papers do a poor job with books in general, and are constantly cutting the space for book reviews. So, when its decided what gets review space, the modernist view of what’s worthy is applied – i.e. realist fiction. Newspapers don’t review what people buy, but what they think people should buy.”

Ouch!

“Well, look at it this way,” Szego offers as a consolation, “genre writers don’t really have to care about reviews– they’re too busy selling books.”

Type Cast 1

2006-01-21T09:41:00.000-05:00

Looking back at my university days, I can’t believe that I wrote entire essays on, for instance, Hawthorne’s foot fetish or the “lesbian textile motif” in Willa Cather’s short stories, using a crappy, Sears brand teal plastic typewriter with a bum C key. How did I make it through a single page? And why don’t I have nose cancer from the pails of Wite-Out?

I hated that typewriter and hated typing even more. So when I bought my first adorable little Mac, one of the early “dollhouse” models that looked like an upturned grey bread box, I fell in instant and slavish love. The typewriter met a timely, much deserved death at the end of a hammer. I was tempted to make a kill trophy necklace with the keys.

With all that emotional baggage, I was surprised to find myself completely engrossed by Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Iron Whim, a crazy quilt history of typewriters and typing that tackles everything from the metaphoric importance of machine communications in Stoker’s Dracula to an examination of writing styles typical of authors who typed with one finger.

Wershler-Henry’s writing hops from subject to reference to anecdote in an engagingly frantic way that, appropriately enough, mimics the clacking, find-peck-stab-print action of typing itself. Unlike other composite histories, the kind that trace the social history of, say, paperweights or porridge, The Iron Whim generously lends itself to dipping, dabbling, and random shuffles. This is not a chronology, it’s a scrapbook, and is far more entertaining precisely because it is so loosely constructed.

Some readers may find Wershler-Henry’s fondness for communications philosophy and all theories French and obfusticating a bit tough to love, but such readers need only skip a page or two until they find themselves smack in the middle of another weird and wonderful, plainly told tale of the typewriter’s strange power. With Wershler-Henry, one is never very far from a tasty film reference or lurid allusion to drug-induced pop music, and watching the egghead wrestle the trash queen across the pages is half the fun.

Interviewing Wershler-Henry over the phone is exactly like reading his prose. He speaks faster than a Montreal waitress and moves effortlessly (and without prompting) from the criticism of Walter Benjamin to chair designs by surly Italian futurists. I tried to keep up, but at a failing 18 words per minute typing (keyboarding?) speed, I had to stop periodically for some finger yoga.

The obvious first question: Why write a book about a dead machine?

“I started this book for two reasons”, he begins, avant le deluge.

“I was thinking about bodies and machines and how they work together, especially cyborgs, but then I realized that everybody else was making a book about the same thing. So, I started thinking about writers and machines and how various machines have allowed writers to work – especially how there’s a difference between the way a keyboard works on a computer and how the same keyboard works on a typewriter.”

“The second thing that happened was that once I started telling people about my typewriter project , absolutely everyone, and I mean everyone, starting telling me about the old typewriters in their basements. Everyone seems to have one, but nobody uses them. Typewriters are tokens, people keep them the way 18the century writers kept skulls on their desks. I had to explore this weird nostalgia.”

And they’re kind of cute, I add, feeling suddenly guilty about my past typewriter abuse.

“Typewriters are attractive objects, and there are serious typewriter collectors out there. The typewriter is collected the way photos of Marilyn Monroe are collected, or Ernest Hemingway memorabilia – because typewriters are an icon of the last period of modernism, of a time when there was a direct physical process to writing. Because it was so physical, it’s easy for us to look back at the writing from the typewriter era as being un-alienated, more focused, even pure. Of course, this is an illusion, but we couldn’t see the illusions about typewriting as a kind of mastering act until after typewriters disappeared.”

I mention that I’ve just seen the film Capote, and noticed that whenever the director wants us to feel sympathy for the vile little gnome, he shows tiny Truman in a bare room sitting at a typewriter.

“Of course. Part of the reason that that visual cue works is that typing is a really pure kind of action – you hit a key, you get a letter on a physical page. There is an immediate, viewable, and stable response, and we read that stability as a kind of honest act because cause and effect are instantly manifest.”

Now that he’s cleared up one big mechano-cultural fixation, what’s next ? A book on blenders?

“Im really interested in how we interact with technology – specifically, why our interactions fail. Why does every VCR in the world blink 12:00 and can’t be made to stop? Why does your cell phone have 17 functions you’ve never learned to use? We have a perverse relationship to machines. We devise them to work for us, but the results end up messy and bad.”

The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting

Darren Wershler-Henry

McClelland & Stewart $29.99

The Big Picture 63

2005-12-24T09:40:00.000-05:00

It’s Christmas Eve. The children are in bed, full as tics with grandma’s lemon squares and warm milk. The tree glistens with decorations. The house is clean and smells of fresh pine boughs. The dog is snoring, the neighbours have turned off their outdoor lights, you’ve watched A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life, there’s nothing left to wrap and the phone will not ring for hours …. Now what the hell do you do with yourself?

If all this wholesomeness is making you feel like you’ve been living on Walton’s mountain, there’s a ready cure just waiting at the nearest modem – Christmas porn!

Yes, Christmas porn. You didn’t know about holiday themed blue movies, did you? You thought Christmas was all Bing Crosby and the Chipmunks. But why would the world’s most exploitative entertainment industry miss out on the year’s most easily exploited season?

Christmas erotica has been around as long as Christmas itself, and Christmas’s pagan predecessor, Yule, was hardly a time for pious self denial. Medieval Christmas pageants were full of dirty jokes and ribald antics, and Victorian gentlemen spread good cheer in the cigar room by passing around “French novelty” postcards decorated with nubile elves. All I’m advocating here is a return to solid, traditional Christmas values.

Those of you new to bedroom mistletoe mummeries will want to start with the basics: busty ladies in Santa outfits. Nothing says Happy Holidays! like a well set up young woman in red felt and white marabou. A good starter film is Pleasure Productions’ delightful Gina’s Very Merry Christmas Orgy, which follows the antics of title star Gina Lynn and her gal pals Trinity Maxx and Xandria as they make like minks at a large Christmas office party miraculously unlike any office party you’ve ever attended.

Gina is the kind of girl my Fundy-bred mother would call “a hard lookin’ ticket”, meaning that when life hands Gina a torn fishing net, Gina makes herself a pair of stockings. In this especially athletic episode, Gina finds herself wandering from room to room in a large, holly-bedecked mansion. In each room, one of her fellow relaxation therapists is spreading seasonal cheer, and baby oil, with a client, or three. Gina, a helpful sort, lends a hand. And a leg, and a thigh, and a torso. When Gina catches up with Trinity, the sharing and caring reaches new heights, as both ladies are blessed with a tender, giving nature that would bring Scrooge himself to his knees.

At Gina’s Christmas party, the office letch is a tall, blonde god with arms like stove pipes and a mind wholly unburdened by the concept of sexual harassment. In the true festive spirit, blondy has brought along his somewhat shy dark-haired pal, who is also blessed with a furnace-sized appendage. After a little coaxing, the brunette wallflower quickly blooms.

Throughout this holiday hayride, Gina and friends display an admirable devotion to Christmas tradition by sporting Mrs. Claus costumes trimmed in the fluffiest white fur and the cheeriest crimson plush. With the Yule log blazing hotly in the hearth, Gina sensibly opts for the beach wear version of Santa’s classic tunic and cap ensemble. Traditionalists may balk at this sartorial choice, but traditions should never be too constricting, or chafing, or, as Gina puts it, “all itchy and stuff.”

~

Christmas is a magical time, and Sheer Finesse’s Christmas Hose wonderfully recreates the awe and wonder of Christmas morning with the delightful tale of Natalie and Vikki, two lucky young ladies who wake up on December 25th to find that Santa has left them a life sized, fully operational doll.

Being sentimentalists, the girls quickly change into their best Christmas get ups - which include not only sequined miniskirt versions of St. Nick’s famous cloak, but also a wide selection of highly coveted holiday hosiery. Inspired by the luxury of fine silk, Natalie, Vikki, and their new toy Chloe spend Xmas morn admiring each other’s shapely legs and exquisite taste in lingerie. Party hats and noisemakers are employed in various frolics, and a new and novel use is found for the Christmas cracker.

~

In many European countries, Pere Noel performs a dual function – he rewards good children with candy and toys and gives beatings to bad children. This charming old world custom is brought to vivid life in two of the many, many adult movies that deal with Christmas parenting strategies: Star Maker Enterprise’s Spanked by Santa and the gay themed Santa’s Excellent Adventure, by Man’s Hand Films.

Spanked by Santa is set in the jolly old elf’s very own office, where Holly and Bill, two frisky elves, have been instructed to decorate the North Pole headquarters. Just like overexcited children, Bill and Holly are easily distracted and soon forget their Yuletide chores. Santa returns, and the forgetful elves are briskly reminded of the consequences of inattention.

Holly is particularly adept at looking both kittenish and sorrowful in her red Lycra tube top and snow white spiked boots, and Bill is suitably contrite when Santa dispenses his slappy Christmas benedictions. Like the best Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas movies, everyone in Spanked by Santa undergoes a learning journey and feels markedly - emphasis on the marks - better after their trials and tribulations. Santa just can’t stay angry for long.

Similarly, Santa’s Excellent Adventure teaches the viewer that the best Christmas presents are the ones you don’t expect. In four vignettes, Santa visits a Naughty Little Brother, a stubborn Cowboy, a Spoiled Boy and two very bad Hunky Burglars. All five men are avowed non-believers who think Santa is just for kids. But Santa, each learns, is very real and very ready to prove it, and keeps on proving until it hurts. Santa’s Excellent Adventure offers up hard lessons (and harder bottoms), but Christmas can be a cruel time for young men who lack father figures.

These two films reinforce a belief I have held for years - Christmas is for masochists.

The Big Picture 62

2005-12-17T09:40:00.000-05:00

The city of Toronto’s new arts awareness campaign, TO Live With Culture (TO – Toronto – get it?) proves that when civil servants promote the arts, the arts resemble the civil service. I know that sounds ungrateful, but there are some things even a Toronto artist can’t take. Is a little glamour and style too much to ask?

The thinking behind the campaign is solid enough. When the federal government declared Toronto a Cultural Capital for 2005-2006 - you’d think our cultural pre-eminence would be self evident, but there are people in Ottawa paid to state the obvious - the City of Toronto slouched into action, creating a Culture Plan for the Creative City via its Culture Division (the first dictate being that henceforth all mention of said important initiatives be crafted in capital letters). A key part of the Culture Plan is the implementation of a web portal called www.livewithculture.ca, which in turn is part of the Cultural Renaissance Capital Projects initiative, and is co-produced with the Toronto Arts Council Foundation …. Well, you get the point.

Apart from sending a handful of civil servants’ children to UCC, all these interrelated programs share the laudable goal of promoting Toronto-based arts. Arguing with that core goal seems peevish, like criticizing a toy drive at your local fire hall. The web portal itself performs its function well, except when it strives too hard to be all-inclusive and puts displays of Christmas lights and CN Tower tours on an equal cultural footing with plays and art exhibitions.

But good intentions are not enough when it comes to publicity and promotion. Good design is in many ways more important, because if the public is not drawn to the “sell” image at first glance, they will never make it to the web portal. Sadly, the promotional banners and posters for TLWC are, in a word, horrendous.

Various disciplines are represented by clichéd props, such as a brush and palette for art, a stack of books for literature, etc., and the activity associated with the prop is performed, or rather assaulted by, a bouncing underwear model dressed in a costume left over from A Chorus Line. If the goal of this campaign is to trivialize the local arts with infantile imagery, then somebody at city hall is due for a big promotion.

The posters are an insult to the diversity of artists working in this city. Apparently, fat people don’t make art. Nor do people over the age of 30. And why should they? Making art is only a fun hobby, the posters tell us, like taking yoga classes, and is mostly enjoyed by thin white folks. The complaint here is not that the posters lack representative scope (although they do, painfully so), but that their bland, commercial look actually makes them invisible. The TLWC visuals could just as easily be selling yoghurt or back pain medication.

No, I take that back. The problem is one of representation. As a large-and-in-charge artist myself, one who has given rather a lot of time and talent over the years to rather a lot of art events in this town, I damn well want to see a fat person on the poster!

Once you get past the unimaginative model casting, you are left with some equally tired messages about art and art making. The jumping twits on the posters reinforce age-old, anti-art stereotypes: Namely, that we’re all flighty, fey airheads skipping along and smiling like idiots while the real world passes us by. All that’s missing from these posters are the gossamer wings.

Art-making is a profession, and a difficult one. Can you imagine using stupid toys and anorexics in Danskins to promote dentistry or engineering? Of course not, because fixing teeth and building bridges is serious work. So is creating a city’s cultural life.

After getting all riled up, I wondered if I was over-reacting. I polled a handful of artists and non-artists and found I was not the only one wanting to climb the nearest lamppost with a pair of scissors and a lighter.

Novelist Andrew Pyper (whose latest, the gripping The Wildfire Season, is just out in paperback) calls the TLWC campaign “a missed opportunity”.

“What's disappointing about the campaign isn't its ugliness, but its generic anywhere-ness. Working artists could have been commissioned to create distinctive words and images, something that didn't just say "Toronto has Art", but "Here is Toronto's Art."

Fellow novelist Jared Mitchell concurs.

“The posters stink of leftover money in the budget. They look like they were composed by a committee that couldn’t agree on anything other than the posters had to have a human in them. If conservatives want to complain about taxpayers money being misused in the arts, this is where they should look, not at art or artists.”

Restaurant manager Paul Forsyth calls the banners “as bad as the moose fiasco. The first time I saw one, I thought it was an ad for a Parachute Club comeback CD.”

I tried - really I did - to find one artist who liked or was at least forgiving of the TLWC visuals. Just one. I failed.

Multimedia artist Chandra Bulucon put it best: The campaign must have been designed by people who’ve never made a work of art in their lives, or met an artist.

“To think these images represent arts and culture in Toronto. Not my arts and culture.”

The Big Picture 61

2005-12-10T09:38:00.000-05:00

Everybody wants my holiday gelt. So far this month, I’ve been invited to torch my fiscal Yule log at three craft sales, half a dozen book launches, one high end gym, no end of charity auctions, and, honestly, a sex club selling “a good time on Santa’s knee.” Yikes! I wish the Post would stop selling my email address to its shareholders.

The most chronic merchants in the manger, however, are art galleries. Most of the year, galleries pretend that making money is not their primary concern. Theirs is a higher calling, pure as the artistic impulse itself. Until mid-November. As soon as the frost hits, galleries become about as interested in culture as 50 Cent at a gun shop.

I don’t begrudge gallerists their mercenary urges – not even art dealers can live on human blood alone. But the sheer number of holiday art sales can trigger mild panic in the shopper, and a mild stroke in me. So, here’s a quick guide to the best of the downtown gallery bazaars. This is by no means a complete listing of all the Toronto art houses looking to poach your January mortgage payment, but the next gallery that overloads my inbox with tinselled promises gets their co-ordinates forwarded to the hooker Santa.

Gallery TPW’s annual Photorama is one of the most consistent and anticipated year end sales in town - primarily because photography fans know they can snap up a Burtynsky, an Ingelevics, or a Lake for about one third of the going price. It’s also a great way to do some boast-worthy early buying of works by newer artists, who have a habit of using TPW as an art star launching pad.

This best buys this year are digital prints by Cecilia Berkovic that replicate, in miniature, her wonderful 1980’s Tiger Beat tribute installation currently on permanent display in the Gladstone Hotel, and a set of five small, bittersweet photographs by Lukas Blakk that depict tiny toy and ceramic animals hiding underneath mushrooms and grazing on lawns. Look also for a “surprise piece” by Dean Baldwin (likely one of his hilarious and disturbing photos of himself hanging off the ledge of a prominent building) plus a vintage photo of a man standing in a Hollywood prop room holding up a fake John the Baptist severed head – part of the growing collection of oddities, outsider images and collectibles assembled by the Toronto-based archival photo dealers Camera Lucida.

Most of the works on sale at TPW are priced well below $500, and Executive Director Gary Hall reminds me that “the big names go very, very fast –sometimes within hours.” So, by the time you read this, the Ingelevics works will be long gone. Be adventurous – everyone has a Burtynsky, but how many people have a Berkovic?

~

The Shelf Project at C1 Art Space is the Winners of gallery sales, because it’s a new store every day. Packed with ceramics, jewellery, fine art and curious crafts by nearly 50 artists, this rotating sale will change stock every week until New Year’s Eve, and promises to tempt the spendthrift with everything from silk screened tee-shirts to one-of-a-kind art dolls.

Already in full swing, The Shelf Project’s next batch of goodies includes a collection of creepy gothic dolls by Rodney Frost, Nadia Moss’s papier mache owl figures, whose see-through stomachs are full of tiny demon animals, animator Laura Vegys quirky series of watercolours exploring the Golem legend, and Ross Bonfanti’s concrete dolls, which he makes by hollowing out stuffed plush toys and filling them with concrete (for the person who truly has everything, except a weapon).

The best deals at C1 are the wool pastel baby slippers by Irina Badescu, Lesley Ashton’s charming squirrel cards, and Julie Moon’s bright red, glazed ceramic poppy pins – all under ten bucks.

Want to make your own gifts? C1 is offering pre-Xmas classes by professional crafters. You can make a collage, an ornament, or, if all else fails, a macaroni keepsake box. Your mother will love it, at least to your face.

~

Good old A Space Gallery once again resurrects its Gifts That Fit sale. If only they’d been around all those childhood Xmas mornings when I was forced to squeeze into sweaters from the Sears “husky” department.

The art up for grabs is priced between $20 and $150, and comes directly from A Space members. Name droppers will be pleased to see new works by painters Sadko Hadzihasanovic, Scott Waters and Raffael Iglesias, fresh offerings from multimedia artists Peter Kingstone, Natalie Wood, Deanna Bowen and Shelly Bahl, and a specially commissioned photo-based work by the legendary artist/activist team Carole Conde & Karl Beveridge.

Those of you who know A Space’s old-school leftist programming might wonder if the gifts in Gifts that Fit will be un-ironic Che Guevara posters, home compost kits, and earnest tracts on the future of the NDP?

Fear not, says A Space Program Coordinator Pam Edmonds.

“A lot of the artists are creating new work for this show, and there’s a broad range of work. But of course, this is still A Space … it’s interesting to see these artists who do make activist work re-interpreting their own practices for the specifics of this show. Something can be beautiful and have a message too.”

So, the frivolous and shallow are welcome?

“Always! Come with a smile, that’s all that we ask. And money.”

Photorama
Gallery TPW 80 Spadina Ave, Suite 310 Last day today!

The Shelf Project
C1 Art Space 44 Ossington Avenue Until December 31

Gifts that Fit
A Space Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 110 Until December 11

The Big Picture 60

2005-12-03T09:33:00.000-05:00

Her dealer swears it’s unintentional, but Y.M. Whelan’s new suite of abstracts at Fran Hill Gallery couldn’t be more Christmassy. There’s enough holly green and cranberry red on the walls to choke a whole team of reindeer.

Smart seasonal timing aside, Whelan’s paintings are intriguing groove-and-slot compositions that deftly interweave multi-coloured rectangular slabs of paint until the shapes appear to dance and come alive, like an old Atari building blocks game. The jittery twitching is further enhanced by layers and layers of noisy under-painting – usually a distraction for me, but Whelan makes it work by saturating her top, final layers with deep, at times even violent, colour.

Let go of the Xmas connotations, and Whelan’s shimmering red and green collisions quickly trigger other sets of associations: a series of traffic lights viewed through a rainy window, blooming flower beds and wet lawns, flapping flags, Lego castles, a gangrenous limb being amputated (OK, that’s just me), a digital image at the invisible instant of formation, or coming apart, a Christmas tree on fire (again, me). The allegorical and associative possibilities are endless, but that’s what an artist gets for working with such primordial, Jungian colours. Whelan herself has assigned several of the works with mythological titles, referencing Celtic gods and other pagan deities. But all that arcana went flying over my United Church-damaged head.

What surprised me most about Whelan’s paintings was the discovery that her medium is acrylic, not oil. I can usually spot an acrylic painting from 20 paces, with their flat, Formica-counter-top sheen and blunt, too clean sparkle. But Whelan has mixed her paints like an alchemist and created much warmer textures from the plastics, surfaces that convey both the heavy, candle wax pallor of oils and the bright, blushing shine of watercolours.

A note to potential buyers: wait until February to hang your new Whelan, lest it get misread as some sort of funky Xmas decoration. These paintings are meant for more reflective times.

~

Fans of multimedia artist Daniel Olson will be lining up at YYZ Artists’ Outlet to catch the most extensive survey of Olson’s video work ever shown in Toronto. With 24 short videos playing in a continuous loop (for a total of about 90 minutes worth of weird fun), Diamond In The Rough is a great way to acquaint or re-acquaint yourself with Olson’s oddball canon.

Olson’s videos are uniformly spare and minimal, usually focusing on a single image or repeated, simple gesture. Olson is the anti-Matthew Barney. There are few if any props, no attention paid to creating a set (unless you consider bare warehouse space a set), and Olson himself, who is always the star of his own show, typically wears an unassuming costume of jacket, dark pants, and shaved head. What, you might ask, is there to look at?

After viewing one or two videos, you realize that Olson doesn’t want you to look, he wants you to watch. Watch for small, almost invisible changes in his expression, watch for the moments when he appears or disappears, watch for his body to interrupt the scene, watch for subtle changes in lighting. Olson does not seek to distract us or illustrate a specific point, he seeks to hypnotize. The more you stare at Olson’s seemingly undercooked dramas, the more you become invested in anticipating the shifts in tone, movement and shadow.

And if the visuals don’t get you, the audio will. An accomplished sound artist known for his work with toy instruments, Olson composes melancholic soundscapes to accompany his videos – soundtracks that rely heavily on scratch-and-grind industrial noises and muffled musical notes to create a dreamy, underwater feel.

As the star and director of his own films, Olson naturally faces charges of narcissism. But Olson is no Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, the Canadian video artist famous for attempting to remake himself into the next Britney or Kylie. Olson’s works are not attempts at self-glorification, they’re extended, at times merciless, acts of self-inspection and slow, murmured confessions. Besides, Olson’s onscreen presence is about as glamorous as a bed bug. He’s all giant jug ears and basketball skull, but in a cute way.

The mythical Narcissus drowned in a reflecting pool, seduced by his own reflection. Olson approaches the same pool, sees himself mirrored on the surface, and gently picks at his scabs.

~
Take a break from the slushy misery of December and jump into Penelope Umbrico’s sun-soaked Honeymoon Suite, a clever cut-and-paste game that steals idealized images from romantic travel brochures.

Digging into her vast collection of cheesy resort brochures, Umbrico culls images of unbelievably perfect, cotton candy sunsets and then remounts the pixelated horizons onto canvas and paper. The effect is somewhat alarming, as the sunsets look more like atomic bomb blasts than happy closings to flawless days of beach blanket Bingo.

Umbrico’s snarky, cynical take on the “romantic getaway” industry’s mango-and- mammary schtick (and, by extension, the concept of romance itself) reminds us that as we look to the horizon with love in our eyes we ought to look out for the airbrush, the Vaseline on the lens. Don’t trust your eyes, as ever mother tells her daughter.

Y.M. Whelan
Cartimandua
Fran Hill Gallery 230 Queen Street East Until December 24

Daniel Olson
Diamond In The Rough
YYZ Artists’ Outlet 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 140 Until December 17

Penelope Umbrico
Honeymoon Suite
P/M Gallery 149-1159 Dundas Street East Until January 14

The Big Picture 59

2005-11-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

Years ago I curated an exhibition of new queer video work for a gallery in New Brunswick, and from that humble non-event I learned a valuable lesson – when assembling a collection of short films for the public’s delectation, don’t imagine that you’ll please everyone.

Watching films is an intensely subjective experience that we nevertheless engage in as a group. Most of watch films daily, via the cheap medium of television, and are therefore far more comfortable acting as critics of film-based art than we are of painting, sculpture, or dance. We are familiar with film, steeped in its strategies, practices and language. If everyone who looks at art is a critic, everyone who looks at film is Pauline Kael.

Pity Paul Wong, the curator behind Vtape’s intriguing but uneven new exhibition Split Decisions. After a months-long curatorial residency at Vtape, Wong has assembled a collection of works that come from, he states, a “place of two minds – tapes that examine conflict both exterior and from within the deep recesses of the human psyche”. I’ve done some vault-diving at Vtape myself, and the above description could easily be applied to every single video in the joint. Why didn’t he just try to push a streetcar up Bathurst street instead? It would be less demanding.

For the most part, Wong pulls it off. Split Decisions is a lively collection of recent short films that amply explores Wong’s curatorial agenda but also offers some unique variations. No two works feel the same in this exhibition, despite their thematic similarities, and Wong has not made the perennial curator’s mistake of selecting works from within a single, narrow tonal range. There’s everything in this show from pop music video takeoffs to serious short narratives to non-linear experimental oddities. Some of Wong’s choices would not be my choices - but as I noted earlier, that’s par for the course. If I liked everything I saw, I’d take it as a sign of my own personal End Times.

Of the dozen works on display, my favourites begin with Nelson Henricks’s Satellite, a campy reworking of vintage education films into a nihilistic music video. The film doesn’t really amount to much - the cranky text plastered over the stock footage is comprised mainly of empty aphorisms and, overall, the work is more a triumph of clever sampling than a true re-contextualization of the borrowed materials - but Satellite is still enormously fun to watch and the punchy score is dementedly cheerful. Fun is always appreciated, especially in the context of short film anthologies, which tend to be rather dour when they aim to illuminate serious topics.

Equally fun, and beautiful to look at, is Deirdre Logue’s succinct, aptly titled short That Beauty. The film opens with a screen full of brilliant sparkles and fades into a heavily shadowed shot of an unidentified person (Logue, I suspect) dancing in his/her kitchen. As the figure rocks out to a looped beat and repeated, upbeat refrain, her/his body grows increasingly covered in the bright speckles of light, until the dancer looks like Tinkerbell on an ecstasy high. This film is so joyous, and so neatly self-contained, that it deserves to be viewed twice, if for nothing more than the giddy high it induces. Logue’s films have always had a playful bent, despite her reputation for making meditative, introspective work, but That Beauty is her Flashdance.

For pure silliness, turn to John Beagles and Graham Ramsay’s Trilogy – the funniest films I’ve seen all year. The concept at work here is simple enough: find two shabby looking British geeks (perhaps Beagles and Ramsay themselves?), place them in an even shabbier looking British hovel, and then ask them to give deadpan recitations of upbeat pop song lyrics, without music.

In the first film, the two men sit on a ratty chesterfield while one of them recites the lyrics to Prince and Sheena Easton’s dirty hit “U Got the Look”. The performer might as well be reading a vacuum cleaner instruction manual for all the sex he puts into his delivery. The next two works feature archetypal Madonna songs, first the power ballad “Borderline” followed by the especially strident “Express Yourself”. “Borderline” is recited from a bathtub, with one sad sack sitting pants-around-ankles on the toilet while the other talk-sings. In “Express Yourself”, the songbirds share a damp looking bed, covers pulled up to their chins like frightened children, while one man incongruously recites Madonna’s anthem to courageous self-determination.

The conflation of the men’s pathetic, run down lives and the glamorous pop lyrics is hilarious, but also acts as a sharp critique of the gulf between the fantasies pop music sells and the realities lived, or endured, by its millions of buyers.

Who are Beagles and Ramsay, and where can I get their album?

Split Decisions
Curated by Paul Wong
Vtape 401 Richmond Street, Suite 452 Until January 13

The Big Picture 58

2005-11-19T13:35:00.000-05:00

The paintings of Mexican abstractionist Francisco Castro are new to me, but that’s hardly surprising given that Serie Hiedra, a collection of recent work on display at Diaz Contemporary, is his first solo exhibition in Canada. Besides, I can barely keep up with the local crowd.

Forgive me for thinking then, at first glance, that Castro’s squares-on-squares paintings were created sometime closer to the second World War than to the Iraq War, as there is a decidedly retro look to his modernist geometrical abstracts. Mondrian’s colour blocks are an obvious influence (or, to be more postmodern about it, reference), as are Sol LeWitt’s slide rule concoctions – but it’s a mistake to read these lovely works as mere exercises in nostalgia.

Castro’s Rubik’s cubes do not convey the same triumphant severity as the works of his predecessors, and appear at times to question the entire formalist enterprise - especially in the spaces between the squares, which are delineated with soft, indistinct lines and whispers of muffled paint. The squares themselves are fraught with imperfections, washed out patches and smears, and Castro frequently disrupts the surfaces of each with faint swipes of excremental brown and sapphire blue, giving them a sluggish movement that nicely counterpoints the rigid mathematics of his compositions.

However, going all academic on these works or turning them into a commentary on the fallacies of modernism is a waste of precious time – time you should be spending wallowing in the lushness of Castro’s colours. And lush is the operative word here, as Castro has filled the gallery with a tropical rainforest’s worth of febrile, breathing greens: pine green, green tea green, frog egg green, absinthe green, fern, bluegrass, slime, mint, Palmolive, khaki, barrel cactus, jade and emerald green. It’s a Christmas tree farm for minimalists!

Save this exhibit for the first days of December, when the sun goes down right after lunch. Get the friendly gallery attendants to turn all the lights on, take off your scarf, and soak up as much chlorophyll as you can, because you won’t see this much foliage again till April.

~
Derek Sullivan’s Kiosk, a poster stand plunked in the middle of the Toronto Sculpture Garden, aims low and succeeds brilliantly. The goal of the sculpture, to create a temporary platform for posters (works specifically commissioned from other artists by Sullivan, plus whatever gets stuck on the boards by enterprising locals) is hardly a lofty one. As any construction worker or Reg Hart will tell you, when you create a blank public space, the public will fill it.

What intrigues me about this work, however, is not the artist’s inflated claim that the work will “activate street level activity” – like I said, how hard is that? – but rather how much the kiosk, modelled on the poster stands one sees in Paris or Munich (or Fredericton for that matter) looks like it came from a Canadian Tire kit.

The wood surfaces are stained a familiar, suburban deck dark green (more green!), and are ornamented with rough fretwork that looks like the decorations my grandfather used to carve out of lumber scraps to fancy up his shovel shed. The roof of the kiosk is covered in black tar paper, another of Puppa’s favourite ornamental materials, and the base is constructed of common cement tiles, the kind sold in hardware stores to gussy up front porches. In other words, Sullivan’s tribute to grand, oh-so-European notions of public space and street level democracy might as well have been manufactured by Red Green – all that’s missing are the wooden butterflies, which I am greatly tempted to apply myself.

Kiosk’s unsubtle nods to the great Canadian garage make the sculpture far more fun, and more resonant of our particular cultural quirks, than its otherwise tame, anarchist-lite agenda. I bet it would make a great ice fishing shack.

~
The Artists Network of Riverdale are getting the jump tonight on the Xmas art sale rush with their annual Little Art Show - a fundraiser for, naturally enough, the Riverdale Art Walk. These folks stick close to home.

The format of the sale is a reliable one: pack the sales floor with hundreds of attractive works of art, all very small and in all imaginable genres, then rake in the dough. Works are sold via a silent auction, which allows the buyer to be anonymously cheap.

At last year’s sale, about 1000 people crammed in to see the wares, which means the real treat is watching the crowd to see who’s buying what for how little (opera glasses come in handy for catching under-bidders).

March Gregoroff, ANR Executive Director, reminds me that “The most important thing about the Little Art Show is that - just like everything else we try to do around here - we don’t anyone to ever feel excluded from the traditionally snobbish art scene.”

Not even the snobs? They’re the ones with all the money.

Francisco Castro
Serie Hiedra
Diaz Contemporary 100 Niagara Street Until December 23

Derek Sullivan
Kiosk
Toronto Sculpture Garden 115 King Street East Until April 15

Little Art Show
November 19, 7 – 11pm BMW Toronto, Broadview and Eastern (11 Sunlight Park Blvd)

The Big Picture 57

2005-11-12T10:28:00.000-05:00

Although best known, and widely loved, for her kooky paintings of a fairy-dusted, cotton candy world populated by kitten-girl hybrids and dancing pink behemoths, Fiona Smyth has never shied from visiting the darker, danker side of the forest. Her plush cuties, delicate as unicorns, eat with razor teeth.

But even hard core Smythites will be shocked by the gory goings-on in her fantastic and freakish new suite of ink-on-paper works, inspired by her recent artist residency in Japan. I hope Canada Customs didn’t check Smyth’s luggage on the way back, because there must have been some very scary manga tucked under her dainties.

A list of the horrors skulking across Smyth’s canvases reads like a CSI evidence kit crossed with The Corpse Bride, plus a bit of Clive Barker added for ghoulish flavour: monsters erupt like nests of snakes from semi-human female wombs; fanged ghosts cavort with nubile, multi-breasted teen killers; feline Kali goddesses dance surrounded by flames and innards while laser blasting robots chase dolls under skies dappled with flesh-piercing diamonds; mutants and jellyfish swim beside sainted badger girls; and everywhere you look, there are pale, whispering washes of inky flame.

To take in all the details, you need a good hour, and a sound mind. Smyth’s endlessly fecund imagination runs riot over two long walls, creating an intricate, elaborate and defiantly original phantasmagoria that’s as deftly and densely woven as any medieval tapestry (and there’s robots!). If only some smart patron would buy the whole collection and preserve it as a single work. Some smart, mildly psychotic patron.

Speculation on the larger meaning of Smyth’s visual necromancy runs from the simple supposition that her bald mixing of cute and creepy is a distillation of the dualities rampant in Japanese culture (a culture with a particular fondness for sword swinging schoolgirls), to speculation that Smyth is expanding her already full madhouse of recurring characters by kick-starting a new line, so to speak, of iconic figures. Neither of these theories satisfies me. Smyth’s work was cuddly and clawed long before she ever went to Japan, and, like any good comics artist (which, at heart, Smyth truly is), she is always introducing thrilling new heroes.

What’s going on here is no less than a grand attempt to sum up our distracted times, to match on paper our culture’s dual addiction to the sentimental and the dysfunctional, to syrupy love songs and blood-spattered video games. The mawkish and the violent, Smyth posits, are co-dependent, and the extreme representations of both that bi-polarize our culture need to be acknowledged, categorized and given names (and sweet little faces) before we can make sense of either or really think about the desires that propel both. An ambitious undertaking for sure - but what good is art if it doesn’t aim for the stars and the murky pools below?

~
After wandering Death Valley with Smyth, head for a more naturalistic, but no less confrontational, exhibition of portraits of young women at neighbouring Edward Day Gallery.

Angela Grossman’s Alpha Girls is a collection of manipulated found photographs that explores the turbulent years of adolescence with an unnerving eye. Looking at her subjects less as people and more as walking thunderstorms, Grossman externalizes their inner tumult with angry slashes of runny paint, tar black charcoal, tangles of string, needling pencil gouges and ripped paper.

Easy visual metaphors? Perhaps, but Grossman has chosen her found materials carefully. The girls in these pictures stare straight at the camera with the typical teen mixture of defiance and the need to please. And while it would be easy to categorize these portraits as raw and febrile - and thus read the girls as put-upon victims – Grossman surrounds her young subjects with a hazy, indirect light that speaks of the young women’s as yet untapped power.

~

After all that bluster, you’ll need to retreat to calmer shores. Stephen Bulger Gallery is showing a sleepy set of prints derived from the photo-diaries of Robert Frank, who has spent much of his adult life in tiny Mabou, Cape Breton.

Looking at Frank’s collage landscapes (simple, Instamatic-grade snapshots taken sequentially across the stony shores) and reading the artist’s casual, intimate scribbles about daily life in the remote village is like stumbling on a stranger’s scrapbook and peeking at the contents, minus the guilt.

The collages themselves are tiny marvels of cool blues and cream tea browns, or black and whites as delicate and pocked with shade as lacy doilies. You can almost hear the ocean, but I don’t advise putting your ear against the frame.

Fiona Smyth
The Chimera’s Daughter
SPIN Gallery, 1100 Queen Street West Until November 20

Angela Grossman
Alpha Girls
Edward Day Gallery 952 Queen Street West Until November 16

Robert Frank
In Canada
Stephen Bulger Gallery 1026 Queen Street West Until December 22

The Big Picture 56

2005-11-05T10:33:00.000-05:00

Forgive yourself if by the end of this weekend you’ve become confused over the difference between TIAF and TAAFI – neither of which is a new strain of avian flu (but may cause as much fatigue). TIAF is the Toronto International Art Fair, and TAAFI is the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, and both are running until November 7. There, doesn’t that make it all clear?

The duelling art fairs – or, as their diplomatic publicists like to call them, “complementary art fairs” – are both massive exhibitions of contemporary Canadian and international art staged in smart downtown venues, and both are packed with contributions by top names in the field. So, why two fairs at the same time?

No-one at either fair will give you a straight answer (and they sure as hell won’t give me the on-record dope) but my own experience of both events tells me that TIAF, the senior fair and the one with the big bucks, prides itself on being the Cadillac of the two (figuratively and literally, as the car company is a major sponsor), and TAAFI, the baby of the family at a mere two years old, positions itself as the hip, sometimes bratty, shoe-string upstart. For short hand, think of TIAF as Holt Renfrew and TAAFI as the Kensington Market.

Inevitably, there has been some sniping and counter-sniping since TAAFI started last year (except among the smarter artists who participated in both shows). Big wigs at TIAF were overheard describing TAAFI as “the children’s table” and “the B-list fair”, and smart asses at TAAFI were caught referring to their elder, larger cousin as “the Death Star” and “the senior’s lounge”. TAAFI supporters are quick to note that TIAF is actually produced by a BC-based corporation and run from a head office in Vancouver. How, they ask, can it accurately reflect Toronto’s diverse art community? TIAF teamsters counter that since art-making is an international concern, any worries from Torontonians about constituency issues are misguided and feudalistic. But I don’t want to start any trouble.

Why not make like Koffi Anan and attend both exhibitions? The Hatfields and McCoys can fight their own battles. The admission fees are certainly enticing. For the cost of a CD – TIAF costs $16 to enter, TAAFI is $6 – you can go to one fair today and the other tomorrow. I wouldn’t dream of telling you which one to visit first.

TIAF, now in its sixth year, comes by its big momma status honestly. With 81 galleries from 13 countries spread out over 10,000 feet of exhibition space, TIAF is nothing if not generous. Apart from the wall to wall art, there are also a number of promising special projects, including Art Rising, a showcase of painting, photography, video and installation from China, Taiwan and various Chinese diasporic communities, the Video Lounge, a preview of the forthcoming Video Art in Canada website, curated by legendary Toronto artist Peggy Gale, and the third instalment of the wildly popular News At Five, a continuously updated contemporary art gallery that changes every day at 5pm.

Linel Rebenchuck, Managing Director of TIAF, encourages viewers to revisit TIAF while stressing the fair’s local connections.

“Every year we get better and better, and also we get more and more community support. We have not reached our peak yet! TIAF’s mandate is to put together the art community, to bring together commercial and non-commercial galleries and artist groups from all over the world – and we’ve had a big impact by doing that. If you look at the difference from the early 2000’s, when only a couple of Toronto art galleries went to art fairs in other countries, you see that now Toronto galleries attend lots and lots of fairs around the world - because they came to TIAF and saw how it works.”

When I ask Rebenchuck to tell me what he likes most about TAAFI, he answers without pause.

“I’m hoping that I am not again misinterpreted like I was last year by the media … because I think that the TAAFI is a great addition to the scene. What TAAFI does happens everywhere - one major fair and one smaller one running alongside. I am glad that they are starting to find their own identity this year too. It appears that they want to do something different, and now it is actually happening. It’s a win-win for everyone, and I hope that everyone sees it that way.”

What patrons of TAAFI will see, first off, is a very different environment from the one that houses TIAF. While TIAF is ensconced in a breezy auditorium in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, TAAFI plunks itself into the cozy quarters at the Gladstone and Drake hotels. The difference is more than one of scale. TIAF feels like the trade show that it is, with all the excitement of a bustling souk. The TAAFI experience is more akin to dropping in to a friend’s house, with the added sex appeal of a hotel tryst.

TAAFI’s collection of participating galleries ranges from large institutions such as the Goethe-Institut and the Art Gallery of York University to hole in the wall galleries like Solo Exhibition, Jessica Bradley Art, and Le Gallery. TAAFI really shines, however, in its extensive series of Invitational exhibitions and performances – works specifically curated by TAAFI for the fair.

Invitationals at the Drake include a mock seal hunt, complete with baby seal piñatas, by multimedia artist Patrick Decoste, a Super 8 film-based installation by the Splice This! film festival, and a “retrospective” of cheeky video art by Lisa Pereira, who is all of 24 years old and, she says, “still attempting to graduate from OCAD”. Over at the Gladstone, the Invitational treats feature a hilarious installation by Camille Turner - aka Miss Canadiana, the self-proclaimed winner of a fictional, very patriotic beauty pageant - plus a performance work by local art doyenne Andrew J. Patterson, stunning new photographs by transgendered mystic Taboran Waxman, and a suite of outrageous neo-psychedelic paintings of professional wrestlers by Toronto painter Scott McEwan.

TAAFI co-organizer Pamila Matharu describes her fair as “a community event”.

“TAAFI is about bringing people together and having local pride. It’s not a cash cow. We’re three artists (Matharu runs TAAFI with Andrew Harwood and Barr Gilmore) who make this fair happen because we feel that there is something missing in the arts scene, that we need a place where artists can come together from different disciplines and in different stages of their careers. After being in the visual arts in Toronto for 12 years, the most thrilling comments I’ve ever received were the thanks I got last year at TAAFI. One guest came up to me and told me that nothing like TAAFI had happened in Toronto in years.”

Turnabout being fair play (sorry), I have to ask what Matharu loves about TIAF.

“I worked that convention floor for three years – I was employed by Wynick-Tuck Gallery at the time – and I met a lot of people who just decided to drop in and see the art. They were not the same people and same faces I see over and over, they were folks who generally avoided galleries. It was a reminder to me that not everybody goes to the AGO at grade 8, and not everybody is comfortable in an art gallery. I met an audience at TIAF who I never saw anywhere but TIAF.”

“My feeling about fairs and how they should work is this: If the Toronto Film Festival can bring out thousands of people who love movies but aren’t in the movie business, can’t art fairs do the same thing for art?”

Toronto International Art Fair
Metro Toronto Convention Centre South Building, Exhibit Hall E
November 3 – 7

Toronto Alternative Art Fair International
Gladstone Hotel - 1214 Queen Street West
& Drake Hotel - 1150 Queen Street West
November 3 - 7

The Big Picture 55

2005-10-29T09:15:00.000-04:00

One of the good things about this art critic gig is that galleries, hungry for media attention - any attention - send me invitations to exhibitions and provide me with images of the work on display long before I see the actual exhibition. I have to admit, this saves me a lot of time.

One glance at a postcard decorated with some ugly paintings or an email packed with jpegs of boring sculptures, and I’ve spared myself a bike ride across town, as well as that queasy feeling bad art gives me in the bottom of my intestines.

Sometimes, however, I get fooled. Case in point: when I received the Tatar Gallery’s invitation to Joseph Davidson’s exhibition of sculptures made out of Scotch tape (you can’t make this stuff up), my first thought was not kind. Apart from the fact that the sculptures on the postcard look like peanut butter jars covered with flat white wax, art made out of common clear tape is as much a non-starter (or so I thought) as a film starring Tim Allen. What could be more banal than Scotch tape? Aren’t the landfills full enough?

My second thought was even less Christian: I’ll see this stupid show and trash it. Tape art – ha! Why not make lamp shades out of Popsicle sticks, Alphagetti picture frames, egg carton waste baskets?

Well, I type corrected. Against all my better prejudices, Davidson’s Scotch tape totems turned out to be wonderfully odd, luminous objects that continued to chastise my humbled, judging temperament long after I stumbled out of the gallery with dazzled eyes and a red face. Put simply, Davidson’s office supply art is gorgeous. I love surprises.

Davidson has wisely chosen humble, kitchen sink objects to recast in tape, as anything more fanciful would be overkill (it’s hard enough to believe he made a Palmolive bottle out of hundreds of tiny strips of tape, let alone a dragon, a flower or the Eiffel Tower). But as you wander through the gallery, the dozens of replicas of liquor bottles, salt and pepper shakers, parfait glasses, baby food jars, vases and toothpaste tubes begin to appear less and less ordinary, as if you are looking at the previously unseen skeletons of objects you’ve taken for granted all your life, tubes and jars and glasses viewed at a molecular, not entirely corporeal level.

Davidson’s careful, shrine-like arrangement of his ghostly canned goods only adds to the funereal feel of the exhibition, as does the fact that the physical composition of the sculptures – built-up layers upon layers of light refracting glossy tape – makes each sculpture glow like a phosphorescent mushroom in a dark forest. Light lands on the sculptures but does not settle, sometimes appearing to come from within the works and sometimes from outside. Naturally, the clear tape clouds over and turns off-white as the layers become denser, and viewers will immediately be reminded of alabaster jars (a favourite of ancient Egyptians, who used them to preserve the deceased’s liver, heart and other icky internal parts).

The attendant at the Tatar Gallery told me that Davidson’s tape art flew off the shelves in NYC, where the still traumatized locals naturally read the empty, spectral shells as memento mori. In our context, the works strike me as more aggressive than sombre. To go to such painstaking lengths to create simple dish soap containers and cupcake wrappers out of tape, to make grand the mundane via an even more mundane material, is one very smart way to give the lazy art world a big middle finger, to say to our increasingly banal culture: You want banal, I’ll show you banal!

Whatever the intent, the results are eerily beautiful.

~
My sources tell me that hard core print enthusiasts were less than impressed with young printmaker David Trautrimas’s foray into digital print making. Trautrimas’s silk screens, the argument goes, are much more true to form than his digitals. Purists are such a bore.

Anybody who can walk away from A Confederation of Alloys, Trautrimas’s new collection of computer-enhanced and worm-spit induced prints, without giggling at these inventive, playful works is either a total crank or too busy obsessing over technique to admire the finished product. Yes, yes, the silk screen prints in the show look more like traditional prints (because, uh, they are), and digital printing can’t truly replicate the dreamy washes of saturated colour that silk screen prints lavish on paper – but the images, digital and traditional, are so much fun to look at that I quickly forgot to care.

Viewers of a certain age will see traces (indeed, entire footprints) of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cut-and-paste animations in Trautrimas’s wacky collage concoctions - especially in works such as the helicopters made out of oil cans, egg beaters and flatware, or in the flat iron souped up to look like a hot rod car. But in the smaller, less hectic works, Trautrimas sets aside the goofy visual puns and aims for a darker, more melancholy brand of surrealism. In either case, the busy but precise imagery is never less than skilfully crafted, and each work is fuelled by an infectious, buoyant tomfoolery.

Printmakers are an incestuous, often persnickety lot – it’s all those toxic inks infecting their bloodstreams, I suspect – but even they can’t begrudge a young artist’s desire to experiment. Especially when the prints-that-aren’t-“proper”-prints are more lively than the average etching.

~
Feeling under-loved? Is the autumnal urge to nest more powerful than your ability to find a co-nester? Live in loneliness no longer - Denise Oleksijczuk’s installation Perennial Love is a never ending love song you can play to yourself over and over, with one hand (do I really need to finish that joke?).

Simply walk up to the Solo Exhibition window (a rectangular shadow box built into the wall next to Dufflet’s café on Queen West) and give the large wooden handle sticking out of the wall a gentle crank. A scroll covered in love song lyrics rotates between two spools, telling you in too many ways to count, and for as long as your strength lasts, that you are the true blue love of a total stranger’s life.

How affirming, even if the message is coming from a smarty pants art project and not a warm body. At least it’s free.

Joseph Davidson
Scotch Tape Sculptures
Tatar Gallery 183 Bathurst Street, suite 200 Until November 12

David Trautrimas
A Confederation of Alloys
Le Gallery 1183 Dundas Street West Until November 3

Denise Oleksijczuk
Perennial Love
Solo Exhibition 787 Queen Street West Until November 15

The Big Picture 54

2005-10-22T10:34:00.000-04:00

When I turned 40 a few months back, a pal of mine (a questionable distinction, given what follows) offered the following observation – or curse – regarding gay men of a certain age: After 40, fags either go leather or blousy.

Dirty minded as I am, I can’t quite make the leather daddy look work. There’s too much gear, too many rules, and my vegetarian heart won’t allow me to wear an entire calf’s worth of hide. Blousy, however, is easy – you just accent every outfit with a scarf.

And scarves I’ve got, aplenty. I’ve been collecting neck knots since I was in my teens, and have dozens of hideous wraps to prove it, in all the toxic colours unknown to nature. Imagine, then, my joy at discovering Dance of Pattern, a luxurious new exhibition of ornamental fabric works at the Textile Museum of Canada. I had to walk through the show with my hands shoved into my pockets, to keep me from trying on the shawls.

Curator Patricia Bentley has cleverly organized Dance of Pattern around four universal motifs that appear in costume and decoration around the world: the stripe, the diamond, checkerboards, and centres. From this simple format, Bentley builds a multi-layered, informative (and very pretty to look at) exhibition that showcases universal patterning practices and tracks each motif’s metaphorical, cultural, and even spiritual role.

Exhaustive but never tiring, the exhibition successfully mashes together some very diverse but obviously interrelated materials – from checkerboard quilts made in rural Atlantic Canada in the 1840s to contemporary Malaysian skirts. If the resounding “It’s a small world after all” message of the show is a bit of a cliché, that does not detract from the abundant proof Bentley offers that all humans share an innate need to create patterns, and the patterns we create are therefore similar from continent to continent. My blousy fate, I’m relieved to know, is shared by men from Borneo to Bathurst.

Highlights include a collection of gorgeous, blood red Peruvian ponchos, lively green and yellow dress wraps made by the Asante people of Ghana, Congolese raffia pile clothes decorated with dense, tufted embroidery, fantastically intricate batik prints from Java, quilts from India that are indistinguishable (at least to this untrained eye) from quilts made by Canadian grannies, and sexy kemben (Javanese “breast wraps”) decorated with sword patterns that symbolize strength and ward off evil.

In between covetous dreams of accessorizing your sweater with a jaunty foulard from Sumatra, you can also learn how to weave reeds into material as tough as cord, the correct way to wear a Mexican coat blanket, the painstaking knotting process that creates startlingly elaborate Persian carpets, and, my favourite bit of textile trivia, where to look for the tiny imperfections in Indian quilts - “mistakes” intentionally inserted by quilters who believe that creating a perfect pattern is asking for bad luck to strike.

Smart and visually arresting, Dance of Pattern is a sensual delight, a parade of eye-popping colours and hypnotic patterns. My only complaint, and it’s one that I frequently have with museums, is that the show appears under-lit. Some corners of the exhibition are almost dark enough to develop film. I understand that many of the artefacts on display are light sensitive, and that bright light only hastens their decay, but the dimness is frustrating and makes you feel like you’re walking through a summer garden in full bloom wearing welder’s goggles.

Nevertheless, Dance of Pattern is worth the cost of a bottle of Visine.

~
One exhibition that doesn’t have to worry about decaying materials is Michael Davey’s Re:Forestation , a tiny arbour made entirely of indestructible, and grossly inorganic, plastic crap.

Like many artists who live on the hippy-infested Toronto Island, Davey is very concerned about the future of our natural world. But that doesn’t mean he’s lost his sense of humour. Re:Forestation, a parti-coloured grove of trees made of discarded coat stands, footballs, pool noodles, all manner of cheap Asian-slave-labour-produced toys and plant pots, is a scruffy jungle gym for the eco-sensitive. Despite the grim message that fuels the installation – namely, that we are filling in all our open spaces with irreducible garbage – the work, maniacally crammed into a tiny back room at York Quay Gallery, is actually rather pleasant to look at, a surrealist forest as bright and cheerful as Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

Arguably, the grungy found materials Davey employs are meant to convey an unmistakably menacing tone, as most of the props are as dirty as the bottom of a dumpster. But I couldn’t help finding Davey’s clever assemblies oddly cheerful. Call me simple minded, but art made out of Playdough-coloured toys is happy art. Perhaps the didactics of Davey’s forest are meant to self-deconstruct, to be as playfully seductive as they are foreboding? After all, most of us are drawn to cheap, brightly hued dollar store junk for a reason – because it’s pretty, affordable, and instantly gratifying. And therein lies the problem.

Whatever larger message you take away from Davey’s Tinkertoy timberland, the many ways he finds to build a tree from a toddler’s pink baseball bat or a bent hoola hoop are, at the very least, entertaining. All this exhibition needs is a family of live squirrels, or a rubber dingy tree house.

~
Curator and critic Philip Monk is not known for his openness. A shy, quiet sort, Monk approaches his projects with all the emotional attachment of a lab technician prodding a rat. But his latest book, Spirit Hunter, may soon change his reputation for being, as the writer Gerald Hannon once put it, the Robespierre of Toronto art.

Spirit Hunter is ostensibly a collection of meditations on American artist Jeremy Blake’s “Winchester Trilogy”, a series of video installations based on the fabled Winchester House (a mad, spooky nineteenth century experiment in “architectural spiritualism” paid for by Sarah Winchester, the guilt ridden heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune) – but the book is really about Philip Monk and his attempts to find larger meaning for a life spent looking at, thinking over, and writing copiously about art.

While Spirit Hunter certainly does its day job by giving Blake’s project a thorough once, twice, and thrice-over, the book really comes alive when Monk allows himself to wander off the prospectus and speculate on the things that worry him most – increasing American aggression, the way past violence haunts the present, and the unavoidable conclusion that, art be damned, the world really is coming to a speedy end.

It is in these passages, these moments of panic and poetry, that Monk’s latent humanism shines through. Aiding this strange diary of dilemmas is Lisa Kiss’s luminous, picture-packed design, which will help you get through Monk’s occasional egg-heady outbursts.

All these years of being intimidated by Monk the Inquisitor, and it turns out he’s just a humble country parson fretting over the chickadees in their nests.

Dance of Pattern
Textile Museum of Canada 55 Centre Avenue Until March 27, 2006

Michael Davey
Re: Forestation
York Quay Gallery, York Quay Centre, Harbourfront 235 Queen’s Quay West
Until November 6

Philip Monk
Spirit Hunter
Art Gallery of York University press. Distributed by D.A.P.

The Big Picture 53

2005-10-15T11:34:00.000-04:00

To say that people have problematic relationships with their clothing is like saying Peter McKay knows a little bit about the pitfalls of social climbing (not to mention melodrama). The many ways in which we choose to cover ourselves are as fraught with psychological complications, and outright conflicts, as our food choices, with the added bonus that everyone can see the results.

We have clothes we wear for comfort, clothes that make us feel sexy, clothes for business, and clothes to disguise our business. And who doesn’t own a pair of “fat pants”, for those days when one feels bigger than life? Choosing what, or what not, to wear provokes as much distress as it does pleasure.

Given these conundrums, I’d love to see the inside of Teri Donovan’s closets. The Toronto multi-media artist’s gorgeous and deliciously creepy new exhibition, Skirts, explores the dark side of self-ornamentation via a series of grisly, yet oddly pretty mixed media works depicting a much-put-upon, bright red skirt.

Donovan’s innocent garment (are there any innocent garments?) gets the complete Francis Bacon bloody carcass treatment. Hung from meat hooks and trussed up tighter than a freshly shot deer, the skirt sometimes appears in bad need of rescuing, like one of the hapless, gored teens from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and at other times it appears perfectly in sync with it’s surroundings, as if it were meant to be strung up like a duck in a Chinatown butcher’s window. The fact that any of Donovan’s images of distressed skirts could easily be mistaken for a legitimate fashion advertisement is an uneasy reminder that fashion and horror film campaigns often look the same, because each rely on visual strategies designed to place the viewer in a passive position – which makes sense, as both industries are in the business of selling anxiety.

Donovan herself sees the skirts as metaphors for women’s choices, and reminds me that while the violence in her work is obvious, there is also a more contemplative element.

“My mother had some clothes that she saved from the late 40s and early 50s, a number of which were skirts, particularly one red skirt, which I kept. My mother came of age in a time when women’s identities were limited, and if you watch movies from that time, women were referred to as “skirts” - a skirt was an item that stood in for a woman, it was a metonym. So, the skirt in these works embodies that limitation, and also reminds women of the limitations we still carry today.”

“A woman’s identity tends to be read by what sort of clothes she wears, and women’s (and some men’s) fantasies are connected with fashion because women’s identities have been fused with fashion. Women are reluctant to entirely let go of that fusion, as far as we’ve come since feminism, and certain connotations continue to linger.”

And yet, I remind Donovan, the skirts in her work are undeniably beautiful. How, then, did she tackle the tension between the obvious attractiveness of the skirt and the skirt’s unattractive metonymic and symbolic history?

“Clothes from that era are gorgeous, without a doubt. But I didn’t really look at the clothes as objects in themselves. I think the fact that the skirt is still beautiful in the works is a reflection of how things still are – the skirts do look nice, but are also representatives of limitations. Women play with self representation in their clothing choices, because all women know that they can assume different identities with different clothes. Like all clothes, the skirt has that double function.”

“Part of my reason for doing this project was to find out if other women think about these things like I do. Do other women face their abundant choices today with the same dissatisfaction that I do?”

“There’s an idea that we should be happy now with all our choices, shut up and be satisfied, and there’s definitely pressure to feel satisfied, or at least appear satisfied. But what if the skirt doesn’t quite fit?”

~
Glass artist Stuart Reid must have been an alchemist in a previous life, if not a full-on witch, because his new series of chemically-treated glass panels on display at Material Matters is nothing short of magical.

Using staining techniques dating from 14th century Europe – silver nitrate washes, copper dips, cobalt infusions and golden acid etchings – Reid coaxes out rich and luxuriant hues that are actually embedded in the body of the glass, not merely lacquered on the surface. The difference, though subtle, is that the works appear to have been made in a single stroke, as if the colours, shapes and radiant splashes were there at the original firing of the panels.

The figure studies and texts that decorate the panels are literally eating their way into the hard liquid of the glass, albeit at a glacial pace. Subsequently, they quietly hum with life, especially when the sun pokes through the gallery’s large front windows and ups the kilowatts. Rich blood reds infect the fringes of the burnt gold, and the blue stains twinkle with royal purple.

But you don’t need to know anything about Dark Ages glass fabrication to appreciate all the pretty colours and dancing light (I barely understood the chemistry lesson myself, and Reid was there to walk me through it). Wait for a bright day and plunk yourself in front of the glowing spectacles. Reid’s crystallized incense is aromatherapy for the eyes.

~
Toronto is a lonely town. TTC patrons sit stoically on the subway like aristocrats being bustled to the guillotine, hands in their laps and eyes averted. Restaurants play loud music to prevent spontaneous inter-table conviviality, and nobody knows their neighbours.

Katharine Mulherin’s new installation at Fly Gallery (a store front window space for public art) is a simple but effective attempt to re-sensitize our numbed hearts. Mulherin’s long time neighbour, Johnny, passed away recently and Mulherin realized that even though she had lived beside him for years, she’d never gotten to know him. To reconcile herself to this cold fact, Mulherin has created a wallpaper printed with the obituary details of hundreds of real, deceased men named John – some famous, some forgotten.

As you read the long lists of dead Johns, and the small bits of information about their lives, the list becomes an incantation, a séance in print, and the anonymity of the late men becomes impossible to uphold - each forgotten John is fortified and made whole again by the presence of the others, by the simple fact that once a name is recorded, its bearer cannot disappear entirely.

Ancient Egyptians believed that carving a name into stone granted immortality to the bearer of the name. It’s worth a try.

Teri Donovan
Skirts
Propeller Centre for the Arts 984 Queen St. West Until October 23

Stuart Reid
Torn Curtain/Tangled Lines
Material Matters 215 Spadina Avenue Until November 6

Katharine Mulherin
The Estate of the Late John Young
Fly Gallery 1172 Queen Street West (window space) Until November 10

The Big Picture 52

2005-10-08T10:15:00.000-04:00

Those of you who’ve been counting - there’s me mum in New Brunswick, and … well, that’s about all – will note that this column is my 52nd. My first year anniversary!

And what have I learned in a fun filled, action packed year of writing about art in Toronto? I’ve learned, the hard way, that many, many, dammit most Toronto galleries need some serious instruction in media relations.

It’s not that the gallerists are unfriendly, although I have met a few gate-keepers who’ve successfully kept me out (and, unlike Fred Flintstone’s cat, once I’m put out, I stay out), or intentionally negligent, or entirely stupid – they just don’t have a clue how newspapers work.

Fair enough, newspapers are not their game. But if one has entered into agreements to represent artists, part of that agreement is the handling of publicity, and that means talking to newspapers. If artists knew how badly the majority of galleries in this city handle media, there’d be a booming business in self-representation.

The thing is, publicity is not really all that complicated. Rule number one, for instance, is make sure the gallery is open when it’s supposed to be open. I tried seven times this year to see shows at a young gallery on Queen West, but the place was always closed during its alleged business hours. And now it’s closed for good. Mr. Cause, meet your new friend Mr. Effect.

Rule number two is even simpler: be nice. Attitude is only useful for selling high end clothing, because anyone who will pay $700 for a pair of slacks is a masochist. Look at it this way - you’ve sent out invitations, the front door is unlocked, and there’s a sign in the window, so why are you shocked and bothered when people enter the gallery?

Rule number three is another basic. Answer the phone. Pick it up. It’s ringing. It might be a buyer, or me. C’mon, pick it up.

Rule number four is perhaps the most important, and yet the least understood: newspapers print pictures, pictures of the art that you are trying to sell, and - how Circle of Life can you get? – quality pictures of a product actually help sell said product. Zeller’s knows this, why don’t you?

So, when a critic tells you he/she needs a picture of the art by, say, Tuesday, don’t send it on Saturday and then get all upset when the photo doesn’t find its way into print. Running a newspaper is not like making art – it actually does matter that you get your poop in a group on time. The art world is very forgiving, but newspapers are merciless.

Finally, a personal request. Please don’t follow me around the gallery pitching the art. If I wasn’t already interested in the work, I wouldn’t be there.

Here’s how to tell if I want to listen to 45 minutes of breathless art speak while I’m trying to work: I’ll ask for it. Otherwise, let this poor hack wander around and make up his own mind. That’s what they underpay me for. And offering me free art in exchange for a good review is very bad manners. If I want to feel cheap and corrupt, I’ll go to Church street.

~
Speaking of odd gallery behaviour, I was practically drop-kicked during my last visit to Sandra Ainsley Gallery. Ms. Ainsley’s diminutive but feisty mother, who is twice as scary as any guard dog and has a far meaner growl, demanded to know who I was, why I was there, and what exactly I thought I was doing in her gallery taking notes. The nerve of me! Apparently, the Ainsley Gallery is besieged by dangerous rogue academics.

I adore fearless elderly women - I hope to be one myself someday - so my appreciation for the Ainsley Gallery’s new exhibition of gorgeous ceramic sculptures by Bennett Bean was not diminished in the least by the mama tiger treatment. Bean’s work is pretty enough to calm Brian Mulroney.

The best works in this multimedia show, which includes delicate carpets designed by Bean, ceramic sculptures shaped like fans, and a series of collage works I found hypnotically awful (some art is so gaudy and overcooked that it becomes entrancing, like the terrible eyes of a cobra), are Bean’s small, cereal bowl-sized vessel sculptures that resemble dissected nautilus shells or fractured tea cups.

Glazed in shimmering gold and silver and painted with abstract patterns in bright primary colours, the sculptures are so obsessively covered in visual information that they reminded me of elaborate, bejewelled chalices, the kind you see hidden behind glass in the better Catholic churches. Under the careful, pin-spot lights of the Ainsley Gallery, the vessels glow like fancy table lamps. I kept wondering where Bean had hidden the electric cord.

Viewers may find Bean’s sculptures too garish, and there is a decidedly 80’s look (in the wrong way) being worked, and worked again, in the choppy, cut and paste graphics and clashing New Wave colours. It is also arguable that Bean’s busy surfaces mask, to their disadvantage, the evocative, strong shapes he has coaxed from the kiln.

But I counter argue that since the vessel pieces are not much bigger than a grapefruit, the layers and layers of glaze and paint force you to look closely at each sculpture, to stare into their inner folds and curves – an experience akin to examining a detailed miniature portrait or ornately carved keepsake box.

Not that I dared get that close with Ma Barker hanging around.

~
If you are still in autumn denial, Ariel Rubin’s spectral photographs of dead trees, stagnant lakes and winter-burnt meadows will send you to the closet for a fluffy sweater. Or your anti-depressants.

The subjects of Rubin’s gaze are solemn enough, but Rubin ups the Sleepy Hollow factor by attacking her negatives with (I’m guessing here), a straight razor, a muddy garden rake, a meat tenderizer and a lighter. Gouged, crisped, gored and otherwise mangled, Rubin’s images resonate with barely suppressed rage, and no small amount of remorse.

The excremental colour scheme - created by both the natural browns of the wood and the dead grass plus a bit of stagy enhancement - and an overall rotten orange peel hue only serve to infuse the landscapes with a creepy, horror movie glow.

Don’t get me wrong – these are all reasons to enjoy the exhibition. Despite the funereal tone, the works are flamboyantly gothic and operatic. And nobody ever went broke in Canada making art about trees. To the moors, Heathcliff!

Bennett Bean
New Works
Sandra Ainsley Gallery 55 Mill Street, Building 32, Distillery District
Until October 22

Ariel Rubin
Decomposition
Pikto 55 Mill Street, Building 59 Until Halloween (!)

The Big Picture 51

2005-10-01T09:43:00.000-04:00

My brief tenure in Cub Scouts – long enough to buy the uniform, not long enough to actually wear the uniform to a meeting – left me with only two lasting memories.

I remember being asked to squat down on the floor and howl at a plastic wolf’s head, which I enjoyed immensely and am convinced helped make me the superstitious pagan that I am today, and I recall, vividly, a game called “jump or smack”, wherein the Cub leader made us all stand in a circle while he stood in the centre and swung a nasty strap at our legs. If you jumped, you were “learning valuable wilderness survival skills”. If you didn’t jump fast enough, you were clearly another one of life’s pain-stricken losers. You can guess which team I was on.

If the Cub Scouts pack I joined was even half as much naughty fun as the one depicted in Toronto printmaker Daryl Vocat’s new folio, A Boy’s Will, the bruised thighs would have been worth it, and I’d be a better man today. Or at least a kinkier one.

Vocat’s obsession with paramilitary boy cultures, such as the Scouts, street gangs, and cadets, and the sexual and power dynamics that fuel them, has influenced his work for years, but his new folio (a loose term for a suite of prints meant to be viewed in a single folder, like an art book) brings all that latent libidinous energy and passive/dominant role playing into sharp, provocative focus.

The boys in Vocat’s imaginary scout troop, who look like angelic young heroes lifted from a Horatio Alger novel, except for their tattoos, pass the time massaging each other, playing homo-erotic capture games, giving each other new tattoos, and, of course, tying up their willing leaders. One former Scout I consulted, a happily married father of two, told me cheerfully, “we did all that stuff, and worse.” Now they tell me.

“I was involved in the scouting movement for 12 years, way longer than most
people seem to stick,” Vocat admits.

“I started when I was 5 years old and joined the Beavers, then went on to Cubs, Scouts and Ventures. So, I keep coming back to the Boy Scout illustrations and ideals because they played such a huge role in my life when I was growing up. At the time Scouts just seemed like something fun to do more than anything - it wasn't until later, and when I had left that environment, that I could look back at it critically and rethink what was going on.”

Is, then, A Boy’s Will a critique of the movement? The goings-on in the prints certainly subvert the wholesome Scout image.

“I use the Scout imagery because I'm very familiar with it, but also because there is a built in nostalgia to it, a sort of universality that people recognize. A great deal can be projected onto the characters and scenarios that take place within the pages of Boy Scout handbooks. But, overall, the basic message of Scouts is that we should be kind to each other and help each other out. In the work I kind of pervert these ideas, but I don't intend to completely discredit the philosophy. I admire the goals as much as I make fun of them.”

~
After watching Deanna Bowen’s beautiful, hallucinatory video (truth)seer, I was tempted to call her up and sing REO Speedwagon’s 1975 hit Dreamweaver, but good taste prevailed. Not that Bowen’s work needs any musical augmentation – (truth)seer is a floating, lyrical escapade as otherworldly, nocturnal and bedeviling as a Satie song.

(truth)seer follows a young, black-clad Asian woman as she negotiates a dark, barren space filled only with symbolically loaded, animated visions and manifestations. The roughly drawn visions – of everything from guns and crosses to chromosomes - appear randomly across the screen, sometimes covering the woman’s mouth, her laser-bright eyes, her forehead, or all of her body. Occasionally, bits of text appear, such as samples from psychological tests and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but we can never be certain if the woman is acting or being acted upon; much as we can never be sure during our own dreams if we are the protagonist or merely a spectator.

Bowen is a master at timing. I will never forget a compelling video she made of a candle flame being buffeted and almost extinguished by breath, which ended with the flame being snuffed out at just the exact moment when the viewer was about to lose patience. In (truth)seer, Bowen takes her time building and layering the pieces of her animated dream language, seducing the viewer in slow steps until we are wholly immersed in the film’s world and the apparitions begin to reveal an innate logic and rhythm.

Better than an afternoon nap, Bowen’s video will replenish your serotonin and leave you pleasantly befuddled. Bring your own pillow.

~
The gaps in my education are as wide as, well, many other parts of me, but there’s no excuse for the fact that until John Geiger’s book Nothing is True Everything0 is Permitted landed on my lap, I knew nothing about the exploits of Canadian artist Brion Gysin – no excuse but that I am Canadian, and, typically, was taught all about Gysin’s American collaborators instead.

Gysin’s art caused him to cross paths with just about every person you’ve ever read about, from William S. Burroughs, his life long friend, to Jane Birkin, Phillipe Starcke, Alice B Toklas, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollack, Cy Twombly, and on and on. He painted, he designed book jackets, he wrote books, he served with the Canadian Intelligence Corps in WWII, he traveled the Middle East, and his ashes were scattered by no less than Paul Bowles. And that’s just a sampling (another art strategy he is credited with co-inventing) of Gysin’s life.

Comprehensive and briskly written, Geiger’s biography is a fascinating read, yet it mysteriously doesn’t include any reproductions of Gysin’s art works. If there are any enterprising curators out there looking for a great subject for an exhibition, look no further.

Daryl Vocat
A Boy’s Will
Limited Edition Folio, available from Art Metropole 788 King Street West

Deanna Bowen
(truth)seer
Trinity Square Video Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376 Until October 26

John Geiger
Nothing is True Everything is Permitted
Disinformation Books $37.50

The Big Picture 50

2005-09-24T10:26:00.000-04:00

The “hemline theory”, which posits that stock market prices rise when short skirts are in fashion and fall when women are sporting ankle dusters (economists are all pervy thigh fetishists), has a corollary in the art market called the “messy index”. It goes like this: when people are getting rich off of art, artists have time to make very particular, very formal and controlled art. But when the art market sags, everyone panics and artists make art as quickly and haphazardly as they can, hoping something in the overstock will resonate with the public and kick-start sales.

To prove this theory, and, more important, to prove that I didn’t just make it all up, I point to several signs of a dip in the local art market – galleries closing on Queen West as often as they were opening only two years ago, an increasing focus, even in the major commercial galleries, on smaller, more affordable works and artist multiples, and three new painting shows that, while gorgeous and vibrant, could hardly be called exact, and certainly not stiff nor stuffy.

John Borg’s new collection of gouache on paper works at the O’Connor Gallery is a lovely reminder of why art that relies on and celebrates the impulsive gesture will always prompt an immediate emotional response. Few of us, let’s admit it, are careful planners or emotionally cautious, and art that reflects our own impulsiveness (and the subsequent vulnerabilities that that impulsiveness prompts) speaks to us with a febrile directness. If Borg were a singer, he’s be wobbly but real Morrisey, not note perfect but plastic Mariah.

This is not to say that Borg is a sloppy painter – far from it. Rather, that Borg’s work conveys a joyful free-handedness, an allowance for accident and play that gives the work a personality, and, indeed, some guts (in all senses of the word) – two strengths that more than overpay the viewer for Borg’s occasional lapses into too easy, flowery prettiness.

The bulk of the exhibition is comprised of Borg’s luscious studies of male nudes, or, to be more precise, studies of the more delectable parts of a male nude. Borg likes a rosy penis the way Monet liked a water lily – in full, misty bloom. The rest of the male body gets a good once over too, as Borg paints man flesh as if men were long and generous party trays filled with tempting, perfectly marbled cold cuts. The gouache is applied and re-applied until it is as thick as melted crayons, creating a kind of fatty opulence. The aren’t really paintings, they’re menus.

Visitors to the O’Connor Gallery expect a heaping helping of nekkid menfolk – situated in the heart of the gay village, the gallery knows its cliental – but after they ogle Borg’s supine and slippery slabs of flesh, they might be surprised to find themselves just as drawn to the painter’s luminous and ghostly paintings of Maltese interiors.

Compared to his model studies, the Malta paintings are much more cloudy, as if seen through a snow globe, and are washed with a muddied, indirect light. The dusty, sunburnt church corridors and narrow, haunted streets reveal themselves only in faint bursts of light, in patches of clarity surrounded (sometimes smothered) by a murky indistinctness so thick and watery it made me wonder if the paint had dried. These are dreamscapes, not travelogues.

My favourite work from the exhibition is a graceful yet very busy painting depicting the generous lap of a bronze Buddha. Criss-crossed with thin switches of bright paint and randomly smeared with metallic and flesh tone pigment, this is a twitchy, anxious painting seemingly at odds with its serene subject matter.

But it’s exactly this balance between the quiet and the frantic, the restful and the noisy, that makes the liturgical aspect of the painting come alive, as the viewer is confronted simultaneously with what Buddhism promises – contentment, restfulness, good posture – and all the earthly delights that work against Buddhist ideals, such as the distracting gaiety of pretty colours and desirable, shiny objects.

I doubt it wise to clutter one’s path to enlightenment with sparkly pictures of the Buddha. I won’t even ask about the nudies.

~
For a bigger blast of crazed, damn-the-impasto painting, you can’t get any more bombastic than Michael Smith’s modestly titled exhibition Light & Matter (giving this loud, storm-tossed exhibition such an innocuous title is like calling Hamlet a polite drawing room comedy) – a show that should come with a health warning for epileptics, pace-maker users, and people prone to speaking in tongues. Looking at these chaotic masses of clashing colours, I now understand how bugs with several hundred eyes see the world, or women who wear too much mascara.

I know it’s a cliché, but you really do need to stand back, as far back as you can get, to fully experience Smith’s blasted landscapes. It’s almost as if he created the paintings in a naturalistic style and then, while they were still wet, tied the canvases to the back of a speeding train. The paint doesn’t move on the canvas, it flies, jumps, tries to escape, as if it’s being continually slapped and punched. Violent concussions of colour fight for space on each surface, creating a mad contrapuntal dialogue, a mob of shouting voices. Of course, the paintings sometimes spiral completely out of control and become great blazing disasters, but even those are fun to watch.

In each painting, Smith spins his tattered webs from a central light source, a great ball of fire that anchors the disparate elements and brings the far flung (and I mean that literally, as in chucked, tossed, pitched, and heaved) scrapes of paint into a remote but recognizable focus.

This is old school, muscular painting, painting wholly untouched by the sniggering ironies of post-modernism. The goal here is straightforward and uncomplicated by representational politics - to inspire awe, wonder and, yes, rapture. Remember rapture?

~
Luke Painter’s wacky concoctions are likely to inspire rapture’s opposite, delighted giggles, but that’s the point. Painter scrapes metal sheets with toxic colours, like a street kid wielding a dirty squeegee, and then nails bizarre, printed metal appliqués to the mashed colour fields. Adding to the conflagration, Painter’s appliqués are printed with designs that look like the remains of a disembowelled robot.

The whole enterprise leaves you shaking your head at the screwy, utter originality of Painter’s vision – one clearly unencumbered by notions of good taste or restraint – and pining for your own set of finger paints.

John Borg
Gouache
O’Connor Gallery 97 Maitland Street Until October 1

Michael Smith
Light & Matter
Nicholas Metivier Gallery 451 King Street West Until Sept. 29

Luke Painter
Pipe Dreams
Angell Gallery 890 Queen Street West Until October 8

The Big Picture 49

2005-09-17T11:37:00.000-04:00

Evergon has his dewy, shot-through-gauze boys, Greg Curnoe had his bikes, Aganetha Dyck can’t stop smothering appliances in beeswax, and Allyson Mitchell is addicted to the velvety, inviting caress of fun fur. Maybe Mitchell, Dyck and Evergon could smother a nubile underwear model in sticky plush?

Mitchell’s new exhibition, Lady Sasquatch, solidifies her reputation as the pre-eminent fake follicle artist of our time – not merely because she has tamed the tufted medium into a material as pliable and evocative as any high-grade oil paint, but also because she never forgets that anything made out of the same stuff as a Sponge Bob doll (or, for that matter, a plastic shopping bag) is inherently fun, and funny.

Lady Sasquatch continues Mitchell’s ongoing project of recasting mainstream erotic images of women in her own idiosyncratic, smart ass style of feminism - an enterprise that last year resulted in a delicious series of updated, fat-positive vintage Playboy cartoons re-worked in candy coloured fun fur. For her new exhibition, Mitchell takes on the Big Foot/Sasquatch mythology and uncovers its hidden female history – a story populated by large-and-in-charge, fanged beast women and their happy human love slaves. If you go out in the woods today …

The move from extra voluptuous Playboy bunnies to full-on monster women was only a step away, Mitchell tells me, because the only thing more threatening to patriarchal concepts of femininity than a fat chick is a fat chick with a mighty pelt.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about hairy, large women, and how they are perceived as scary, which, by association, led me to start thinking about Sasquatches.”

“I grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries with Leonard Nimoy and all those 1970’s fake occult “documentaries” – the ones where the Sasquatch always turned out to be musk ox or whatever - and I still remember with love the Sasquatch character on The Bionic Woman. But I started to wonder why, after all the years of hearing about Sasquatches in pop culture, I never heard anything about female Sasquatches? How can there be tribes of Sasquatches running around the woods without females – where do baby Sasquatches come from?”

Well then, Ms. Mitchell, why aren’t there any lady Sasquatches in popular culture?

“Because men are terrified of big hairy women. So I decided to give them something to really be afraid of!”

That’s an understatement. At 11 feet tall, with hairy teats the size of tennis balls, engorged, fire-coloured vulvas that look like mutant Bird of Paradise flowers, long black claws, vampire incisors and white trash mullet hairdos that brush the ceiling, Mitchell’s lady Sasquatches are the furry equivalent of the monster mothers from the Alien movies – and yet, they are far from repulsive.

The baby’s bottom smooth fun fur mitigates the initial fright, of course, but it’s the beasts’ round and confident bodies, exuberant celebrations of plenty and confidence, that finally draw you in, make you question your initial apprehension. Mitchell’s she-hulks appear just as likely to protect you from marauding bears (and the cold nights) as they do ready to eat you for lunch.

“They’re totally sexy, but they’re scary monsters at the same time. It’s possible to be both.”

~

On the other end of the art making spectrum sits Dimensionality, a spare, at times severe group show of new works that re-imagine the sterile, clinical world of Op Art - a (thankfully) dead mid-20th century practice fuelled by modernist notions of exactitude, un-ornamented surfaces, and art as mechanization. Dimensionality is about as wild and woolly as a architectural blue print.

I am normally not drawn to art that over-emphasizes precision. I like my art a bit rough around the edges, because I am far from precise myself. But, given my inherent distaste for art that resembles a mathematical problem, I still found myself engaged by Dimensionality – perhaps because most of the works are art about art, or art history, and that extra layer of consideration imbues the work with a human presence, makes the show an examination of why the artists involved wished to revisit a largely forgotten practice than about their actual art (which is intentionally as stimulating as a TV test pattern).

My favourite contributions are Angela Leach’s beautiful wave painting, a long undulating parade of hot colours that vibrate off the wall, causing a pleasing sense of dislocation (and nausea), and David Reed’s manipulations of stills from Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo, wherein Reed has cheekily replaced the art on the film set’s walls with his own swirling abstract paintings.

The rest of the exhibition, while at times quirky or at least handsomely crafted, left me cold. Nestor Kruger contributes another of his lifeless wall paintings, meant to depict a dissected filing cabinet, shoe tree, broom closet or some other such banal subject, and Robert Fones offers two straight up Op Art replicas that would not be out of place on Rhoda Morgenstern’s living room wall. Why revive a played out genre if you have nothing new to say about it?

Dimensionality will appeal to people who like their art unburdened by content, and who believe in colouring not just within the lines, but with a ruler (i.e. Torontonians in general). The rest of us - messy, needy, infantile pleasure seekers that we are - can at least admire the pretty colours.

~

In between Allyson Mitchell’s roughhousing and Dimensionality’s austere minimalism rests Lanny Shereck’s new series of multimedia works – art that combines a modernist interest in the power of pure, primary colour with scratchy, neo-folk collage samples.

Shereck’s panels are coated in cheery, almost childish colours – tomato reds, crayon sunshine yellows – and then plastered with rough, hacked up snapshots of hurrying crowds, people carrying shopping bags and talking on cell phones, or folks who simply look very distracted by the everyday chores of life. Occasionally, Shereck highlights an individual with a bright ring of paint, or buries his unwitting subject in a swath of black paint – emphasizing that when we are in an urban crowd, we are both objects of surveillance and completely anonymous. By placing his casually gathered subjects on fields of babyish colours, Shereck further conveys their helplessness (or at least their obliviousness).

My only critique of these curious collages is that the work might be more successful if the panels were smaller, if the floating bodies were less adrift and were instead trapped in a congested field. More tension, more of a sense of panic, is needed to truly bring the collages’ innate nervous energies into full twitch.

Lady Sasquatch
Allyson Mitchell
Paul Petro Contemporary Art 980 Queen Street West Until October 8

Dimensionality
YYZ Artists’ Outlet Suite 140, 401 Richmond Street West Until October 22

Fair Game
Lanny Shereck
Fran Hill Gallery 230 Queen Street East Until September 24

The Big Picture 48

2005-09-10T11:31:00.000-04:00

Do you hear that slump, drag, slump sound? Does the occasional wet, squealing sigh caress your ears? Is your sidewalk stained with vinegary tears?

Pardon my cackling, but it’s back to school time and, like every other harried, child-free adult in town, I couldn’t be more full of schaudenfreud if I was Fassbinder himself. Let the little wretches squirm and twitch through another numbing year of rote learning and creativity-stunting - at least they won’t be outside my office window throwing rocks at my cat, or me.

For those children who’ve been good all summer, or considerate enough to spend the last two months at a camp far, far away from my home, I offer an olive branch in the form of a bizarre new colouring book by Toronto painter David McClyment. Filled with sea beasts, two headed rats and lurid rhymes, Why Are Some Monsters So Sad? is as gorgeous and menacing as a handsome but mean junior-high gym teacher.

McClyment’s paintings are known for their rabid layering, for their conflation of complex stencilled images, bright enamels, and frantic acts of gouging and sanding. But what to do with all those stencils once the paintings are complete? Since many of McClyment’s hand-made stencils depict imaginary monsters – carp with cow heads, kangaroos with rattle snake tails – he decided to recycle the leftovers into a warped version of a Sendak pictorial, a grotesque lullaby to be shared with children who appreciate the macabre, or with brats whom one does not wish a good night.

“The book is kind of an anthology of images I’ve dealt with over ten years, dealing with fictional monster forms,” McClyment tells me.

“These monsters creep into my work frequently, coming from pop imagery and from things that were important to me as a child. I guess I like the fun that’s in them. For example, one of the images is of a pike eating a swallow, borrowed from a Victorian natural science guide - a completely unlikely scenario that was made possible to me as a child by it being in a book.”

“Generally, I’m the guy who always cheers for Godzilla. So when I made this book I was conscious of the fact that we often ignore how children don’t just like cuddly bunnies.”

If the moose-lizard creature doesn’t freak out your saplings, the butcher’s rag colours will certainly tint their imaginations. Covered in bloody reds, vein blues and splotches of dung brown - the result of having multiple (and clashing) paints sprayed through the stencils – McClyment’s murky palettes are the antithesis of the bright, clean and undiluted colour schemes that enliven most children’s books.

“It’s almost like the colours bleed, literally, from the incisions of the stencils. My colours tend to be very aggressive in my paintings, so the stencils carry the ghosts of that aggression. If you see the colour as being a residue of violence, it works well against the cuteness of a colouring book.”

Would McClyment let his own children take Some Monsters to bed?

“Absolutely. I don’t think it’s an overtly violent book, but the edginess is the kind of thing kids like to play with – the monsters are scary and goofy at the same time. I hope that kids get a whole range of emotions from the book.”

“At the launch, I got kids to colour copies of the pages, and some kids went crazy, let the colours explode, and made the images even more violent!”

~
Whenever I leave town, I carry a St. Jude medal inside my shaving kit. I’m not particularly Catholic, or even Christian, but I am easily lost, prone to missing airplanes, and can’t count money. I need all the help I can get. Therefore, for my own good, I ought to buy all of the work in Barbara Rehus’s new exhibition at Loop Gallery, and probably hang the art around my neck.

In please thank you, Rehus continues to explore her fascination with milagros, those tiny tin medals used in Mexico to solicit miracles from the saints. But this time, instead of using her home made milagros as decoration in her work, Rehus lets the milagros take centre stage in a prismatic hanging garden – and the results are magical.

Made from opalescent, kiln-cast glass, Rehus’s miracle medals shine with oily under-hues of blue and green, like dragon fly wings. The 80 palm-sized works appear to be begging for intervention in everything from stomach ailments to art projects, and half the fun of the show is trying to guess what requests are signified by what medals. For instance, one wonders what would be the outcome of pinning ones hopes on a medal depicting a video camera, or luggage, the Energizer Bunny or Elizabeth II (my guesses are, respectively, a great acting career, crossing the US border without incident, vigorous sexual performance, and a bushel of cold hard cash).

Hung from the gallery ceiling with clean white ribbon, the mass of fragile milagros creates an anxious quiet that strongly resembles the humming tension found in a church filled with whispering worshipers. But don’t let that scare you off – with this much refracted light and all the shark skin colours, please thank you could easily serve double duty as a festive chandelier, or giant disco ball.

If Rehus’s shimmering art is meant to be liturgical, or at least devotional (she notes in her artist statement that her works “make it seem possible that simple prayers can help lead the way to understanding and healing”), Rehus apparently forgot, thank Heaven, to put in all the usual fire and brimstone palaver. I guess miracles don’t just happen on cold, barren mountaintops or in the dark, smelly guts of whales.

~
Seconds after stepping out of Idiomatica, a new show of works by Latin American-Canadian artists at Lennox Gallery, I was assaulted by a sky-cracking clap from one of the military muscle planes at the CNE air show. Given that Idiomatica is part of the Salvadore Allende Arts Festival for Peace, the irony was almost too thick.

Unfortunately, Idiomatica is less than military in its precision. The Big Themes at play – Latin American diasporic discontent, the evil toll of poverty and militarisation, ongoing US imperialism – are simply too large and cumbersome to make for a focused exhibition. But the show certainly gets a A for effort, as there is no shortage of provocative work on display.

Highlights include the Z’otz Collective’s dreamy, wall-length charcoal mural and paintings on paper, a parti-coloured crazy quilt of floating bodies, neck-less heads, mythical creatures and wild animals, Ximena Moreno’s bed spread made of used long distance calling cards, a succinct rendering of the mundanity (and literal cost) of homesickness, and Oscar Camilo De Las Flores’s wigged out, unapologetically didactic painting of a slumbering white plantation boss surrounded by docile natives, slaves, cavorting pigs, and a murderous alligator wielding a knife.

Why be subtle when so much is at stake?

Why Are Some Monsters So Sad?
David McClyment
Available at Babel Books and Music, 123 Ossington Avenue.
Limited Edition of 100

please thank you
Barbara Rehus
Loop Gallery 1174 Queen Street West Until September 18

Idiomatica
Lennox Contemporary Gallery 12 Ossington Avenue Until September 15

The Big Picture 47

2005-09-03T10:33:00.000-04:00

Wandering around the CNE, bloated and giddy from repeated doses of deep fried Mars Bars and horrible perogies that tasted like charcoal briquets (and were about as easy to chew), I learned, yet again, the bitterest truth about art – it’s everywhere. I came for candied apples and tattooed carnies and ended up looking at Renaissance reconstructions and dairy-based sculpture. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m anhedonic.

My failure to have good, tacky fun was not helped much by the CNE’s main artsy attraction, Travelling With Leonardo Da Vinci - a lacklustre show of machine models built from diagrams found in the master’s notebooks. To call this show a buzz kill would be an understatement. After twenty long and dreary minutes spent with these cheaply replicated brainchildren of LDV, I had to drink two milkshakes and make friends with a massage chair just to get my blood running again

Not that old Leo’s proposals for helicopters, projectors and catapults are less than fascinating: if even a handful of his technologically advanced contraptions had been successfully implemented in his day, we’d be living in a very different world, one where the Wright Brothers’ little pedal plane would be as out of date as a wool carder. The problem with this exhibition is hardly the subject matter, it’s the presentation – ugly, poorly arranged and frustratingly un-interactive, Travelling With takes all the fun out of learning (and almost all the learning too).

First off, the exhibition is way too cramped. While you’re admiring one gizmo, there’s a good chance you’re about to knock over another. People with children not covered in bubble wrap are advised to avoid this display. Even more aggravating is the exhibition’s “no touch” policy, which makes no sense at all given that all the twirling and whirling gadgets were designed to be powered by hand cranking, are fully functional, and the handles are right there in front of your tempted eyes. Of course, my friend and I touched everything that moved, for the fun of watching the machines work and the double fun of being scolded by security.

If the exhibitors had spent more than a hundred bucks on any of the replications I might feel guilty about pawing them, but the widgets look like they were made out of wood scraps by bored Home Depot clerks. At least there’s some drama in watching kids pitch fits because they can’t play with the giant Tinker Toys.

As if the models are not under-whelming enough, the exhibition is encased in a wall of bleak, light-sucking black curtains, which only serve to make the objects appear even duller. Didn’t the organizers realize they’d be competing with every garish knick knack hawker in the province, not to mention live pigs and goats and cows? A little colour goes a long way, but at the Ex you need to be a peacock to draw a crowd.

I suspect the entire point of Travelling With is product placement. As you leave this darkened and painfully still séance, you are given the chance to purchase a new board game based on “real legends about Da Vinci’s life” (real legends? as opposed to those unreliable fake legends?). Pity they’re not selling hammers.

On the bright side, there’s butter sculpting. Go ahead and laugh, but let’s see you make a totem pole, a cowboy, or a Gaudi-esque landscape out of milk fat. The fun here is two-fold: you can peer into a giant, glass-walled refrigerator and watch shivering OCAD kids in toques and sweaters hack away at glistening bricks of yellow gunk (I hope they get extra credit for rheumatism), and … it’s art made out of butter! This is exactly the sort of ridiculous and adorable spectacle one expects from the CNE, with the added bonus that most of the sculptures hold up as art on their own, silly dairy industry stunt or not.

If, as the philosopher Bakhtin claimed, carnivals like the CNE are ritualized acts of capitalist self-congratulation, affirming celebrations of plenty and prosperity linked to pagan harvest sacrifices, I state without shame that I am very grateful to live in a country where people pay to watch other people play with precious food, and where nobody finds sculptures of animals made from animal fat the least bit disturbing.

~
After the sensory overload of the CNE, I needed a bit of calm, a quiet brush stroke, a muted palette. And an Aspirin. Luckily, a new exhibition of large acrylic on canvas abstracts at Engine Galley worked better than a handful of Tylenol 3’s, and didn’t make me fall off my bike.

Toronto painter Glenn Romasanta is a minimalist in denial. Try as he might to reduce his paintings to singular meetings of black and white pigment , to spare pick-up-sticks games played with bold, calligraphic lines and sleepy brush strokes, there are busy filaments twitching under the top layers of his canvases, manic cross hatchings and choppy swathes of angry under-painting. The paintings may appear cold and barren and nearly smothered in spongy gesso, but a crackling fire roars underneath the wintry whiteout.

All the bars and blips dancing across Romasanta’s canvases reminded me of the time I dislodged some retinal fibres and saw thin, shiny rectangles behind my eyes for a week – which, apart from the fact that I thought I was going insane, was actually quite pretty. Take your time with these paintings, or bring infrared goggles.

~
Khang Pham-New’s beautiful new sculptures are as austere, smooth and soothing as the top layers of Romasanta’s paintings, but I wouldn’t try lifting one. Bigger than king size beds, these curly monoliths look weirdly (and deliciously) out of place tucked inside XEXE Gallery’s small front hall, and are as imposing and endearing as baby whales.

Khang is a modernist at heart, and his work echoes Jean Arp and Pamela Soldwedel, to name only a couple. The difference between Khang’s work and any garden (or office tower) variety monument is that Khang’s silky granite arabesques are sexy, not grandiose.

Khang builds his stony confections from the bottom up, resting impossibly heavy crowns on the slimmest of necks. My favourite works are a lithe, pink curlicue that resembles a seedling in sprout (granted, a twelve foot seedling)and a really big, dark granite work that incongruously looks like a drag queen’s gravity-defying, upswept hairdo.

Khang counters the raw aggressiveness of his materials and the stately, at times alarming scale of his work with a coy and kittenish daintiness that’s both unexpected and wondrous. I wonder how much he charges for a tombstone?
Travelling With Leonardo Da Vinci
Hall A, National Trade Centre
Butter Sculptures
Farming Pavilion
Canadian National Exhibition Until September 5

Equanimity
Glenn Romasanta
Engine Gallery 1112 Queen Street West Until September 14

Recent Sculpture
Khang Pham-New
XEXE Gallery 624 Richmond Street West Until September 17

The Big Picture 46

2005-08-27T10:07:00.000-04:00

By the time you read this, Zsa Zsa will be on her last legs. But don’t call Ben Mulroney yet – I’m not talking about the much-married, police-slapping B-movie actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, but about Zsa Zsa Gallery, a landmark on the West Queen West art strip.

Started eight years ago by Toronto multimedia artist Andrew Harwood, Zsa Zsa was the first gallery to break the Yorkville stranglehold of the mid-90’s and bring art to the strip surrounding the Centre For Addiction and Mental Health - an area once considered a no-go space for us delicate artistic types. By providing cheap rental space to emerging artists, Zsa Zsa also took up the slack created by the decline of artist-run centres, which were becoming stale, governmental and elitist.

With Zsa Zsa gone, curators and gallery owners looking for the next hot young things will have to find new poaching grounds.

Given its namesake, it’s not surprising that Harwood’s gallery gave its artists about as much attention and care as Gabor gives her chambermaids. But that was the genius of Harwood’s management style – don’t interfere, don’t bother, and let the artists make their own mistakes. As Harwood once put it, “I do nothing for my artists and they love me all the more.”

Subsequently, Zsa Zsa became something of a playground for local talent, hosting everything from stuffy figurative painting exhibitions to riotous Groundhog Day parties. Other memorable events include a zany “witch hairdressing salon”, a tortuous performance featuring buckets of glitter and molasses, sauna parties, fake snow falls, a 24 hour meditation enacted in the window, found clothing dress up parties, and a putrid installation featuring a desiccated, flattened cat corpse and a smouldering cauldron.

A natural ring leader, Harwood staged madcap seasonal group shows with contributions from dozens and dozens of artists, cramming all the mismatched art onto Zsa Zsa’s three small walls. His curatorial practice was anti-academic, to say the least – if he bumped into you, he’d ask you to be in the show. Nobody (well, nobody smart) ever said no.

Of course, I’m implicated in much of this foolishness. I had the privilege of participating in a handful of Zsa Zsa shows, and never felt as simultaneously appreciated and under-loved as I did during the many times I tried in vain to install my work while Harwood sat in a corner smoking and laughing at my inability to hammer a nail or plug in a monitor. Harwood was not a typically passive-aggressive gallerist, he was passive-passive.

Harwood’s reasons for closing Zsa Zsa are entirely personal – his own art is too much in demand for him to continue to run a gallery and make new work. He is also the co-founder and co-curator of the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, which begins its second season in November.

“People keep asking me if I’m sad,” Harwood tells me, “with that overly concerned, fake simpering tone - ‘Are you sad? You must be so sad?’ - which actually makes me laugh. I couldn’t be happier. And it’s mostly people who completely ignored the gallery when it was running who are suddenly so concerned about my well being. Now they all want in for the last hurrah.”

Harwood takes a long, stately haul off a cigarette and zeroes in on my inquisitive journalist face.

“The next person who asks me if I’m sad is gonna get kicked right in the crotch.”

~
Unless you follow the Harwood group show method described above (ask everyone, put art on wall), making art fit together is a difficult task. Somebody always ends up looking like the odd man out, the monkey in the middle.

A new group show at Xpace proves, however, that one way to solve this dilemma is to make everyone the monkey, so to speak. FOUR, a self-explanatory exhibition featuring new work by four young artists, appears to have no curatorial impulse whatsoever, except to highlight the various (and varied) contributions. Oddly enough, FOUR works, because once you give up on the idea that the art is in any way inter-related, you’re left with some fascinating examples of young creativity in all its charming excess.

Dave Buschemeyer wins the prize for silliest contribution with his series of doll head liturgical sculptures. Doll heads are the art world equivalent of overplayed hip hop phrases like “holla” or “bling”. At some point in every artist’s career, there’s a doll head phase – and who can blame the young artist? Doll heads are creepy and instantly signify thwarted innocence.

Thus, it would be too easy to dismiss Buschemeyer’s overstated sculptures. I’d rather recount how, despite the omnipresence of doll skulls, the sculptures are beautifully crafted and do carry the same fetishistic menace as the Voodoo and animist talismans they are meant to mimic. I wouldn’t want one in my house, but if you’re going to use doll heads, you might as well, ahem, bling them up.

In its denunciation/glamourisation of gun violence, David Yu’s photo-based installation is as earnest as Buschemeyer’s spooky religious sculptures, but, thankfully, contains no plastic heads. Comprised of a suspended line up of photos depicting a young man aiming a rifle, Yu’s pictures are displayed like target sheets. Each photo is also poked with holes that look like bullet wounds. Get it?

Sometimes, beating a metaphor to death is actually a good idea. We are in the middle of a gang war in this city and a little overtly preachy artwork is more than welcome. And the guy in the photo is heartbreakingly cute.

I thought I saw a connection between Tessa Angus’s low-to-the-ground sculpture and Yu’s installation, if only because Angus’s sculpture features large dark blobs that look like pools of blood – but that just betrays my need to connect all the dots.

Mounted on sheets of transparent plastic and set under bright lamps, Angus’s black holes are the most minimal and unobtrusive works in FOUR – perhaps to their detriment in such a loud show. But the blobs are rather soothing to look at, and will make you think of Rorschach tests, which will make you think of sex, and then you’ll be afraid to look at the doll heads again.

The best works in this show are the two photo series by Davida Nemerof – works so different I couldn’t believe they were by the same artist.

The first series is a haunting, bronze-tinted collection of images of museum taxidermy. Taxidermy is, of course, right up there with doll heads in the obvious metaphor department, but Nemerof’s photos are deliciously cramped and chaotic, looking more like accidental side swipes than overly studied meditations. By keeping her images busy, Nemerof avoids the cliché. The second series is a happy suite of portraits of friends dressed up as glaring pirates. The combination of goofy and sincere reminded me of David Rasmus’s seminal portraits of men in wigs, from back before Nemerof was born.

Flawed and freaky, FOUR is easily the most lively show in town. The only thing missing from this carnival are the butter sculptures and the two headed chickens.

~
Don’t tell that bumbling Bill Graham, but Toronto painter Matt Crookshank is busy negotiating a Hans Island settlement with Greenland – and it won’t cost us taxpayers a cent, or a submarine.

Deciding to treat the whole squabble-over-a-pebble with the same idiocy as the respective governments, Crookshank mailed a plan for the island’s development to Greenland’s foreign minister Josef Motzfeldt. Mr. Motzfeldt was not amused.

To Crookshank’s proposal to install an ice rink on the island for friendly Canada-Greenland hockey games, Motzfeldt responded, with typical Nordic ill humour, by calling Crookshank “Mr. Matt Coward”, and then asked him “Who are you? What is your background?”

As Crookshank kept the farce up, Motzfeldt became increasingly insulting, calling Crookshank “Mr. No One”, and signing off with a curt “Good night for hundreds of years.”

Touchy, touchy. Crookshank’s last letter, in which he graciously shares the lyrics to a cheesy Iron Maiden song about Vikings, has yet to receive a response.

Zsa Zsa Gallery
962 Queen West Final show: Bed knobs and Broomsticks Until August 30

FOUR
Xpace 303 Augusta Avenue Until August 28

Matt Crookshank’s complete Greenland correspondence can be found on his website, www.mattcrookshank.com

The Big Picture 45

2005-08-20T09:11:00.000-04:00

My 80 year old mother spent her childhood in a rural village in New Brunswick during the Great Depression, and she has not thrown out anything since. Her basement cupboards are packed with used (and mercilessly bleached) margarine tubs, jars of all sizes and girths, paper shopping bags, egg crates and enough Styrofoam trays to insulate a two family log cabin.

Mum has no plans to make clever mobiles, decorative waste baskets or bird feeders with all this crap, but there’s no telling her to get rid of it either. Only very recently have I convinced her to recycle old magazines and newspapers, an activity she engages with much suspicion.

“What exactly,” she asks every other month, when the paper products begin to resemble a child’s fort, “does the government want to do with my trash?”
They give it to the poor Acadians, I tease her. “Both of them?”, she invariably cracks.

I used to think Mum’s hoarding was some sort of psychological disorder, an habitual, anxiety-driven response to the traumas of the Dirty 30’s. But now I realize, after seeing Re:Imagine, the Eastern Front Gallery’s new exhibition of art made from refuse and trash, that dear old mother has actually been engaged in an un-credited, decades-long performance art experiment. Can she apply for retroactive funding?

Re:Imagine’s premise is simple enough: round up a bunch of artists and ask them to make something lovely, or at least amusing, from whatever disposable or disposed of materials they can find. The results of this open-ended experiment are, as might be expected from such a generalized scheme, decidedly mixed. Some artists are lazier than others, and nothing better proves this maxim than a room full of tired updates on the good old Cornell box. What could be less mentally taxing than collecting some broken knick-knacks and pop culture scraps and gluing them into a shadow box? Even I am industrious enough to do that, and I’m practically too lazy to sleep.

What excited me in Re:Imagine were those works that took discarded materials and transformed the flotsam into objects that both illuminate and rise above their mundane origins - art that truly re-imagined the junk, not just re-assembled it. To wit, two artists truly stand out in the scrap heap, no offence intended.

Daniel Megill’s tiny sculptures are easy to overlook amongst the exhibition’s louder and more didactic works, but bend down and pick them out of the pile. Inspired by those diminutive but very brainy little black cartridges that make your computer work (and that’s as deep into the technology as I go), Megill has crafted a swarm of adorable, thumb-sized metallic insects.

Like their microchip cousins, insects are miniscule information machines, fragile bodies wired to receive and convey complex systems of responses. The metaphor is plain to the point of obviousness, but Megill’s lively robo-bugs are a perfect example of the kind of work Re:Imagine should be full of – art that imaginatively re-casts found materials while asking the viewer to consider the similarities between the source object and the new creation.

Emily Rosamond’s two sculptures are less driven by this manufactured/natural dynamic, but are so gorgeous that I hardly cared about their metaphoric potential.

As you walk into the gallery, it’s hard to miss Rosamond’s enormous sculpture of a fish head, made from plastic pop bottles and thread. The light-catching shreds of blue, green and clear plastic are as pretty as a clean lake at high noon; and when the sunlight hits the fish, it appears to gently sway, the way my goldfish do when they’re too fat to swim to the top of the tank. Rosamond’s other work, a wind sock made from the soft pink plastic netting used to protect mangoes, is a subtler but no less delightful work. The long tube of netting reminded me of those slinky rice paper lamps Ikea sells, the kind meant to fill your bedroom with muted Zen mystery.

With a bit of editing, and more from Rosamond and Megill, Re:Imagine could have been a seductive combination of trash and transcendence. As it stands, it’s still got enough quirky fun to be worth the visit. And if anybody at Eastern Front needs a few hundred margarine tubs, I know just where to find them.

~
Being terminally un-cool, I had no idea what the press release advertising Toronto video collective FAMEFAME’s upcoming evening of “scratch video”, “orchestrated signal and noise”, and “rhythmic edits” was on about.

I suspect the event will be a happy mess of cacophonic sound art (what a friend calls “Nazi disco”), ironically culled film clips from B movies, and a lot of artists standing around computers trying to play the mouse like it’s a bitchin’ axe. According to FAMEFAME co-founder and video artist Jubal Brown, I’m only half right (a personal best!).

“The show’s not really about chaos, its about the dislocated position of the audience – they won’t know whether it’s art or a party, whether they are participating or having something done to them.”

“In scratch video, the visuals are not chaotic, they’re very rhythmic and precise, but they create a sense of chaos. It’s all very carefully planned. The application is not chaotic, but it induces a sense of chaos, because the results are ultimately unpredictable.”

But how does it work?

“Scratching video is like the scratching and mixing a DJ does – it’s editing and chopping up simultaneous signals of audio and video, so that there’s a syncopated link of visuals and sound. We treat the video editing software the same way a musician uses a sampler, creating a techno music that also exits in a visual realm.”

Structured as a battle-of-the-video-bands competition between FAMEFAME and the Paris-based collective V-ATAK, who mine a similar video/sound mix and match terrain, the evening will conclude with an audience choice prize for best (most irritating? least coherent?) team.

And who will win?

“We expect to win,” Brown says with a snicker, “because, to quote the band Jesus and Mary Chain, ‘we’re so f-ing good’. But I really don’t care about getting the most claps from the applause-o-meter.”

Ah-huh. We’ll see who’s left crying on the podium with his runner up bouquet.

~
Those of you who enjoyed the Power Plant’s Images of Justice show will want to catch the Market Gallery’s Heart-Shaped Box - another wonderful historical exhibition that weirdly combines violent historical events with lovingly made outsider art.

Following the failed 1837 Rebellion – an uprising in Toronto that ended in several deaths, including two executions for treason – the imprisoned rebels whittled away their days in stir by carving beautiful gift boxes. Many of the plain but meticulously made boxes carry heart breaking inscriptions to family members or sweethearts, and a few are decorated with political poems. My favourite inscription, by John Gibson, reads “Prity (sic) maidens shun each Tory” - advice I will live by with Belinda Stronach-like determination.

By focusing on these incidental but deeply personal side products of the rebellion, Heart-Shaped Box brings the events into a new and poignant light. The simple and still- relevant aspirations of the rebels – prosperity and fair government – resonate loudly from these rough souvenirs, and reading the hopeful inscriptions is as satisfying as stumbling on a cache of old letters.

Re:Imagine
Eastern Front Gallery 750A Queen Street East Until August 28.

Videodrome: Experimental scratch video art tournament
August 27, 10pm MOCCA, 952 Queen Street West $5 entry

Heart-Shaped Box
The Market Gallery South St. Lawrence Market, 2nd Floor 95 Front Street East
Until October 2

The Big Picture 44

2005-08-13T23:32:00.000-04:00

Oscar Wilde once claimed that nothing succeeds like excess, but then he didn’t live to see AWOL Gallery’s Square Foot – an exhibition so packed it would send the poor old libertine screaming for a bare room and a lukewarm cup of milky tea.

Featuring over 500 artists from eight countries and more than 800 pieces of art (who knew there were more than 500 artists showing in Toronto? Where are they hiding?), Square Foot is nothing if not good value for your viewing time - and a critic’s completion-anxiety nightmare. With each 12 inch by 12 inch work priced at a mere $200, Square Foot is also the bargain of the month. Think of it as a giant end-of-summer overstock sale, minus the lime green flip flops.

Obviously, there is too much work here for me to attempt to describe in any comprehensive fashion, and it goes without saying that not all the works were created equally. There are duds, there are near misses, and there are some wonderful scores. I will accentuate the positive, with the shameless admission that the pieces listed below are those that caught my eye first. Call me lazy, but AWOL ain’t exactly the Louvre.

Where to begin? Why not with Cathie Pak’s creepy-cute amoeboid dolls? Looking like the love children of a Teletubbie and a squid, Pak’s goofy creatures jump out of their frame, all pink tentacles and knowing smiles, begging to be purchased for the nursery, or to accompany your Barbapapa figurine collection. On the other side of the creepy-cute spectrum sits Andrew Pommier’s sinister drawing of a slouchy young man scowling underneath a heavy hoody. As disaffected and pissed as a run-off-the-parking-lot skateboarder, the boy would be the poster child of cranky, maladjusted youth if his hoody wasn’t topped off with a babyish pair of rabbit ears. Kids today – all they need is love, understanding, and a bit of downtime yoked up in the Revlon factory.

For fans of pretty colours and indeterminate shapes, there’s Lola Landekic’s delicious collage and paint flourish, a quiet work that resembles a smoke curl frozen in ice, or Dorian Fitzgerald’s poop brown dollop paintings, a joyous calamity of broken chains of dung heap colours linked by gooey ridges of flat black paint. Remember those swag lamps from the 70’s, the brightly coloured hornet’s nests made from spun plastic? Fitzgerald must have had one hanging over his crib. For more neo-psychedelia, hunt down Erin Finley’s ink-on-mirror image of a sexy boy dreaming face down in bed and admire her acid-head renderings of the boy’s dream world – a naughty subconscious landscape dappled with floating cheerleaders, semen white clouds, and, ahem, a squadron of plump and bulbous lizards carrying balloons. I remember those dreams, except I was the cheerleader.

Shoppers searching for something more pensive will be drawn to Patrick Staheli’s lush and brooding portrait of two aging, dark suited businessmen enjoying a drink, slumped in their seats as if crushed by decades of deals and haggling, or his lime-tinted, eerie painting of a Soviet cosmonaut, a man surrounded by the colour of his own fear and anxious excitement. Cameron Stott’s menacing, under-focused painting of a rocket launch would make a perfect companion piece to Staheli’s cosmonaut, and Amy Spalding’s blinking, night image of a double-decker bus rounding a corner surrounded by bruised purple lights carries a more timely message of fragility and transience than I suspect was originally intended.

Finally, there’s the odd little works that defy easy categorization – works that are well made but silly, handsomely crafted yet gleefully dumb. These charming runts of the litter include James Gardner’s daffy painting of a big-eyed tweety bird trying to lift a dumbbell, Magda Trzaski’s delightful, grinning black wire goblin dolls, or Dale Ronson’s stoner-art mirror painting of a glowing, hot pink skull (sure to be a hit with fans of black light posters).

I could go on - and on, and then some - with more of my picks, but that would be unfair to other shows in town (actually, with this much work, it would be unfair to all the other shows in town). If you’ve spent the summer avoiding the gallery circuit, Square Foot is a great way to relieve your guilt and stay satiated until at least early October. Galleries within a square mile of AWOL might as well paper over their windows.

~
Photographer Andre Kertesz (1894-1985) is not a household name, probably because his quiet works are not as showy or easily appreciated as those of his contemporaries, such as Man Ray, Brassai, or Cartier-Bresson - and nobody’s turning them into napkins and placemats, yet. But a new mini-retrospective at Stephen Bulger Gallery is a great introduction to Kertesz’s work, and also indirectly explains why the artist never enjoyed brand-name status.

Kertesz was, above all, a master of the intimate moment. While the majority of photographers of his generation busied themselves investigating movement, cinematic techniques and the relentless bustle of the modern age, Kertesz turned inward, aiming his camera at table tops, smoke trails, parks submerged in new snow, unremarkable clusters of buildings, and portraits of humble people. He dipped into the bubbling well of surrealism now and then - best evidenced in his wavy photos of female nudes - but seemed uncomfortable with subjects not rooted in the everyday, the real.

This is not to say that Kertesz’s work is dull or lifeless, but rather that it acts as a meditative counterpoint to the Klieg-lit flashiness and glorification of the new that is the hallmark of popular modernism. Take your time with these gentle works, as they reward the patient and attentive watcher, people drawn to the skittering clouds above the neon.

~
Those darling brats at Year Zero One, a loose collective of Toronto and international new media artists, are at it again – this time at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, an unfriendly, urban planning misstep desperately in need of some artistic intervention.

Deciding that if you can’t beat ‘em, you join ‘em (and who, besides Godzilla, could overwhelm the vulgar commercialism of Times Square Junior?), Year Zero One has commissioned a collection of short art films about film culture, and will run them continuously for the next year on one of the square’s pedestrian level video billboards. Screening every half hour on the 29th and 59th minute, the films play clever games with the self-aggrandizement of the entertainment industry.

In the first round, Jillian MacDonald and Manu Luksch poke gentle fun at Hollywood’s romantic and technical bombast.

McDonald digitally inserts her pale face into kissing scenes with top stars, such as Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, and she is often more convincing than the paid talent. As a no-tech response to Hollywood’s digital obsession, Luksch arranged a school of starfish to spell out “The End” and then filmed the creatures slowly making their way back to the brine. Played backwards, the starfish appear to be coming together, like chorus girls, to signal the end of a movie.

Running alongside legitimate Hollywood ads for upcoming spectacles, these films look only a little less plausible than the movies being sold - and won’t cost you a cent to watch. If the notoriously fun-hating Dundas Square security doesn’t catch you, you might even indulge in a verboten smile.

Square Foot
AWOL Gallery 76-78 Ossington Avenue Until August 28

Andre Kertesz
1920s – 1980s
Stephen Bulger Gallery 1026 Queen St. West Until August 27

The Big Picture 43

2005-08-06T11:41:00.000-04:00

A funny thing happened on the way to the Power Plant - and, no, there’s no punch line at the end of this paragraph involving an agile farm hand and a rabbi’s daughter. I discovered that I’m a cultural nationalist. Ok, re-discovered.

Currently playing in the big rooms at the Power Plant is an exhibition by the American art star Glenn Ligon, whose work focuses on African-American identity and the iconography of the US civil rights movement. I loved this work, even if I had some qualms about its polemical simplicity, because Ligon is first and foremost a very playful artist engaged in some very serious explorations. What relevance Ligon’s work has to our own African and Caribbean communities I’ll leave for those communities to address, being a member of neither.

What triggered my uppity Canuckness was not a question of Ligon’s relevance or irrelevance to our particular national experience (after all, we invite artists from other cultures to come here so that we can learn both about them and about ourselves), but a question pertaining to what might be described as the ideology of presentation. Or, to be less fat-assed about it all, the politics of who gets to play the grand salon and who gets to play the lounge - because upstairs from Ligon’s exhibition, in a far from perfect exhibition space that resembles a board room more than a gallery, sits a brilliant, eye-opening exhibition of important Canadian historical work that is, to be blunt, too good for the Power Plant’s often overlooked attic gallery.

The not very subtle implication lurking in this upstairs/downstairs dynamic is that American art stars trump all, and that their works are more vital (and box office bankable) than art that contributes to and showcases our national legacy. But I’m a pot-stirring, touchy sort, as one suspicious Power Plant employee enjoyed reminding me.

The politics of headliners and opening acts aside, please haul yourself upstairs and see the gripping Images of Justice: Sissons/Morrow Collection, an exhibition of Inuit sculpture on loan from the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories. Don’t just do it for yourself, do it for your country (there, I’ll stop with the flag waving now).

Let’s face it, the words “Inuit sculpture” are unlikely to ignite passion in most gallery goers. Every airport gift shop in Canada keeps a tray by the cash register full of the genre’s worst examples. The discipline has been greatly cheapened by dollar store knock offs and lost much of its uniqueness due to the Inuit community’s own semi-industrialization of sculpture production. To too many Canadians, Inuit sculpture is doctor’s office decoration, or Prime Ministerial weaponry – lumpy grey stones shaped like bears, owls, or seals. Nice, but about as artistically vital as a house plant.

Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The works in Images of Justice have as much in common with mainstream, commercial Inuit sculpture as the films of David Cronenberg have with Porky’s. In fact, there’s enough violence, mayhem and brutal behaviour on display in this exhibition to fuel a half dozen Cronenberg movies. Don’t tell anyone at the CBC, but Inuit life is apparently not all beadwork and throat singing.

A bit of backstory is necessary at this point: Between 1955 and 1976, the Northwest Territories Supreme Court was headed by Mr. Justice J.H. Sissons and his successor Mr. Justice William G. Morrow, two men thrust into positions of authority during a time when the Inuit community was facing both massive re- (and dis)location and dealing with the increased presence, and imposition, of non-Inuit people in the north. Naturally, things got a bit rough as traditional ways of life collided with southern white values and laws.

Justice Sissons initiated the practice of commissioning sculptures by local artists to commemorate legal cases that involved this clash of traditions and/or cases that resonated emotionally within the community – creating, in essence, an oral history in stone.

The result is a collection of sculptures unlike any I’ve seen before from the Inuit world – sculptures that combine the traditional forms and style of ancient carving practices with a bizarre, at times shocking, journalistic impulse to record murders, abductions, rapes, and family abuse.

Apart from the obvious socio-historical importance of the works (a number of the sculptures depict pivotal aboriginal hunting rights test cases), there is nothing weirder than looking at these soft, rounded figures - the comfy and cuddly, baby-fat jolly men and women who are a standard of Inuit sculpture - engaged in decidedly malignant activities. This work is gruesome and unblinking, a testimony to the horrific violence and communal disorder that plagued (and continues to worry) the upended Inuit world. This is not an exhibition for the faint hearted or for those who romanticize aboriginal culture.

I don’t scare easy, but sculptures such as Agnes Topiak’s R. v. Kaotak (the Crown versus Kaotak), stopped me in my tracks. The tiny stone carving, not much bigger than a bread plate, depicts a father kneeling with a shot gun to the back of his head while his child stands to the side, waiting for the gun to go off. The fact that the tiny gun looks like a prop from a dollhouse only makes the sculpture more sinister.

Similar homespun horrors are found in Bob Ekalopialok’s R. v. Mingeriak, which recreates a double homicide and uses bright red knitting wool to portray gushers of blood, and Sam Anavilok’s R. v. Amak, Avinga and Nangmalik, a retelling of the assisted suicide of an elder. The elder in Anavilok’s sculpture is shown standing inside an ice house, behind a peek-a-boo cut out, looking just like a mischievous garden gnome - except for the miniature wooden rifle tucked under his chin.

My favourite sculpture, if that happy word can be applied to such dark work, is Bernard Ekutartuq’s R. v. Shooyook and Aiyoot, an interpretation of the shocking murder of a mother by her child and his friend. What makes this work so unnerving is that the awful event is memorialized in gorgeous ivory carvings set on a lovingly polished antler. The fluid, glowing white ivory figures appear to be made from buttery ice cream - a surprisingly calm and delicate look, given that the sculpture re-enacts the cruel execution of a young woman by two rifle-toting boys.

Phew … that’s four out of twenty five gasp-inducing works. Everywhere you turn in Images of Justice, the beautiful and the terrible meet. The art in this moving, very emotional exhibition, a strange brew of solemn facts and lurid dramatization, abstracted forms and unflinchingly realistic portrayals - dualities spawned by and befitting a culture in profound transition – will challenge even the most hardened viewer.

Images of Justice is a stellar exhibition that deserves a national audience (and, please, a less cramped showcase).

Images of Justice: Sissons/Morrow Collection
The Power Plant 231 Queens Quay West Until September 5

The Big Picture 42

2005-07-30T11:12:00.000-04:00

Toronto multimedia artist and well known curmudgeon Sally McKay is not, by nature, the type to engage in high-spirited treasure hunts and party games - but when Case Studies Gallery asked her to participate in their new geocaching challenge/art exhibit Waypoint, she couldn’t resist the chance to examine the dark underside of the world’s newest techno-craze.

“Geocaching is this nerdy thing people do with Global Positioning Systems, and there are websites from all over the world dedicated to it. Basically, people put treasures in canisters or hiding places and then post the GPS co-ordinates on the web. The seekers use GPS gadgets to find the canisters and collect the goodies. It’s a whole subculture, which I admit I’m not part of, because I hate running around looking for things.”

“What fascinated me, however, is the distopic scenario that makes GPS work - the fact that circling around us all the time are satellites owned by the US military capable of tracking our every move. I love that people have turned this sinister reality into a goofy hide and seek game.”

McKay’s complex installation has three parts (as far as I could figure out): first, a charmingly rough diorama depicting the earth as seen from outer space, with rocks posing as planets and dollar store widgets playing the role of satellites; second, an offsite geocache – the GPS co-ordinates are available at Case Studies – that contains special codes to McKay’s website; and, third, a series of hilarious animated stories, viewable from McKay’s website, providing you find the geocache, discover the codes … well, you get the idea.

Warning to geocachers: I’m about to spoil the fun.

“The animated stories are about rocks and geology, about our relationship to geological time, which is vast and much longer than human time,” McKay blabs, “so, I hid the codes on the undersides of a circle of rocks beneath the Gardiner, rocks that were put there by the city to discourage homeless people from taking up residence – which tells you a lot about how authority doesn’t like to think in the long term.”

~
All art critics have their critical peculiarities – a warm fondness for cold minimalism, the unhealthy need to see every show in town, a slavish devotion to the deadly works of Eli Langer – and I am no exception. My problem is monkeys.

Any work of art with a monkey in it will always get my attention. I have never met, owned, or otherwise communed with a primate (certain dates excepted), and yet as soon as I caught a glimpse of local painter John Nobrega’s luscious portraits of apes dressed as 19th century French fops, I knew I was hooked by my ringed tail.

Granted, this work is not a hard sell. Nobrega paints with a confidence and control atypical of young artists, and what’s not to love about chimps in velvet? If only they smoked cheroots! But Nobrega’s dandified simians carry a sadness and vulnerability that is not immediate upon first giggling glance. Many of the creatures are posed in mid sentence (or howl), as if about to articulate a serious point. Others are grey haired and stout, like the Fathers of Confederation, and are dressed like sombre judges.

As you wander from face to face, you realize that Nobrega has created a cast of characters, not caricatures, and imbued each of his solemn and magnetic portraits with a poignant, often melancholic dignity that is as chastening (to us non-monkeys) as it is unexpectedly moving.

I wonder what Nobrega could do with a room full of poker playing dogs?

~
Who declared it Wacky Art Week and didn’t tell me? As if sputnik-powered treasure hunts and suited baboons aren’t enough, along comes a very full exhibition of the comprehensively demented work of Nicholas Di Genova.

Think of Di Genova’s art as illustrations for children’s books that will hopefully never be written – an apocalyptic world where genetic mutants and their machine friends struggle to survive constant invasion by cross-bred animals, cyborgs, warring factions of both, and terrifyingly freakish hulks.

Like characters in a macabre role-playing game, each creature in Di Genova’s unique universe has its own biography, a set of abilities and disabilities (as well as neuroses), plus super powers and fatal weaknesses. Trying to absorb all of this narrative information in one viewing is akin to trying to reduce Herbert’s Dune novels to a single short story – so just forget about learning all the Di Genova code and let the gorgeous art wash over you, metallic bit by oozing glob.

It helps that Di Genova is a maniacal illustrator. He’d need to be. His busy surfaces are covered with deep scratches, furious bloody blots, and diabolical, hypnotic patterns that mimic the tortured psyches of his mechanically augmented animals. But the work never looks messy or even occasionally experimental - just very, very frantic.

A casual tracing of Di Genova’s vast set of references would fill this entire newspaper, but the big three appear to be the so-called “Silver Age” of Marvel Comics, when Jack Kirby drew each figure with a broad mascara outline and edges sharp enough to cut skin, those cute but creepy Japanese Tomigachi toys, and, honestly, Gustav Klimt’s watery, ornate and languorously sexual draperies. As if that’s not enough, Di Genova clearly has a thing for the cheesy 80’s robot cartoon Transformers, as his army of steel plated, bionic monsters looks more than capable of kicking the rusty butts of the show’s transforming dump trucks.

Clearly, Di Genova’s work is not for viewers prone to dismiss art energized by popular culture. Many will find the art dense and noisy - hard not to with works titled “Monstrous Albino-Hunch with Pygmied Elehound” or “Creeping Jackatee Stalking Eelsects”. Furthermore, it’s arguable that Di Genova’s private alien world is of most interest to Di Genova alone, and that his substantial narrative superstructures are actually crutches that allow him to avoid artistic choices and self-editing. I propos, however, that Di Genova’s fanciful excesses and the relentless, harried look of his works actually make the work more accessible, as there is literally something for everyone in any given piece.

If Di Genova is guilty of self indulgence, he’s also guilty of generousity. This mad, mad art is a giant parti-coloured chef’s salad. Pick what you want to much on and be grateful that your bowl is full.

Waypoint
Case Studies Vitrines
York Quay Centre 235 Queen’s Quay West Until September 11

John Nobrega
Salon De Paris
Edward Day Gallery 952 Queen Street West Until August 7

Nicholas Di Genova
Due West of the Happy-Lake Hills
Le Gallery 1183 Dundas Street West Until August 17

The Big Picture 41

2005-07-23T11:41:00.000-04:00

Of the many delightful quirks that set us humans apart from the animals, besides quality footwear, Fritz Lang films, and anonymous sex, is our compulsion to collect. Everyone you know, even those bizarre and unnatural people who claim, with a self-righteous sniff, to despise clutter and flotsam, is a collector – usually of ostensibly “useful” things such as clothes and wine, but it’s the same impulse.

In my own charming circles, I know people who collect classic country and western vinyl records, unusual cacti, macramé owls (granted, that’s a special taste), and Hammer Horror movies, as well as less tangible, or at least less showy items such as countries visited and beer tastings. If you’re human, you hoard.

A new show at Xpace gallery examines the collecting urge and finds in it an unexpected revelation – that people amass objects not just to fulfil an atavistic desire to nest, but to remake the world they inhabit. Collecting, the exhibition demonstrates, is as much a creative act as it is an acquisitive practice, because when you remove an object from one surrounding and reposition it in your own little world, you have, of course, changed that object by changing its context.

To collect is to re-assemble, argue Julie Jenkinson and Michael Baumgart, the artists behind The Bureau of Productive Arts, and therefore, they ask, why not take the piles of things you’ve assembled and rework them into art? It’s the next logical step, after all.

Julie Jenkinson explains the duo’s magpie approach as one borne out of both curiosity and a desire to recreate a childlike state of play.

“Michael and I started working toward this show about six years ago, when we started collecting found pieces, magical little surprises from the street. For instance, one piece of sculpture is made from found wood, discarded string and metal, and stuff I found in the garbage. We spend quite a bit of time going to flee markets and junk yards, and then we turn the stuff we’ve found into something it is not, or was not, and give it a new life.”

“There’s a really beautiful tension created when you transform a found object, a tension between what it was and what it has become. Familiarity and strangeness inhabit the same object.”

Plus, adds Baumgart, it’s great fun.

“Part of what we’re doing is redirecting people’s attention to how things look when you stop for a moment and look at them as if you’ve never seen them before, like when you flip an object over and look at the underside, which maybe you never paid attention to before.”

“We want people to come in and be delighted and surprised and inspired, and hopefully as excited about the work as we are. After having all this stuff around for six years, it’s thrilling, and sort of terrifying, to be finally showing it all, getting it out to the public.”

Not to mention getting it all out of their studio, which, if the massive amount of work in Productive Arts is an indication, must be about the size of Heather Reisman’s solarium.

There’s everything in Productive Arts from bracelets made of pansy-shaped kennel tags from Baltimore, to spooky, manipulated early 20th century family portraits, to a giant bench made from a junked 300 year old hemlock beam, to Jenkinson’s wonderfully feral, itchy charcoal drawings of wild animals.

“We were worried at first that we put too much stuff in,” Baumgart says, “but then we figured there was no such thing as too much, at least in this case.”

“And,” Jenkinson admits, “it’s not even half of what we have at home.”

~
I’m the kind of guy who finds changing a battery about as easy as learning Sanskrit, so imagine my surprise when I not only liked, but actually understood (well, kind of) the technology-driven work on display at Interaccess Gallery.

Pulse is a survey of new work by recent art school grads with a yen for new technologies - which sounds more frightening than it is, because these students have not only learned how to make things chirp and blink using memory cards, fire wires and other gizmos I don’t pretend to comprehend, but also, and more important, they’ve learned how to entertain viewers who don’t happen to have Wired subscriptions.

Ryan Pierce creates a green and throbbing virtual garden with a low steel frame and a moving video projector that casts images of plants and grass directly onto the gallery floor. Rob King turns his personal electronic correspondence into an ever-shifting, black lined diagram that looks like a Paul-Émile Borduas painting come to life. Pearl Chen programs nets of little chartreuse lights to flash in pretty, alluring waves, and has written a tiny pocket book showing you how to do the same (not that I got past the first page, but I’m immune to pedagogy). And if you still need more science fair fun, wander over to Adam Brandejs’s creepy “Gen Pets” sculpture, a mock commercial display selling freakish monkey/cat hybrid pets from the future. But be careful, the horrid (and heartbreaking) creatures are prone to disturbing fits and shrieks.

Accessible but still loaded with enough techno gimcracks to satisfy even the nerdiest customer, Pulse is more fun, and much less preachy, than previous exhibitions concerned with technology’s impact on human and natural environments. It might even get your kids to put down that g-d Gameboy.

~
I wanted to like Geoffrey Pugen’s slick multimedia exhibition Aerobia! , but something kept me from being fully engaged - a nagging sensation that I was looking at some very old ideas dressed up in smart new designer threads.

Aerobia! is a series of mock documents portraying a cult-like organization that promises its adherents well being by teaching them to find their “inner animal”. To sell the concept, Pugen has created a series of handsome advertisements depicting half human/half animal cultists and an attractive infomercial narrated by a pretty male host. All very interesting, at least on its shiny surface.

The problem with this work is that while the show purports to explore the rough and wild animal-human dynamic, it looks as clean, cool and urban as an expensive billboard selling overpriced sneakers. The graphics are clearly more important than the subject, and whatever Darwinian exploration Pugen is engaged in is lost in the sterile production values. Shouldn’t an exhibition about finding one’s inner beast be a bit scruffy, carry a whiff of the barnyard?

Furthermore, the icy, hyper-current fashion rag look of the show can’t overcome the fact that Pugen is Photoshopping dated and well-worn themes – namely, H.G. Wells’s classic The Island of Dr. Moreau, written almost a hundred and ten years ago.

Oh well, at least the models are sexy (but that’s just my inner bonobo monkey talking).

Julie Jenkinson and Michael Baumgart
The Bureau of Productive Arts
Xpace 303 Augusta Avenue Until July 31

Pulse
Interaccess 9 Ossington Avenue Until August 6

Geoffrey Pugen
Aerobia!
Angell Gallery 809 Queen Street West Until August 6

The Big Picture 40

2005-07-16T11:25:00.000-04:00

Mid-summer is a tough time of year for art writers, the hack’s equivalent of the poky January retail season. The reason for this annual slump is simple – it’s summer and gallery owners are just as lazy and distracted as the rest of us.

Cottage-bound gallerists mount summer shows stocked with leftovers from the last season, with the occasional new small work for seasoning, and then leave the hodge-podge up till the end of August. Besides, no artist wants to debut new work when everybody is out of town and the media is preoccupied with summer festivals.

I could, of course, diligently attend all the above noted remainder sales, and then diligently report on them in my usual wheezy, wandering way, compiling one long list after the next of guests of honour and also-shows, like some demented parent checking off relatives at a wedding reception - but I’ve already seen most of the work, wished I hadn’t seen some of it, and already written about the work worth noting. And I am not pretty when I’m grumpy.

Instead, I’m spending the rest of the summer seeking out galleries that don’t get enough attention, and younger, untested artists whose dealers, unwilling to risk prime day book space, have decided to toss the younglings to the season’s warm, apathetic winds. The patchwork of uneven group shows about town (with the exception of the one described a couple of hundred words from now) can stew in their own indolent juices.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to look very far in my counterintuitive quest for the shiny and the new. Material Matters, a gallery devoted to glass-based art, is bucking the potluck trend by staging one of its best and most ambitious exhibitions to date – the first solo exhibition by noted Canadian glass artist Charles Hargraves.

Hargraves makes glass sculptures that are as about as airy and fragile as a monster truck. His watermelon-sized works sit squarely on their plinths with all the confidence and bluster of a marble bust, but with more sparkles. Using optical grade crystal, Hargraves seamlessly impregnates broad (and very heavy) rectangular chunks of light-bending prismatic glass with precious metals and peacock feather-coloured dyes, creating sculptures that are both entrancing and menacing.

Hargraves’s big hunks of prettiness give the glass medium a much needed, well, manliness - a muscularity and weight atypical of the glass art world, which too often over-privileges spindly, whisper thin concoctions. Not that Hargraves’s work is any less seductive. The hulking crystal monoliths are painstakingly stained with magical, charged particles of colour and delicate opalescent bubbles – most effectively in a series of egg shaped works that glow like the refulgent hatching pods from Alien (minus the slime) and in a stoner-friendly series of flat works depicting purple cosmic nebulas.

If only I had a desk big and strong enough for one of Hargraves’s mesmerizing, Brobdingnagian paperweights.

~
Although the new group show the horse they rode in on at Wynick/Tuck Gallery is not, technically, a mere summer toss off – it originated as the Kelly Mark-curated touring exhibition Free Sample– this collection of low wattage comedy art still seems accidental and haphazard.

The core problem lies not with any particular work (although I have my favourites and far less than favourites), but with how the works sit together. Viewed individually, most of this art would strike the viewer as curious, playful, and even silly (in a good way), but when viewed collectively, these dumb joke works become as tiresome and unfunny as a long open mic night at Yuk Yuks. There is no balance in this show – every piece reeks of the same smart ass tone, the same perverse desire to explore banality as a source of either comedy or pathos. Subsequently, this is less an exhibition than a string of one-liners.

Among the worst offenders are David Armstrong-Six and Peter Gazendam. Armstrong-Six contributes a series of intentionally underdone, Royal Art Lodge/Marcel Dzama-style “faux folk” watercolours that look like a bored whiz kid’s notebook scribbles (or, to be precise, an adult artist’s mannered mimicry of a bored whiz kid’s art), as well as an aggressively ugly maze sculpture made of dry wall (I know, I know, it’s supposed to be ugly – but that excuse is as old as ugly itself).

Peter Gazendam offers us a smoked-to-the-filter cigarette mounted perpendicularly on the wall. Yes, that’s all. Granted, the long ash on the ciggy does create an interesting tension – will somebody brush against it and wreck it, is it real in the first place? – but that lasts for about five seconds and then you are faced with the shallow fact that all you are looking at is a spent cigarette tacked to a wall. This is laconic, no effort art taken to a ridiculous, self-defeating extreme. Is it too much to ask for a bit of content?

Adding further yawns are Kristan Horton’s photographs of a shirtless man chewing some food (at least the model is kind of cute, if not over-burdened with purpose) and James Prior’s smirking photograph of a man dressed up in a garish circus costume – a work that asks us to laugh at someone else’s bad taste. Whether or not this circus performer actually exists or is Prior’s creation, the nasty ideology that fuels the image remains the same – namely, that the poor and undereducated are fun targets. Indeed, the so-called “pathetic art” school that this work is derived from is riddled with unacknowledged class biases and a souring cruelty that would be best left in the schoolyard. I wonder how well Prior’s life would hold up under the jaded microscope?

Just when I was about to leave dispirited, I took a second look at Adad Hannah’s carefully choreographed photographs of couples in hotel rooms and decided that not all was lost. Hannah’s couples appear to be engaged in some sort of celebrity/journalist relationship, a relationship that both clearly resent and yet can’t escape. Loaded with chewy buried narratives and sublimated sexual tensions, Hannah’s rich photographs save the horse they rode in on from being a completely pointless exercise in empty cleverness.

~
At long last, the works of beloved Canadian video pioneer and art world grand duchess Vera Frenkel are available for easy home viewing – just in time to save you from the idiocies of the blockbuster season.

Entitled Of Memory And Displacement, this collection of Frenkel’s wonderfully literary (and engagingly chatty) video works from the late 1970s on proves, as if anyone needed convincing, that Frenkel is the Margaret Atwood of the visual arts – a consummate experimenter and our most reliable chronicler of the vagaries of history, remembrance, our flawed hearts and even more troublesome minds.

Punctuated with interviews with La Frenkel herself, who introduces each video, this exhaustive three DVD compilation also comes with a CD-ROM packed with decades worth of Frenkelania.

Sit back, relax (while you can) and let aunty Vera tell you a dark, mysterious story …

Charles Hargraves
Carving Glass From The Inside Out
Material Matters 215 Spadina Ave. Until July 31.

the horse they rode in on
Wynick/Tuck Gallery 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 128
Until July 23

Of Memory And Displacement
Vera Frenkel
Available from V-Tape 401 Richmond Street, Suite 452

The Big Picture 39

2005-07-10T09:52:00.000-04:00

The 44th edition of the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition takes over Nathan Phillips Square this weekend and I ask, once again, why would anyone want to look at art outdoors? The outdoors is one of the few blessed places I’m more or less guaranteed I won’t have to look at art.

But I’m a crank. The TOAE has grown over the years from a more rough and ready version of the Ladies Auxiliary watercolour display at the CNE to a mature, carefully curated and rigorously judged exhibition. Gone are the days of wandering past painting after painting of spunky geraniums in wheelbarrows. The diversity of work – from Dionne Simpson’s ghostly de-threaded canvases to Ying-Yueh Chuang’s sci-fi ceramic floral sculptures – means your eyes will be far too busy to glaze over. And the prices are geared for cash and carry impulse purchasing.

Toronto painter Kirsten Johnson, a four time veteran of the TOAE, looks forward to the artsy tent city with mixed feelings. Some years, she walks away with a bag of cash and a lot less art to haul back to the studio. Other years, especially when it rains, “are a waterfall of tears, and damp art.”

“My first year at the show,” Johnson sighs, “I was sitting under my little lean-to and suddenly it got very, very windy. All my art started to blow away, like little petals. People were chasing paintings across the grass, pulling them out of the pond. I was a complete wreck, a charity case - people came running up to me with ropes and tent poles and blankets and tea and kindly advice.”

“I was the orphan girl of the show, the little innocent who forgot that sometimes when you’re outside the weather is not your friend. And, of course, nobody wanted to buy art from the sad orphan girl, not even out of pity. Oh, but they gawked!”

This year, Johnson is prepared. Her lush, trauma triggering paintings of “fighting sisters and disagreeable toddlers” will be firmly bolted, hatched, and counter weighted.

“I defy the elements to move me from my spot!”, Johnson declares, half meaning it.

“Oh, I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

~
Any new exhibition by legendary Toronto artist Fiona Smyth is cause for celebration, even an exhibition held in the Kensington Market’s latest cooler-than-thou restaurant. But buck up, brave the icy stares and insincerely helpful staff, and head straight for Smyth’s series of large, magical paintings based on the Seven Deadly Sins – paintings that ask why, if the Sins are so Deadly, are they so much fun?

Smyth is the undisputed master of the comix dreamscape, a pigtailed Bosch cruising her very vivid subconscious on a spray painted skateboard - and in these deliciously lurid, post-Pop paintings Smyth’s daydreams are lavishly ornamented with cobra arabesques, flying diamonds, ghost trees, slithering scrolls and sinning (but so loveable) bad girls with eyes that glow like polished jasper.

Never one for modernist understatement (let the boy painters worry about erecting solemn, austere edifices), Smyth steals her colours from the penny candy jar, staining her fingers, and canvases, with blueberry blues, Lime Ricky emeralds and hunting vest oranges. There is never a dull moment or under-adorned inch of surface in a Smyth painting. Is the work excessive? Yes, but in the same way a Fellini film is excessive, by nature and from necessity. Exaggeration and flamboyance are the vernacular of Smyth’s fevered worlds. You can’t illustrate a vision (or nightmare) with stick figures.

No wonder the Japanese, the same people who gave the world flying baby-eyed schoolgirl superheroes and plucky pink cats, covet Smyth’s work with the fanaticism they usually reserve for whale meat and American jazz. And here in Toronto, well, you can see her work hanging over somebody’s overpriced brunch. Shame, shame on us.

It’s long past time for one of our big institutions to host a Smyth retrospective.

~
Just as there are models who want to be actors and rock stars who want to be novelists and model/actor/rock stars who want to politicians, there are poets who want to be visual artists. Go figure. You’d think poets would aim a little higher. But remember that as little money, glory, and babe-scoring as there is in the visual arts, there’s even less (actually, way, way less) in the poetry game. Give a poet a complementary can of pop and five people in the audience and he’ll wonder if he’s become a sell out.

Metalogos, a new exhibition of visual art by poets, shows what strange, pleasingly goofy and sometimes even beautiful art happens when creative types cross genres. Can performance clay throwing be far off?

Most of the artist-poets in Metalogos are members of a hive of local babblers I lovingly refer to as the gibberish poets (they call themselves “language scientists”, but they’re just trying to sound butch) - poets more concerned with the sound of words than the actual sense any given arrangement of text might make.

Subsequently, much of the art on display is intentionally chaotic, academy-fuelled, nerdily elitist and abstract for abstraction’s sake. This show will either thrill your inner Scrabble geek or make you wish you’d never learned to read, as it’s filled with broken passages of text under glass, fragments of type rudely splayed and smeared across helpless paper, baffling linguistic grids, word games turned into sculptures, and a video/cd compilation of poetry that sounds like a particularly fervent bout of religious ecstasy. Accessible and ingratiating Metalogos ain’t - but art without a bit of irritation is like soup without salt, and I’d rather be pestered than bored.

Darren Wershler-Henry’s tribute to the late American experimental novelist Kathy Acker is suitably grisly. Acker wrote violent, gore-smeared fantasies, so Wershler-Henry naturally pays homage to Acker’s epidermal assaults with a broken text fragment printed on a peel of scrunched up vellum. The vellum, of course, looks like the cured skin of a leper, and reminded me of the demonic flesh bible from the Evil Dead movies. Paul Dutton’s famous Plastic Typewriter, a work first presented in the late 1970s, is an anti-writing writing machine. The busted typewriter, clearly the loser in an ugly fight with a hammer, creates (with Dutton’s help) wonky, disrupted, ink stained poems that are as pretty as they are illegible. Steve McCaffery, another veteran of the acid-dipped 70s, mines similar catatonic terrain with a series of decorated concrete poems that look like they were accidentally left in a pants pocket and washed with the colour load.

But save your patience for Nobuo Kubota’s joyous Scat Chant video - a long, vertiginous performance by Kubota of one of his beloved noise poems.

Sounding like a war between a pack of rabid monkeys and a dozen hungry seagulls, Kubota relentlessly chatters along, hypnotizing the hapless viewer. Even with the sound off, Kubota’s video would be worth the headache. The man’s rubber ball face mugs and twitches more, and with more wacky conviction, than Jim Carey at the Oscars.

If the poetry gig ever collapses, Kubota could take up babysitting kids with ADD.

Fiona Smyth
pickupsbreakupsfuckups
Supermarket 268 Augusta Avenue Until July 31

Metalogos
Lonsdale Gallery 410 Spadina Road Until July 16

Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition
Nathan Phillips Square 100 Queen Street West
July 8, 9, 10 10 am to 6pm

The Big Picture 38

2005-07-02T11:05:00.000-04:00

When the Gladstone Hotel announced plans to commission a series of “artist designed rooms”, I admit I harboured uncharitable thoughts. I’ve seen artist-ruined rooms in other hotels, and wondered if future Gladstone guests would find themselves bunked in similarly tacky and obtrusive lodgings.

The great thing about hotel rooms is their complete lack of originality, style or idiosyncrasy. A hotel room is a blank canvas for the guest to fill, not a theme park ride to squeeze into - and who can sleep in a room that’s been covered in sea shells and petrified lobsters, or painted to resemble the tomb of Hatchepsut?

The smart folks at the Gladstone, however, have enabled a cluster of artists and designers to create spaces that are part art installation and part standardized hotel room, without compromising either the artists’ visions or guest comfort. The trick to achieving this balance is the recognition, and implementation, of one of the great trade secrets of the art world – artists, like children and other obsessive-compulsives, love rules. Rules create a set space for the artist to fill in (and perhaps attempt to stretch), and help to narrow the multitude of options bubbling up in their roiling heads. There’s a reason canvases are square.

Artists who took up the Gladstone challenge were given a fixed set of musts – bed size, required pieces of furniture, preservation of core historic features, and a strict budget – and then were left alone to create functional rooms that are more akin to designer showcases than to the gaudy, ridiculous “theme rooms” one finds in Las Vegas (or in any of Ontario’s many Victoriana-clotted B&B’s).

While you might be asked to spend the night with an act of architectural deconstruction, a girly butterfly collection made of wool, or hundreds of paper maple leaves, you won’t find yourself cringing under the covers beside a replica of Captain Kirk’s high chair.

Travellers with a fondness for saucy, pop culture-infused art will be pleased to unpack in Allyson Mitchell’s faux wood panelling and fun fur “deep lez” den, a tribute to crafty Sapphic ladies and their 70’s rec-room stylings, Andrew Harwood’s playful Easy Rider room, a biker gang fantasy cheekily covered in glitter (the room features the same candy blue and red colour scheme as my grade five Sears catalogue bedroom – maybe you had the same sheets-and-drapes set, the one with the race cars?), or Cecilia Berkovic’s brilliant teen queen bedroom, a suburban princess’s playpen decked out with vintage Tiger Beat posters (Kristy McNicol! Matt Dillon!), a peacock bedspread and a lavender bathroom.

Guests looking for a more minimalist art experience can camp out with Andrew Jones and Joy Walker’s meticulously crafted, Gladstone-exclusive furniture and sumptuous hand printed, pastel-on-white fabrics, or Melissa Levin’s signature Puzzle Room, a narrow space decorated with expansive puzzle piece vistas of Paris, New York, and the Canadian wilderness.

If only artists could keep their homes, and their lives, so tidy and well planned.

~
Halifax expatriate Doug Guildford’s life-long attraction to all things microbial and wet has paid off handsomely in recent years, and never more so than in his newest collection of sea creature etchings.

In the past, I’ve found Guildford’s unnatural nature art to be almost too baroque, too tied up in its own curlicues and antennae to absorb in fewer than three or four sittings. Delicious as Guildford’s prints were, I couldn’t imagine living with such works because there’s only enough room for one complex entity in my house.

However, Guildford’s new series Salt Water is much more relaxed than previous efforts. Guildford is loosening his fidgety grip on his trademark subjects and the resulting cascade of amoeboid shapes and invertebrate beasties is beguiling to watch. Imagine swimming in a plankton-packed shallow tidal pool with a magnifying glass tied to your goggles and you’re halfway to visualizing the dancing, twitching feeding frenzy Guildford unveils.

What saves these kinetic works from becoming too busy is Guildford’s masterly etching techniques, which result in graphic textures as delicate and sturdy as fine lace. At times, Guildford’s minutely detailed floating world appears to be rendered with the business end of a pin, or perhaps a laser. And each print is soaked in a translucent, seductive sea foam green - a colour somewhere between the faded pine hue of day old lawn clippings and the chartreuse of newly laid frogs’ eggs, or the dreamy green of jasmine tea in a white cup.

While Guildford’s salty tales don’t quite have the power to make me pine for the seaweed shores of my own Bay of Fundy childhood (that would take an act of God), they might make you look twice at your tap water.

~
When it comes to enthusiasm and an A For Effort attitude, you can’t beat the Fran Hill Gallery. I don’t always love the work the gallery shows (the gallery with that power waits for me in my heavenly reward), but I admire the gallery’s determination to bring energetic and considered shows to underfed east end audiences.

The summer group show Woof is a perfect example of the busy Fran Hill ethos – sixty artists, one hundred plus smallish works in many media, everything from paint-and-run abstracts to high realism, very reasonable prices. It’s like an art garage sale, but with more zeros on the price tags and no ragged copies of Maeve Binchy novels.

Obviously, sixty artists means lots of hits and lots of misses, but why be negative when flowers are in bloom and men are topless?

Trudie Cheng’s child-like mini tapestries take the viewer into the savage, undercover world of urban wildlife, where skunks and foxes skulk back alleys looking for food and love. Kevin McBride’s aggressive ink and watercolour combos offer murky haunted houses and a drunk Satan (perfect post-Pride art). Martha Eleen paints spent industrial landscapes as if they were cheery fairgrounds, while Daniel Solomon taps into his inner mushroom eater with a series of gorgeous, black-light phosphorescent abstracts. Robert Durocher’s textile and encaustic works are populated by tender but creepy, itch-inducing spider forms, and print maker Jennifer Linton provides a quiet moment in the show with a sweet, perfectly executed image of a small girl in a Creamsicle orange dress.

That’s just ten percent of the show, the tip of the iceberg. If the rest of the summer shows prove this easy to love, I’m in for a lot more quality hammock time.

Gladstone Hotel
15 Artist Designed Rooms
1214 Queen Street West Permanent installation

Doug Guildford
Salt Water: recent etchings
Edward Day Gallery 952 Queen St. West Until July 10

Woof
Fran Hill Gallery 230 Queen St. East. Until July 30

The Big Picture 37

2005-06-25T11:10:00.000-04:00

Queen and Ossington is the new Queen and Bathurst.

Scoff while you can, because seven years ago, in a much humbler newspaper, I predicted the West Queen West gallery boom. And they all laughed.

Pedalling up Ossington last weekend, I counted six art galleries, five glammy clothing and house wares boutiques, two design firms, an organic coffee shop, and three trop frais micro-bars – on a street once dominated by run down hardware stores, an ugly garage/gas station combo, and unfriendly karaoke bars with blacked out windows.

Not everyone loves the overnight transformation. At an opening in May, I watched two working class guys drunkenly tumble out of a shoddy Brazilian sports bar and collide with a murder of fancy gallery types smoking on the sidewalk. The results were predictable.

“You’re taking over our neighbourhood!”, the local lads shouted. “We won’t be able to afford to live here anymore!”

Right they are, too. The typical gentrification pattern works this way: artists move in and fix up the neighbourhood, then big corporations take over. A pal of mine with a retail spot for rent in the heart of indie-spirited Queen West was contacted by a dozen US-based chain stores, all looking to hire his cool. I give South Ossington (I’m coining this moniker, and I want the residuals) two years of Starbucks-free living.

Ross Bonfanti and Sandra Tarantino, co-owners of the new C1 Art Space, have a good chance of staying afloat during the next gentrification tidal wave – they own the building. But more important, C1 is a unique combination of gallery, learning facility, and one-of-a-kind shop.

“The gallery in the front of the store is for both our stable and showcased artists. Unlike a lot of starter galleries on Ossington or Queen West, we don’t rent the wall space. But we do take commission”, Tarantino explains.

Behind the gallery is a comfortable teaching room and a showcase packed with a treasure trove of artists’ multiples. Tarantino teaches classes in painting, and C1 hires local and visiting artists to teach other disciplines. Each course runs for a month, with classes once a week. Bonfanti, a multimedia artist, claims he is “too afraid to teach”.

“We get a lot of artists who want to learn another skill for their repertoire,” Bonfanti says, “but our clients are not exclusively artists – a non-artist will feel completely at home here, because even the professional artists are beginners in the new medium.”

Bonfanti and Tarantino both have extensive connections to neighbouring AWOL Gallery, one of the first brave adventurers to land on Ossington, and the two spaces often share artists. However, Bonfanti notes that C1 is “more like a gallery shop, which makes sense, because both of us are from retail families, even though both of us swore we’d never follow in our parents’ footsteps.”

Their parents must be proud, because C1 has a great collection of inexpensive art. Among the steals are the deliciously macabre “Soft Uglies” dolls by Nova Scotia artist Mary Kim, Dale Thompson’s inventive scotch tape collages - Thompson cleverly lifts faces and text from newspapers by peeling the ink off with clear tape - and Kasia Piech’s whimsical portrait bowls glazed with liquorice, chocolate and other mysterious ingredients.

The only drawback to creating a mini service and retail empire is that neither artist has enough time to make art. Maybe they should have listened to their parents?

“We want to keep our own art careers going”, Bonfanti sighs, “and it’s hard sometimes to manage both. But since our own studios are right in the gallery, and we’re sitting here all day, sometimes we’ve got nothing else to do but make art.”

“And we live in the building”, Tarantino adds. “There’s no escaping.”

~
Richard Gorman’s luminous and loud new paintings remind me of retreating mudflats, (acid) rain-swept windshields, and that nasty, gorgeous smear an inkjet printer makes when its wheely thing gets jammed – that is, if any of these visions took place on another planet, one with two suns and no ozone layer.

Gorman’s toxic two-colour swipes are as stark a study in contrast as standing Pamela Anderson next to Andrea Martin. Turquois interrupts geranium red, jack-o-lantern orange break dances with Aegean blue, and Easter egg purple storms over baby corn yellow. These paintings are not studies in harmony and composition, they are carefully plotted car crashes, experiments in discordant colour dissociation. The fact that many of them share the same anti-taste as my old New Wave outfits from the 80’s only makes me love them more.

Literalists will search these aggressively unnatural works for real world antecedents – photo negatives, perhaps, or lightning-fused storm clouds. Well, more power to the pedantic seeker. I just want to wear one.

~
The ever-dependable Fly Gallery – a broom closet-sized window box sandwiched between the Gladstone Hotel and it’s evil twin the Drake Hotel – is clearly building its programming around the summer movie schedule.

A week before Nicole Kidman makes another 50 million playing the facially flexible Samantha in the remake of Bewitched, video artist Mark Laliberte offers a much lower budget version of the same nose shaking shtick – one that will take a lot less time (and, I suspect, patience) to view.

Twitch is a simple and simply animated video depicting a non-descript woman whose face is spasmodically contorted by a series of pouts, eye pops, grimaces, and blinks (which more or less sums up the art of acting). As the face re-arranges itself, an Atari-era soundtrack of computerized beeps and burps sings along to the show.

Simultaneously cute and disturbing, Twitch manages to reference the vile demands of the modeling industry, 70’s NFB animation, cheesy synth pop, fashion illustration, second wave feminism and the ravages of Tourette’s syndrome in just two succinct minutes. Kind of like Parkdale itself.

C1 Art Space
44 Ossington Avenue
Check www.c1artspace.com for class offerings and schedules.

Richard Gorman
New Paintings
Christopher Cutts Gallery 21 Morrow Avenue Until July 9

Mark Laliberte
Twitch
Fly Gallery 1172 Queen West Until July 5

The Big Picture 36

2005-06-18T12:35:00.000-04:00

When the press kit for the MOCCA’s Demons Stole My Soul: Rock and Roll Drums in Contemporary Art landed with a timpani smack on my doorstep, my first thought was that it must truly be summer, the silly season.

Big institutions tend to fill their summer schedules with easy to digest shows, often built around literal-to-the-point-of-dumb themes. Anyone remember the disastrously dim-witted Power Plant show The Hand from a few summers back? It featured a summer camp bus’s worth of art depicting, um, hands. Such shows, kid friendly (or tourist, same thing) and about as challenging to one’s interpretive skills as a novelty bbq apron, are the big gallery equivalent of summer blockbuster movies – easy on the eyes, even easier on the brain.

How refreshing, then, to find that Demons Stole My Soul, a show about drum kits and the artists who use them (who thinks these things up?), is actually far more meaty than it has any right to be - while still packing enough ADD-fuelled bangs and whoops to keep the toddlers from reaching for their PSPs.

The curatorial premise at work here ain’t exactly museum science: certain types of artists - the same ones, I suspect, who like to work with robots, jackhammers, and go-go dancers - are drawn to the rock and roll drum kit as both an icon of popular culture and as a really easy way to fill a gallery with an artillery’s worth of noisy fun. It’s hard to argue with that kind of pure, and puerile, enthusiasm. And if, like me, you spend way too many hours in hushed galleries trying to look overawed and suitably reverent, you’ll be grateful for the chance to rock out.

Having said that, Demons Stole My Soul is a real “boys and their toys” show. Call me essentialist, but banging on things for the sheer pleasure of making noise, or constructing elaborate gizmos that exist solely to make even more noise, is a boy culture practice as old as playing war or blowing up frogs. I’m not judging here, just observing. Take your visiting sister-in-law, the one who thinks Sarah McLachlan is the new Janis Joplin, straight to the Bata Shoe Museum.

Mothers with boyish children fond of science projects (such as “what happens when you fill a Barbie camper full of firecrackers?”), police whistles, and Monster Garage will instantly recognize the automated drum kits built by Jean-Pierre Gauthier and Mirko Sabatini. Motion sensor activated, the drums let out a cacophony of annoying beats, clangs, and thumps, aided by a hornet’s nest of wires, circuit panels, and other gadgetry I have no desire to learn anything about (I am sissy, hear me mewl).

Gauthier and Sabatini’s art is meant to try your patience, like a stationary version of an Istvan Kantor performance, but I question whether or not it needs to be so aggressively unattractive. Clotted with gear, the sculptures look like giant disembowelled laptops. The actual drums almost disappear underneath all the tacky Mad Max styling - which is too bad, since half the fun of an automaton is trying to figure out how it works.

Clearly, what Gauthier and Sabatini’s sculptures do is more important than how they look, but this aesthete’s heart can’t help pining for a few veils, a bit of mystery. Only Red Green thinks fuse boxes are beautiful.

Keeping with the theme of “irritainment”, Flo Mounier offers a 7 minute (but oh, how much longer it feels) video of a maniacal drum solo. As noisy as the endless reconstruction of College Street, this video is, like the automated drums, meant to trigger your inner pot banger, or harried school marm.

If you can get past the patter, however, you’ll notice that the video is saturated, indeed slathered in a gorgeous, pink-orange hue that’s as pleasing as a Georgian Bay sunset in August. The distorted look is an interesting choice, as it not only references psychedelic-era concert films, but also has the contradictory effect of obscuring the drummer’s movements.

Boorish percussion enthusiasts never shut up about the “tightness” of a drummer’s wrist movements or their favourite drummer’s pounding muscularity, as if discussing Olympic athletes. Mounier’s video plays with and against the cult of the macho drummer by documenting a stellar performance and then submerging the performance in a soupy bath of colour. If only Mounier provided earplugs.

My favourite work in Demons, however, is not really a drum kit at all. Prankster Walter Willems has built a standard drum kit, but replaced the drums with wheels of cheese (some real, some plastic). The fit is perfect, a classic surrealist juxtaposition of disparate materials that is both funny and dream-logical. What, after all, could be cheesier than a drum solo?

~
Note to Mayor Miller: it’s hot outside, really hot. Not all of us work in air conditioned offices. Open the damned pools!

Until that work order is filled, take a (gasping, panting) stroll down to YYZ Artists’ Outlet and submerge yourself in Andrew King and Angela Silver’s cooling video installation.

Back-projected onto a hanging garden of room-sized silvery screens, the video takes the viewer on a long, gentle car ride across a softly lit city nightscape. Being inside King and Silver’s video tunnel is like sitting on the passenger side of your best friend’s car, hanging your head out the window to catch the breeze.

A simple, sensual delight, the installation should be enjoyed slowly, like a chilled drink. Bring a sexy friend, a transistor radio, and pull over for a bit of necking.

~
Multimedia artist Natalie Wood poses an intriguing question in her latest project – is Mickey Mouse African American?

Think about it. His skin is black. He started his career in the South, on a river boat no less. He wears the same white gloves favoured by Jim Crow and minstrel singers. What more do you need, a DNA test? Well, here it is.

Wood’s project is part of an ongoing internet-based work called Kinlinks, which she describes as “a faux corporation that does genetic testing on popular western icons to find out whether they have black/African genes or ancestry.”

Inside the site, Wood conflates images of Mickey with images of Al Jolson in black face, vintage pictures of African-American kids (including a priceless picture of a small African-American girl whose hair has been teased into two pom-pom balls, resembling Mickey’s round ears), and vaudeville minstrel performers.

Wood’s fake “genetic scan” concludes that Mickey is “25% African” (and, I’d add, 100% gay – he’s the black Richard Simmons). The website also contains a hilarious gene test on the Medusa, matching images of the legendary snake-haired lady with pictures of white kids wearing the Vancouver passport (i.e. blond dreads).

I can’t wait to see what Kinlinks does with Stephen Harper’s Sammy Davis hairdo.

Demons Stole My Soul: Rock and Roll Drums in Contemporary Art
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
952 Queen Street West Until July 3

Andrew King & Angela Silver
ScenoArt
YYZ Artists’ Outlet 401 Richmond St. West, Suite 140
Until July 9

Natalie Wood
Kink The Links
http://vtapedigital.org/kinlinks
Indefinite run.

The Big Picture 35

2005-06-11T13:36:00.000-04:00

Why do dinosaurs excite our imaginations? Are they, as many ethnologists claim, a reminder of our sublimated pagan past, of a time when humans readily believed in monsters? Or do they have a more current function, as potent symbols of our own fear of extinction? Is it a coincidence that dinosaur science, and the philosophizing that trails behind it, began in earnest in the mid 19th century, just when more thoughtful folks were beginning to question the ravages of the Industrial Revolution?

The racial memory and projection theories are both perfectly sound explanations of our ongoing fascination with the long dead creatures, but I have my own theory, infantile as it may be – we want to see one, pet one, maybe even keep one as a pet.

Proof? As soon as dinosaurs stomped their way into the popular imagination, popular fiction began grinding out stories of dinosaur/human interaction. Reports of dinosaur sightings regularly turned up in the excitable penny press (and still do in the more amusing tabloids). And while Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle both wrote best selling adventure novels featuring encounters between explorers and giant lizards, the Loch Ness Monster myth (and subsequent cottage industry) sprouted up like a horned weed, energized by the startling creatures found in fossil beds. Jurassic Park is just the latest in a long line of dinosaur entertainments.

Is it surprising, then, that the hottest field of dinosaur study today is the study of the so-called feathered dinosaurs? The idea that a humble robin pecking at a garbage bag is actually a descendent of an enormous, freakish lizard offers those of us inclined to the mystical a live connection to the planet’s distant and awe-inspiring past. And it’s this potential for romantic daydreaming that the Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibition Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight successfully exploits.

Packed with information and a truck load of beautiful fossils, Feathered Dinosaurs explores the key question in the bird-dinosaur controversy: are the feathered fossils uncovered by palaeontologists early versions of flightless birds, such as the emu, or are they dinosaurs covered in feathers? Furthermore, if the fossils are feathered dinosaurs, are they the fore-parents of birds?

Scientists have been debating these puzzles since the 1860’s, so don’t expect me to give you a final answer (although I did once watch a flock of finches attack a seed ball with a ferocity that was distinctly reptilian) – what I can conclude is that Feathered Dinosaurs, the exhibition, is delicious viewing.

The fossils, lifted from the apparently very busy quarries of Liaoning, China, are jewel perfect. Displayed individually in small vitrines, the fossils have a delicacy and clarity that will surprise museum goers who’ve gotten used to looking at half-visible and muddied shapes buried in dark rock.

Entire little creatures jump out from the stone, many of them frozen in mid slither. A school (school? What’s the word for a group of extinct aquatic creatures?) of tiny, long-necked dinosaurs swims by, tails bent like rudders. A small, football sized dinosaur fossil rests with its head curled on its front paws (paws? feet? talons?), looking more like a sleeping cat than an SUV crushing monster. A tiny, perfectly articulated turtle, about the size of three loonies, could be mistaken for a brooch.

The speculative models of the feathery dragons are no less impressive. If the scientists are right, these beasts strutted around carrying more colour than a Carnival float. Garish orange feathers crest over flanks of chartreuse feathers, with blue and scarlet feathers for trim. Chanel was right – bad taste is eternal.

My one complaint about Feathered Dinosaurs is dramaturgical. The exhibition opens with a spectacular bang - as you enter, a gaggle of giant, rampaging feather dusters lurch out at you, scary and magical. After that show stopper, however, it’s all fossils, text, video and much smaller, less dramatic models.

I loved the fossils and even read half of the text, but as I watched people bring their children through the exhibition, I realized (and heard, over and over) that the small kids were bored by the intricate fossils and informative narration. You can hardly blame the poor hatchlings.

The lesson here is one every huckster knows. Save your best material for last.

~
Emerging painter Scott Pattinson originally trained to become an architect, but don’t hold that against his paintings. Pattinson’s newest series of abstracts, Rafter, are as exuberantly messy as a dropped palette (and twice as colourful).

It’s tempting to describe Pattinson as an action painter, a splatter, swipe and run artist - but his works are more considered than accidental, and betray hints of underlying (perhaps architectural?) structures. Imagine a stained glass window fed through a blender: you can sense that the pieces and bright bursts of colour once conveyed a form, but now that the original has been smashed, you’re left to marvel at the riotous pile.

And Pattinson really piles it on. Scarred, cross hatched surfaces are clotted with smudged pastels, inky black geometries are interrupted by curls of hot colour or nullifying white, and everywhere a battle rages between calming, flat stretches of neutral colour and indiscreet washes of unmixed, raw paint.

Modesty is not one of Pattinson’s painterly virtues. At times, the paintings look like they were painted with thumbs, fingernails, and toes. But modest abstracts are for hotel lobbies.

~
Trying to add up the many pieces in Emmanuelle Leonard’s unfocused multimedia work I Call On The Inquisition (Self Portrait) is a fool’s game (so, here I go).

That faux-literary title is a hint that Leonard is milking some sacred art-of-obfustication cows, and that the viewer is in for some pretentious twaddle. Leonard does not disappoint – her collection of pictures of herself in various media, handsome as many of them are, add up to a lot of poses with no real position.

My core problem with this work is its familiarity. Leonard depicts herself as a videogame character, and reminds me of Karma Clarke-Davis’s super heroine videos. Leonard displays a series of film stills showing herself in the midst of a violent confrontation, and makes me think of Paulette Phillips’s film installations.

I’m sure all of Leonard’s bits add up to something frightfully important, something to do with self representation, the ambiguous gaze, and unstable narratives, but if you’ve been anywhere near an art gallery in the past 15 years, you’ve already been down this yawning academic path, ad nauseum.

Where’s a giant, carnivorous down pillow when you need it?

Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen’s Park Until September 5

Scott Pattinson
Rafter
Gallery Hittite 107 Scollard Street Until June 18

Emmanuelle Leonard
I Call On The Inquisition (Self Portrait)
Pari Nadimi Gallery 254 Niagara Street Until July 2

Artist Biographies

2005-06-07T17:51:00.000-04:00

Charles Nicholl
Leonardo Da Vinci: Flights of the Mind
Viking 623 pages $48.00

Meryle Secrest
Duveen: A Life in Art
Knopf 517 pages $50.00

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe
Norton 629 pages $51.00

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
De Kooning: An American Master
Knopf 732 pages $50.00

There is a misconception in the publishing world that biographies of famous people are educational tools. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason to take time out of your own life to read about the life of someone you’ve never met – artist, queen, politician, pastry chef – is high quality gossip.

For instance, I can learn all I want about Aleister Crowley’s mystical musings by actually reading Aleister Crowley’s mystical musings. But it wasn’t until I read a tasty biography of Crowley that I learned he was into birching, inter-generational sex and rough sodomy, or that he had a pretty but stunned daughter named Zsa Zsa - information I consider priceless. Stuff the monographs and start shovelling.

With this entertain-me-or-be-tossed attitude, I ploughed my way through three new, very hefty biographies of famous artists (plus one collector), hoping to turn up some gold with the sod. The results were decidedly mucky, just the way I like it.

~
Charles Nicholl’s lively life of Leonardo Da Vinci (not that the world needed another book about Leonardo Da Vinci, but there is that novel about his code that seems to be selling …) is full of choice tidbits. Da Vinci was an enthusiastic dissector of corpses, sometimes taking chunks of fresh cadaver home with him (perhaps the lighting was better). Da Vinci’s many male apprentices – lovers? - bitched and clawed for the Master’s affections like an Italian nobility version of Elimidate. Everyone knows that Da Vinci was gay, but did you know he was once arrested by the Officers of the Night for sodomy? Or that he liked to draw cartoons of penises dancing a jig? What a fun guy!

Entertaining and informative, Nicholl’s book strikes the right balance between scholarly detail and salacious whisperings. But don’t bother hunting down Nicholl’s hundreds of references to lesser Italian artists and minor political leaders, or you’ll still be reading this book by next Christmas.

~
Joseph Duveen, a British art dealer who generated considerable tittering during his life, gets the full warts and Windsors treatment in Meryle Secrest’s absorbing biography – much of which is gleaned from heretofore unavailable documents.

Duveen built his career selling Old Masters poached from crumbling British manors to Gilded Age American robber barons, and thus instigated the shift in art world power from Europe to the United States. If only we’d had a Duveen in this country.

A flamboyant public figure who spent half his adulthood embroiled in one arcane lawsuit after the next – each nicely chronicled by Secrest – and who climbed to remarkable social heights for a Jew living amongst uptight British nobility, Duveen was nevertheless extremely private about his domestic life. So don’t expect any truly revelatory dirt.

What Secrest does find, however, is a Duveen few people knew, a sentimental and emotive man living (and thriving) in a cut throat world. If that’s not enough for you, the side bars about bad behaviour by London’s art mad aristocrats will scald the corners of your black heart. It’s a wonder the Mafia hasn’t dropped porn and drugs for art.

~
Before I read Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s breezy biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, I figured I’d heard enough about the grand old gynocologist of the desert. I keenly remember the second wave of O’Keeffe mania in the 80’s, when you couldn’t buy a paper plate that didn’t invite you to experience O’Keeffe’s gauzy meditations on the flowery petals of womanhood.

But now that I know about the O’Keeffe who enjoyed fooling around with all sorts of partners, who frequently lied to the media (for fun), who was chronically neurotic about food preparation (she once wrote “There is a bit of bitch in every good cook”), and who, generally, was a fiercely competitive and often nasty ass kicker, I am less inclined to see her as a wholesome, idealized earth mother caricature, a table top feminism one liner.

Drohojowska-Philp has rescued O’Keeffe’s reputation from the Mother Theresa treatment under which it has suffered for decades, giving us back the flawed human being underneath the icon. Can a bio-pic be far off? I’d cast Glenn Close as O’Keeffe, or Christopher Walken.

~
If you really want to hunt for the Kurtz in American art’s heart of darkness, you don’t need to look much further than Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s biography of Willem de Kooning. Celebrated today for his startling abstract paintings, de Kooning had everything against him – poverty, a childhood in an abusive home, immigration to New York during the Depression, a fondness for large amounts of alcohol, and an almost insatiable appetite for ladies.

Any one of these hurdles would have felled a lesser artist, but as Stevens and Swan amply demonstrate, de Kooning was possessed of both luck and charm, and he became, at his height, the art world equivalent of a pop star (with all the attendant bad habits).

Recent scholarship on de Kooning has over-emphasized his allegedly misogynistic attitude toward women, as evidenced (again, allegedly) in his supposedly violent portraits of female subjects. Swan and Stevens, however, show us a more complicated artist, a lover of women who also suffered from a blinding fear of permanence and commitment. This revelation leads the reader to wonder if the pulled-apart women in his paintings are meant to be viewed as people in mid-transition, in flux - as mirrors to de Kooning’s own instability.

My only critique of this book is that I wanted to learn more about the social world de Kooning inhabited, the New York of the last century. The reader is told that de Kooning was a man about town, but where did he hang out? What did his haunts look like? Who else was there? Just how sleazy were the man’s tastes?

Call me shallow, but I like my psychologizing peppered with salty tales.

Book Review:Anthony Goicolea

2005-06-07T17:48:00.000-04:00

Anthony Goicolea
Twin Palms Publishers
160 pages $60 US

At the risk of being the uncoolest critic in town … I hate this book. There, I said it. I feel better now.

Here’s why I’m supposed to like Anthony Goicolea’s silly, overstated boys-on-boys erotica: it’s naughty, it’s art school dangerous, there’s a hint of chic performativity theory in his use of layers of digitalization of himself (all the “boys” in the book are the boyish, but adult, Goicolea), it is meant to shock with its play violence and play pubescent sexuality, and New York loves him, baby! And, arguably, Goicolea is exploring some taboo terrain, with his exploration of teen erotica (even if the teens are fake teens) – it’s small wonder that American critics have taken to his work, given the conservative, sex-panic atmosphere that clouds any discussion of teen sexuality in the United States. So, kudos to Goicolea for at least trying to stir the pot.

However, here’s why I actually dislike Goicolea’s laboured photoconstructions: I read Lord of the Flies in grade nine and even at that tender age figured out the society-as-wolf-pack metaphor – and, sadly, that’s as deep as the going gets in Goicolea’s cliché ridden spectacles.

To put it bluntly, there is about as much newness, revelation, or simple cleverness in Goicolea’s images of boyish aggression and sex as you might find in any mid-20th-century, post-Freudian pop culture analysis of the latent homoeroticism in male/male society. From Golding’s novel to Calvin Klein’s underwear ads, the territory has been thoroughly, and often more imaginatively, covered.

You’ve seen these images before, and, if memory serves me, even hack metal bands like AC/DC did the whole sexualized British schoolboy routine with far more gusto. Tarting up worn editorializing and spurious shock jockeying with expensive digital effects, as Goicolea does to the point of being trick-tired, does not make the content any more current or important. What next, a series of photos of Coicolea in black face? The work her is about that relevant and timely.

Perhaps part of the problem is that his work doesn’t shock or provoke viewers who live in less sex phobic cultures – but, then again, I wouldn’t want to hand this tome to my local constabulary (though even they would appreciate it’s gorgeous binding, expensive papers and the overall “keepsake” quality of its top notch production)

Call me old and jaded, but at least when Larry Clark made similar work twenty plus years ago, he didn’t pretend he was doing anything other than jerking off to his own juvenile, stunted sexual fantasies. Goicolea needs a new schtick.

Book Reviews: Bullshit

2005-06-07T17:39:00.000-04:00

Here’s a Zen koan to ponder: how do you write about the prevalence of falsehood, misrepresentation, and obfustication in contemporary culture without running the risk of adding more manure to the pile?

When people talk about the limitless amount of bullshit flying around today, what they are talking about, besides outright lies and larceny, is the actual amount of information, the tons and tons of words, words, words that plague us from every box and broadsheet. The meaning of the phrase “spreading bullshit” has changed radically in the information age, with the angry emphasis shifting from the noun, with all its connotations of dishonesty, to the verb, which speaks of how overwhelmed, even buried many of us feel by the truckloads of unreliable information we confront every day.

In other words, it’s not the lies we’re fed up with (if anything, we’ve grown used to them), it’s the crushing weight of their numbers.

So, isn’t writing a book about the problem just another way of making the dung heap a little taller? Why bother? The best thing anyone concerned with the rise of bullshit noise pollution can do is shut the heck up, close the laptop and take a nap. But publishers are notoriously immune to deconstructive arguments, and altruism.

Two new books on the rise of good old b-s do little to siphon the wheat from the, ahem, waste, and do even less to make our world a quieter, less invasive place. Laura Penny’s Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit is a long-winded blast that, at nearly 300 pages, has almost nothing new to say, while Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is an academic wank-off that attempts to parse out, to pointless, angels-on-pin-heads precision, the many and varied distinctions between his philosophical definition of “true bullshit” and its alleged cousins, such as lies, fabrications, boasting, etc. Apparently, neither of these authors realized they were running to the floodtide with buckets of water.

Of the two, Penny’s is the most readable. Her attacks on everything from big box shopping outlets to the insurance industry are full of interesting factoids, clever one-liners, a fetchingly pure hatred of the powerful and rich, and a charming crabbiness that drives the book from one raging rant to the next.

Penny is a master organizer of useful political and social information. Her dissections of the pharmaceutical industry and governmental over-regulation, to pick two examples from her vast array of targets, are backed up with solid, footnoted journalism. Penny can make a case better than most Supreme Court Lawyers, but her nagging habit of undermining her own authoritative voice with homespun, Minnie Pearl like “just plain folks” observations and dated, Friends-era sarcasms makes her writing seem more tossed off than considered.

Despite all her valuable fact wrangling, Penny’s essays read like extended humour columns from small town newspapers - hardly a threat to the powers that be. And as much as she wants to be a crusading humourist like Michael Moore, Penny sounds like the Sun papers’ low-brow kitchen witch Christina Blizzard (in style, not ideology).

The other big problem with Your Call Is Important To Us is that, despite being written by a Halifax-based author and published by McClelland & Stewart - whose slogan is “The Canadian Publishers” - the book’s references are almost entirely American. A handful of Canadian political notes pepper the prose, but Penny’s best shots are saved for the Republican party, the US end of the Wal-Mart empire, Enron and other cheating American corporate elites, and George W. Bush. Another word for bullshit is irrelevance.

Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, however, will be highly relevant to people who worry about the splintered reasoning buried within Fania Pascal’s essay on Wittgenstein, or the use of the word bullshit as a verb in Pound’s Canto LXXIV. Cocktail parties all over the academic world must be fairly bursting with barbs and re-barbs!

The rest of us will just have to content ourselves with Frankfurt’s core argument, which only took me three hours of reference dusting to uncover – bullshitters lie because it’s fun.

For this they make you Professor Emeritus at Princeton? Has Frankfurt never seen The Music Man (same message, far fewer headaches)?

On Bullshit is a bathroom book for philosophy undergrads, and will end up the smartest little book in the landfill, right beside all those Herman cartoon collections and People magazines. I intend to put my copy in a composter, allegory be damned.

Book Review: Cheap Laffs

2005-06-07T17:36:00.000-04:00

Cheap Laffs: The Art of the Novelty Item
Mark Newgarden and Picturebox, Inc.
Harry N. Abrams 126 pages $30.00

There is absolutely no good reason for Cheap Laffs: The Art of the Novelty Item to exist. It serves no pedagogical purpose, tells no vital story, and has nothing to say about the state of the world today. I read it from cover to cover.

Like the completely worthless junk it celebrates, Cheap Laffs is one of those books you buy for yourself when you feel that you already own everything you could ever need – although, at 30 bucks a copy, it’s a bit steep for a trashy impulse purchase.

The creators of this loving homage to fake vomit, sneezing powder and X-Ray Specs might argue that the plastic tricks and rubber gizmos are a form of Pop Art, or, as the introduction puts it, are “product(s) of questionable quality, taste, originality, and necessity …doomed to remorseless disposal … shar(ing) direct kinship with all the truly significant art forms of the twentieth century.”

Not the nicest way to sum up, say, the films of Alfred Hitchcock or David Adams Richards’s novels (and I suspect the above statement is made with a full dribble glass’s worth of play bravado). Apply the claim to the silly stunt art of Jeff Koons or the oeuvre of Anna Nichole Smith, however, and you might have an argument. Contemporary culture has been periodically plagued by one-liners and slapstick creations meant to shock, like a joy buzzer, and then wear off – but that’s been true of culture since at least the Middle Ages. Have you ever actually read a medieval liturgical pageant play? They’re not exactly big on theological finery, but the monsters and floods and fiery wheels in the sky are pretty cool.

Of course, the great thing about gag items and novelties is that they are not Art. You can enjoy them without feeling guilty that you are not giving them enough time, because the jokes they carry are meant to take mere seconds to recognize – and you never have to confess that you don’t get what the creator is trying to say. Nobody expects you to be smart at parties about fake dog poop.

So, I advise skipping most of the introduction to Cheap Laffs, unless you are truly interested in the history of the mass production of toys, mid-20th century North American capitalism and the after-effects of WWII on humour, or the vaudevillian-like lifestyle of the gag makers. Big whoop.

You can come back to all that art history jazz later, after you’ve read up on such choice items as the Beatnik Beard, a self-adhering strip of greasy fun fur designed to make the wearer look “Crazy, Man!”, or the Trick Smoking Monkey - a nicotine-addicted plastic simian, complete with his own miniature cigarettes (made of harmless rolled paper, sadly), that was such a rage in the 1960’s that it spawned a rash of copy-cat smoking pets. I wonder if anyone has attempted to sue the manufacturer for inciting cigarette addiction?

Many of the novelties lovingly chronicled in Cheap Laffs will be familiar to anyone over 30. I will never forget my first Squirt Ring (nor will my brother – he still can’t abide a recipe calling for lemon juice) or the Yakity-Yak Talking Teeth that disappeared mysteriously in the glove compartment of my mother’s car, or my failed attempt in grade three to shoplift a Whoopee Cushion.

However, even the veteran junkaholic is unlikely to be familiar with the 1950’s Worry Bird - a dour, very phallic statuette meant to be, ahem, stroked when one was overwrought by life’s woes. The Bird’s bulbous head was draped in a curly rabbit fur shawl, just to clarify the situation.

Not direct enough, need to go even farther below the belt?

Apparently, no washroom was complete without the Royal Flush, a cloth toilet seat cover showing a hillbilly (a popular subject with the insensitive gag industry, as were fellow targets “belchers”, “rubes”, and “coons”) attempting to end his yokelish life by flushing himself down the toilet. Silly hillbilly – his will to live would easily have been restored by the hilarity of Laff Tissue, a roll of toilet paper generously endowed, panel after panel, with ribald jokes, the kind involving liquor, a fat wife, and a Jayne Mansfield lookalike.

And you thought the fifties were all about repression and starched twin sets. Douglas Sirk lied.

Book Review: Terry

2005-06-07T17:34:00.000-04:00

Terry
Douglas Coupland
Douglas & McIntyre 176 pages $28.95

I was fifteen when Terry Fox began his Marathon of Hope, and, it shames me to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to his monumental efforts. Cancer was something that only old people got, guys with prosthetic limbs were to be pitied, not lionized, and everybody knew that marijuana didn’t give you lung cancer, so what did I care? These are the myths I, and most people my age at the time, lived under. My world is very different now, as is yours.

At age forty, cancer is something I think about more and more often. I have lived through the first wave of the AIDS epidemic, but lost an early lover to the damned disease, recently buried my father, taken by heart failure, won my own battles with addictions, and, generally, grown up. Like other new 40somethings, I check for lumps, try not to live on potato chips and Diet Coke, exercise when there’s nothing else to do, and avoid hydro towers – and yet, three of my friends have had cancer scares in the last five years. Terry Fox’s life is suddenly very real.

How fitting, then, that Douglas Coupland, the popularizer (and scourge) of all things related to my generation, has crafted Terry, a beautiful and heart breaking scrapbook chronicling Fox’s life and, perhaps more important, the massive, nation-wide obsession Fox’s run spawned – a media and public event that forever changed how we talk about cancer.

Just think back to 1980. Everybody smoked, in elevators, movie theatres, and offices. I remember ashtrays in my G.P.’s waiting room. Everybody lived on fried food, drove drunk, and worked in factories without protective gear. In my home, you didn’t say “cancer” out loud. It was shameful, like mental illness. When one of my mother’s friends got “the cancer”, my father called it “c”, afraid to say the whole word. And forget about prostate exams or asking your doctor to check your breasts for lumps. What’s a prostate?

Terry Fox changed all that, overnight. As Coupland’s book illustrates, nobody could shush or shame away a handsome young man with one leg. Fox’s openness, charming combination of vulnerability and athletic prowess, and, let’s face it, TV star good looks, made our reluctance and misplaced discretion over cancer seem not only silly, but offensive. Here was this adorable guy, running across the country on one leg, sweating like an Olympian, to fight a sickness many Canadians considered bad taste to discuss. Even if Terry Fox had raised only ten dollars, his contribution to cancer research would still be lasting, because he made it OK for ordinary people, especially men, to talk openly about their frailties, their bodies and even their fears – and for that we owe him the kind of tribute Coupland has assembled.

Although it is as thorough and reverent as any celebratory coffee table biography, I hesitate to call Terry a hagiography, because the price and value of saints has cheapened lately - and because Coupland wisely avoids any holy schmaltz.

Instead, Coupland pairs heroic, tear-inducing mass media photos of Fox’s struggle with more clinical, even cold images of Fox’s personal belongings (sweat pants, torn socks, a diary), thus negating any sense that he is assembling a morbid reliquary. Coupland packs his honest homage with images of Fox as “just an ordinary Canadian guy”, as a typical, tee-shirt wearing university jock goofing off in family snapshots, his mop of hair unfettered by combs. Many of these private pictures have never been seen publicly, and will do a great deal to stamp out the growing image of Fox as a superhuman, and thus remote, hero - an image that only separates him from the rest of us and therefore makes his courage unavailable to lesser mortals. Throughout his marathon, Fox repeated one message: I am not special, I’m just doing a special thing. And you can do it too.

Early in Terry, Coupland uncovers a blurry snapshot of Fox visiting a family in Come By Chance, Newfoundland. The family gave Fox and his friend Doug a place to sleep and a meal, way before the national media had picked up on Fox’s journey (which, typically, it didn’t notice until he hit central Canada).

In the photo, Fox stands behind a large cake with white icing, surrounded by big-haired local girls invited from the high school to entertain the boys. Fox looks like the cat that ate the pet shop. Cake and cute chicks!

I love this picture, because it shows me the Terry Fox behind the bronze statues and commemorative loonies – a real, live guy with a naughty smile (and hormones). Douglas Coupland isn’t varnishing Fox’s memory, he’s giving us back its flesh and blood.

Book Review: Massive Change

2005-06-07T17:30:00.000-04:00

Massive Change
Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries
Phaidon $39.95 239

A journalist of my acquaintance recently visited designer Bruce Mau’s studio to discuss Mau’s latest book, the unrepentantly bombastic Massive Change. On Mau’s desk, the journalist noted, was a letter from the president of an impoverished South American country. The letter was in plain view, and, the journalist suspected, meant for his eyes. According to Mau, the president of the long suffering nation had invited Mau to visit for a week and, gulp, redesign the country.

My first thought after hearing this story was, Haven’t those people suffered enough?

In its inherent hubris, the story of Mau and El Presidente is typical of, and exactly what is wrong with, the kind of bold, sassy but ultimately empty promises found in Massive Change – a book more concerned with pronouncements than problem solving, the sales pitch than the product.

And what a pitch. Mau’s book promises that all the world’s nastiest problems – hunger, poverty, violence, ugly shoes – are simply design tasks waiting to be solved. Politics? It’s a design problem. Unleashed genetic sciences? A design opportunity! Trade inequities? They’re the new avant-garde of the economy! I wish I was making this up.

Massive Change isn’t really a book, it’s a two hundred page exclamation mark, packed with giddy prophecies about how super great everything will be once we let the Segway designers and Wal-Mart take over (oh, never mind about underpaid, benefit-deprived Wal-Mart staff or the fact that those goofy looking Segway scooter/shopping karts have become a standard comic prop on sitcoms … what’s the matter with you, don’t you believe in tomorrow?). The only thing holding us back from a new Golden Age, wherein, among other things, the internet and its related technologies will cause peace to break out and “Design and its capacities promise to make this century a new era of wealth worldwide”, is our inability to listen to our prophets – people such as, say, Bruce Mau.

There are two huge problems here that, for all its hurrahing and yahooing, Massive Change can’t overcome. The first is the notion that interconnectedness will automatically make people better citizens. The second is the book’s complete lack of counterpoint or argument.

Every chapter in Massive Change offers a variation on the idea that because we can now communicate over huge distances and share heretofore unimaginable amounts of information, every problem can be solved. If only it were so. This capacity to spread information is now over a decade old. Does the world look better to you? Just because we can communicate with each other doesn’t mean we will, or that we’ll want to bother. Nothing in Massive Change accounts for all the bad things that also make us human – selfishness and lack of empathy being the top two.

Take this quote for instance: “information now travels along vast interconnected networks, and so all problems in all realms are shared.” What exactly does that mean? “Shared” is intentionally vague, with the potential to mean anything from having knowledge of a problem to actual shared suffering. You and I know rather a lot about the situation in Sudan, thanks to travelling information, but do we share the problems of starving refugees? Hardly, and neither does anybody connected to this book, or reading this newspaper (online or not). Why, I kept asking myself as I read Massive Change, if all that the book claims is true, is nothing ever done? Perhaps Mau is waiting for a letter from the president of Sudan.

For a book that trumpets information exchange on every page, Massive Change is wholly devoid of dialogue. Wondrous things are promised without question, overarching statements proffered without challenge, and pesky obstacles to progress like greed or laziness are never discussed. Here’s a typical bald statement: “The Home Depots and Nikes of the world have greater capacity to achieve more for greater good because of their scale”. Hard to argue with that, if you fail to take into account that “greater good” means less profit, and Nike et al exist solely to make a profit.

But there’s no time for moody contemplation, because two pages later we learn that Dee Hock, the inventor of the Visa credit system - that magic little card most of us are too flawed and too human to use judiciously - actually created a “Jeffersonian democracy” that “guarantees monetary information in the form of arranged electronic particles”. Sure, that and 20% interest rates, an entire generation of people hooked on overspending, and countless families forced into bankruptcy.

Apparently, however, the future doesn’t include sober second thought, since by the time you’ve digested the democratic miracle of the Visa card, you’re already on to the next Barnum-worthy page, wherein you’ll learn that “the electronic marketplace has gone from empowering the consumer to supporting a global civic society”. Tell that to the Chinese Christmas decoration makers.

As one fantastic page cascades over the next, you realize that when Mau uses words like “consumer” or “citizen”, he’s really talking about the rich people who live in his rarefied world. Mau’s predictions are riddled with a class blindness particular to over-priviledged soothsayers, from Madame Blavatsky to Arianna Huffington - people who see only the glittering wonders their money and power place before their eyes. Manor-born Aldous Huxley had the same problem, and he promised us flying cars (plus a eugenics-driven super race, who sound rather a lot like Mau’s urban super consumers).

Grouse as much as I like, I know that books like Massive Change are critic proof, like bibles or Dr. Phil guides, because if you don’t agree with the book’s perky futurism, you’re just outdated, retrograde, a tired old crab too cranky to sunbathe before the “shining city on the hill” (as that other great salesman, Ronald Reagan, put it). Maybe Mau is right, maybe you can’t fight the future - but you can stop yourself from buying the tee-shirt.

The Big Picture 34

2005-06-04T17:20:00.000-04:00

Whenever I’m invited to attend an "art walk", I remind the inviter that walking around looking at art is what I do for a living. Where are the invitations to spa walks, chocolate truffle tours and male stripper strolls? Me and my dreams wait by the phone.

Until I get invited to eat caramels in a towel with a football player, I’ll take the annual Riverdale Art Walk – the friendliest and cosiest art tour in the city. Stretching from Davies Avenue to Leslie Street, and running along both Gerrard and Queen East, the walk includes stops in eight galleries, with works by over forty artists, plus an outdoor art show. If nothing else, RAW is an ambitious undertaking for this small but vibrant corner of the city – one whose cultural contribution is too often overlooked.

Co-ordinator Carolyn Megill is blunt about RAW’s humble position in Toronto’s crowded art festival market, because she sees RAW’s low-key approach as its best asset.

“We’re definitely in the middle of a building process. But each year we grow, and now we’re becoming a truly valuable venue for east end artists to show their work – not just to other east enders, but to the whole city. I can see RAW expanding in the future to include other disciplines, like music or theatre, but right now we’re really focusing on art – especially since the loft boom is turfing out a lot of area artists. We’ve responded to that by creating an artist’s park. We figure that if the artists are going to be driven out, we’ll just move the show outdoors!”

Megill admits that the walk used to be “sort of tangled – people would wander off not realizing that there were more stops in other directions”. To fix that, the RAW committee has consolidated the walk into a simple rectangle that focuses on the galleries. “We’re not asking people to wander down alleys anymore,” Megill half jokes.

For those of us who live in fear of the whining brigades of stroller pushing suburban half wits who inevitably descend on the city for such events, Megill offers a calming thought.

“Yes, this is a family event, but the art is serious. People can look at great art and buy great art during RAW in a way that is unlike the normal gallery experience, in a casual and not intimidating way that is more open for everyone.”

“But,” she warns me, “there might be balloons.”

~
Making art about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t be an easy task. The landscape, psychological and physical, is so fraught with charge and counter-charge, so layered with decades of mistrust, that any attempt to capture even a small part of the essence of this disputed terrain will automatically be met with reservation, indeed hostility, from all camps.

Photo-journalist Larry Towell has taken the only route possible for an artist in this situation – he’s chosen a side. Towell’s photographs of displaced Palestinians and their shattered homes are horrifying illustrations of the animalistic level to which this conflict has sunk. The streets in Towell’s photographs are not so much devastated as they are nearly atomized, reduced to rocks and sticks, and the people living in the wasteland look as if they are at once terrified and numbly distracted.

The fractured Palestinian towns, often nothing but stacks of bent and blasted stone, are photographed as if they were abstract paintings. Towell’s camera seeks out the eerie blocks of pure white light and smoky shadow cast by the shattered walls, and finds faces that carry this same stark blend of clarity and horror.

Much of this work is extremely difficult to digest, especially the images of children who seem to have only two life choices - fighter or corpse. However, while I’m not qualified to question the version of reality Towell is offering, I am prompted to ask: Where are the pictures of Tel Aviv cafes blown to bits, or of Israeli homes ripped apart by rockets?

Arguably, Towell-the-artist is under no obligation to do anything but take the pictures he wants to take. But the work is presented as both art and journalism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hardly a morally neutral art event happening in a vacuum. If you use loaded political material, you have to expect people to take issue with your choices, especially when a conflict is ongoing.

Towell’s depiction of the Palestinian experience of the war is provocative, gut wrenching and, at times, brilliant - but I don’t see how it can be judged as a complete work when Towell does not present the Israeli side of the story, because the two nightmares are interdependent. As an artist, Towell has made his point brilliantly. As a journalist, he is telling only half the tale.

~
Describing a J.J. Lee painting is like trying to put into words all the flavours, scents, textures and delights of a fourteen course meal, plus dessert. An unapologetic sensualist, Lee makes works that are as rich and detailed as tapestries or elaborate haute couture dresses – paintings that one falls into, willingly and with abandon.

Lee’s newest works, Still Life With Tangents, continue her exploration of Asian-North American cultural collisions, with an especial focus on Chinese medicines.

“These new works are kind of weird,” Lee says, “but I like them. I’ve been obsessed lately with the packaging on Chinese medicines, and the images of health and strength they carry. And, because so many Westerners are getting into Chinese medicine, I’ve painted the images on Chinoiserie fabric – fabric with patterns taken from 19th century ideas about China.”

Lee’s pan-cultural sampling, zany as it sounds, is never messy or haphazard. Lee bathes her imagery in carefully managed washes of colour - radiant fuchsia, absinthe green, calendula yellow – that serve to unite and illuminate her disparate source materials.

More severe viewers, people overfed on the staple Toronto diet of minimalism and understatement, may find Lee’s work too pretty, too overtly febrile. Let them eat dry toast.

Riverdale Art Walk
Various Locations June 4 and 5
www.riverdaleartwalk.com

Larry Towell
No Man’s Land
Stephen Bulger Gallery 1026 Queen Street West Until June 25

J.J. Lee
Still Life With Tangents
Lennox Contemporary 12 Ossington Ave. Until June 26

The Big Picture 33

2005-05-28T18:14:00.000-04:00

Over 40 years ago, French artist Yves Klein created a series of blobby abstract paintings using the human body as his paint brush. Klein’s Anthropometries were relatively simple affairs – a nude body (usually female) was slathered in cobalt blue paint and pressed against a white canvas.

At the time, the works were considered provocative, adventurous, and even slightly indecent. Today, they seem more cute than sexy (but then, I’ve been around).

For his latest exhibition, Toronto multi-media artist Johannes Zits - a devotee of Klein’s pre- sexual revolution antics - updates and re-invents the legendarily naughty Anthropometries by giving them a queer, po-mo twist.

“The first step in the process”, Zits patiently explains, “is to get the men to strip to their underwear.”

Zits makes it sound so easy. Some of us spend entire weekends on just such futile projects.

“Well, they’re all volunteers,” Zits snorts. “I’m not kidnapping them off the streetcar!”

“For the next step, I ask the men to sort through a pile of magazines, picking images that they feel represent them. The magazine collection has everything in it from interior design journals to fashion mags to gay porn. Then, they get naked and I paint their bodies from knees to shoulders with glue. They press their bodies up against prepared canvas and, once I’ve got the body print, the models head to the shower while I stick their chosen collage materials onto their glue print.”

So far, so kinky. But it gets better.

“When the models are showering, they’ll be filmed and the shower films will be broadcast on the wall of the gallery. This video is then edited and put on a monitor.”

Apart from being a load of goofy (and kinda hot) frat stunt fun, Zits’s restaging of Klein’s experiments resonates with a media-saturated awareness of the male body as both an object and the focus of objectification. The collages are gorgeous representations of conflicted appetites and conflicted self-image. The contrast between the silhouettes left behind by Zits’s models (round and lumpy, like real people) and the pictures of hyper-fit, over groomed men culled from magazines - images of masculinity chosen by men who look nothing like this exaggerated ideal - is both revealing and appalling. There is no small amount of self-hatred, or at least dismorphia, evident in this division between the actual and the desired.

“In some ways, the project is a look back and a look forward,” Zits explains.

“Is the male nude still an anomaly in public? Is showing the penis still verboten? Since Klein, our culture has drastically altered. Think about it - if I were a straight man doing Klein’s experiments today, after the feminist revolution, the work would be perceived very differently and would be questioned, rightly, with far more rigour.”

“But since I’m working with men, I want to address the fact that men today are more conscious of, and anxious about, their body image - and with that also comes a gay awareness and awareness of the gay gaze that was not available in Klein’s time. I’m part of that new awareness, so I’ve put myself into the art – my body will be glued up too. Klein never participated in his own experiments – he never even touched his models.”

Can you blame me for asking my next question?

“I, of course,” Zits guffaws, “will be very happy to touch my models.”

~
Call me simple minded, but I’ve never understood the point of photo-realist painting. Why not just take a picture?

Photo-realism has always struck me as the triumph of technique over imagination. Do people admire photo-realist works for the images they contain, or for the fact that some artist spent hours and hours perfectly capturing the glint of sunlight off the ketchup bottle?

Photo-realism feeds the worst sort of Protestant work ethic evaluations of art: If it takes 50 hours to paint a picture of a sink full of dishes that looks exactly like a photograph of a sink full of dishes, it must be valuable art! Never mind that looking at a painting of a sink full of dishes, no matter how Kodachrome accurate (and accurate is an adjective as slippery as “tasteful”), is not very exciting.

I am prepared, however, to have my mind changed. And painter Mike Bayne just might be the guy to do it.

Bayne’s latest works, as convincingly photo-ish as they are – and I’m not ashamed to admit I was convinced they were photographs, or at least photographs that had been augmented with paint – are actually subtle deconstructions of photo-realist practice. If you look carefully at each painting, you’ll see little interruptions in the photographic veneer, areas wherein brush strokes suddenly become glaringly evident and the painterly aspect of the work is boldly announced.

Bayne’s paintings thrive within the photo-realist tradition while treating that tradition, and the questionable value system that supports it, with suspicion. As such, they are the first photo-realist works I’ve ever spent more than ten seconds admiring.

My only critique is that Bayne, like too many artists of his generation, finds empty parking lots, strips of commercial highway and suburban front lawns to be fascinating subjects for art making (but that whole suburban Romantic/banality cult, or, as I like to call it, the Vancouver Dullard School, is another column’s worth of trouble).

Perhaps the burden of simultaneously exploring and exploding a treasured tradition leaves Bayne with little time to seek out more vital subjects? Or, perhaps his choice of dull settings is a further comment on the mundane nature of photo-realism?

Whatever the reason, Bayne’s brainy, questioning life studies could do with an injection of, well, life.

~
Like most of you, I heard about David Byrne’s bus shelter installations before I actually saw them - because when an American celebrity, even a semi-forgotten one, comes to town to hawk his wares he can be guaranteed wall to wall to bus stop attention from the local media. Resisting the hype, I intentionally avoided Byrne’s work, but one day it was raining and the street car was late ….

Byrne’s photo and text works are humourous, light weight musings on the notion of sin, or to be more specific, Byrne’s proposal that western culture is breeding a new set of sins. Byrne pokes fun at such commonplace bad habits as consumerism, ambition, and contentment – all easy targets – and couples his writing with complementary (but otherwise unremarkable) photographs to illustrate his points.

None of these posters are worth denouncing as bad art, but neither are they deserving of the enormous amount of coverage they’ve gotten. The works are occasionally clever and help kill time between TTC rides, but are, like most billboards, instantly forgettable.

Too bad the Toronto media doesn’t get as excited about local artists. If ours is a city, as Toronto-haters claim, that sex forgot, we sure know how to bend over for a star.
Johannes Zits
The Skin You’re In
SPIN Gallery 1100 Queen Street West Until June 12

Mike Bayne
New Works
Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects 1086 Queen St. West
Until June 4

David Byrne
The New Sins
Bus shelters on Queen West

The Big Picture 32

2005-05-24T13:04:00.000-04:00

A few months back I encouraged you to run out and buy a limited edition poster by multimedia artist and full time super-freak Luis Jacob. Obviously, enough of you did just that, because the poster was sold to raise funds for Jacob’s installation at the Toronto Sculpture Garden and, voila!, the installation is now up and running – or should I say pedalling?

Entitled Flashlight, Jacob’s installation is a mini gay theme park, a tribute to the sparkly, festive world of homo disco, complete with a glitter ball, sun-catching cobalt streamers, a collage of party pics, Fire Island patio lounges, and, for those inclined to infantilism (which, if you check out the Osh Kosh-inspired summer outfits on Church Street, is apparently most gay men) a geodesic monkey bars/go-go platform.

Jacob tops off his Vitamin D enriched spectacle with a banner made from knit Xmas tree lights. The banner reads “Everybody’s Got A Little Light Under The Sun”(it’s one of those “I Will Survive” or “We Are Family” type disco slogans), but you’ll have to work like a gym clone to see it – the banner is powered by two bike wheels that viewers must peddle, and peddle hard, to generate the electricity that sparks up the show. I am a large-legged, hearty sort and even I could only get the thing up to full brilliance for about 15 seconds. Damn muscle queens!

If there’s a subtext beneath Jacob’s club-kidding, it’s nestled in those wheels and all the other hidden gears and widgets that make the lights so bright. The endless gay party, Jacob tells us in his quiet way, is supported by a lot of hard, mostly unacknowledged work – the challenge of maintaining our civil freedoms, the day to day work of fighting homophobia, and the personal struggle to stay positive in a culture that continually negates your very being. That’s the uphill peddling that gets you to the palace. Tough, but worth it.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a gay pal who is being driven to depression by the nasty, daily anti-gay messages put forth by opponents to the equal marriage bill. I’m going to drag him down to Jacob’s sculpture and we’re going to peddle until we’re giddy.

~
At “nearly 70”, US-based painter Delmas Howe is the undisputed granddaddy of erotic art – an artistic descendent of Tom Of Finland and an influence on younger erotic artists such as Rob Clarke, Uli of Berlin, and even fading enfant terrible Attila Richard Lukacs. Howe’s new show of cowboy sex fantasies at O’Connor Gallery is a luscious collection of drawings and paintings that revel in a flawed but still virile masculinity – an idealized maleness that is half classical pretty boy, half gone-to-seed trucker.

This odd conflation, Howe informs me, is not accidental.

“I grew up in a town – Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where I live today – surrounded by cowboys, and even as a child I had a keen interest in the male form. But the only source for images of the male form, images I could study at length, were encyclopaedias. And the encyclopaedias only depicted the male form in the context of classical statuary. So, in my childhood I made this connection between the Greco-Roman art world and the local cowboys. Later, that became a core part of my sexuality.”

Erotic art, like its po’ cousin pornography, is not meant to be complicated. While the response time between the arousal an erotic artwork inspires and the excitement pornography creates may be different – we are trained by frequent exposure to mass media’s use of film to respond more quickly to time-based, and thus more realistic seeming, video imagery than to hand made pictures – the goals of each are essentially the same. You’re meant to get off on the art too, but in a more, ahem, gentle and considered fashion.

Howe’s art, however, plays sneaky tricks with such expectations. His hunky cowpokes are certainly gorgeous slabs of man flesh, but they are also men with slight pot bellies, moustaches in need of a trim, eyes a little too close together, and no sense of smart urban fashion. In other words, they’re a refreshing break from the soulless, shaved-chest robots common to mainstream porn.

“Some of my models are real cowboys, men I see at rodeos or around town. Some of them are friends”, Howe says, “but I always work from a real source, either photos of men or from models. But I don’t mean “model” models. For a painting I did last year, I met some Mexican guys on a camping trip - all nice, sexy young men - and we had a blast with the posing and dancing around. They were just fun loving guys trying something new. I want that energy in my work.”

Being of low mind, I had to ask Howe if any of these hunks become more than friends. He cracks a wicked, unreadable smile.

“Well, I’ve been asked to judge a Sexy Cowboy contest while I’m here … but I plan to win it myself!”

~
By the time I started bumbling my way through the Toronto art community, in the mid-90s, art stars David Buchan and Robert Flack were already dead from AIDS-related illnesses. I feel cheated.

A new retrospective of Buchan’s and Flack’s works at Art Metropole (the concluding show to Art Met’s year-long 30th anniversary programme), is both a tribute to the enormous output of these two seminal artists and a sombre reminder that, not so long ago, a generation of artists disappeared well before their time.

Buchan and Flack, working independently and in various collectives, were nothing if not productive; making everything from prints to photography, video, sound sculpture, performance and fashion. You name it, they tried it, and imbued each project with a wise-ass, sassy sense of humour that was at times misread - as was (is?) much queer cultural production - as low brow camp.

This exhibition does a great service to the legacies of both artists by pairing their early, jocular works (which I would argue have more to say than most of the serious political art of the time) with the darker works produced by each artist as he confronted his own mortality. Much of this deeply personal work, especially the archival material collected from each artist’s personal scrapbooks, is difficult to look at without feeling that you are invading someone’s privacy – but that’s the point, as Buchan and Flack never feared to make the personal public.

Archivist Andrew Zealley, a friend of both artists, deserves congratulations for assembling such a cohesive show from what must have been a mountain of materials – and for bringing Buchan and Flack back into the public eye.

A note to art teachers: this show has way more to say about our wounded and fractious cultural landscape than Bruce Mau’s fatuous Massive Change. Turn the bus south to King Street and give the kids something real (and beautiful) to ponder.

Luis Jacob
Flashlight
Toronto Sculpture Garden 115 King Street East Until September 15

Delmas Howe
Mixed Media
O’Connor Gallery 97 Maitland Street Until June 11

David Buchan and Robert Flack
Halos
Art Metropole 788 King Street West Until July 30

The Big Picture 31

2005-05-16T12:58:00.000-04:00

It’s a cliché, but it’s true – Toronto is a cold, tough town for artists. We make our creative types pole vault over high walls that would kill Montreal or Winnipeg artists, spoiled as they are by supportive, arts-positive populations (and, in the case of Quebec, entire wings of the federal government).

Take, for instance, the case of Toronto-based painter Raffael Iglesias. His work is regularly exhibited in Latin America and Europe, where it sells faster than fresh cut flowers, but he can’t seem to move much product in Toronto – which is puzzling, since his paintings are gorgeous parades of colour and masterful feats of culture jamming.

“I don’t know why, but the Europeans like me more,” Iglesias tells me when I visit his latest show at Peak Gallery. “Toronto seems to be a bit afraid of my work, because it’s so bright and colourful. I think my paintings are very serious, but they don’t look severe or dark – and Toronto likes dark work. I think Toronto buyers associate “serious art” with very minimal pieces that have a limited colour scheme.”

Or, to be less polite, the town’s art establishment is clenched tighter than the Pope’s fist. A pity, because buyers are missing out on a limited-time-offer to buy Iglesias’s work before it inevitably skyrockets in price – an event that will undoubtedly, and, I’m sad to say, typically happen once local curators and buyers get the thumbs up from almighty New York or Berlin. If, as the old Stranglers song goes, everybody loves you when you’re dead, Toronto loves you when you’re deified in the Village Voice (but not a minute before).

Well, screw ‘em. Iglesias’s new work is his best to date – a bold leap forward from his previous works, which tended to be attractive but often too small to contain all his manic image hoarding. These days, Iglesias is working big, and the payoff is a series of huge paintings that are as busy as a Vegas floorshow, and just as sexy.

Iglesias layers spray painted stencils over blocks of hot, even toxic, metallic car-paint colours, adds more stencils, then attacks the canvases again with scratched on drawings, another layer of shimmering metallic paints, splashes of varnish (and nail polish?), and even solarized kid’s stickers. To call these works busy would be like calling Proust’s novels long-winded – busy ain’t the half of it. You can stand in front of an Iglesias painting and find a dozen things to look at, all of them pretty as fireworks. Look again, and you’ll see a dozen more.

Although Iglesias sources everything from Latin American movie posters to graffiti tags, Anti-Bush propaganda to biker tattoos (he runs a side business as a tattoo artist), his work never looks accidental. The paintings are not messy – rather, they are as carefully organized as a beloved curio cabinet. It takes a lot of quiet planning to make such beautiful noise. Listen up, Toronto.

~
After indulging your senses in Iglesias’s flamboyant turntablism, cross the parking lot for Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s more cerebral, but no less playful chamber pieces. Delvoye’s works appear to be no more substantial than whimsical advertising images, but betray, if you give them time, an interrogatory impulse that can’t be too readily dismissed.

J.D. Salinger once wrote that there was a thin line between clever and stupid. I’ve never really understood that line, being neither, but if any work embodies this split, it’s Wim Delvoye’s nutty constructions. Delvoye creates elaborate gags that purport to be about Big Ideas – his poop machine, recently exhibited at the Power Plant, is a good example – and this new exhibition has its share of squirting flowers and whoopee cushions.

For example, Delvoye’s digitally manipulated photos of high cliffs carved with banal email messages, are, at best, cute. Yes, yes – the photos re-contextualize the ephemera of our daily lives and make us think about the messages we send by re-positioning, to Mount Rushmore absurdity, the throw-away information we take for granted or abuse. I get the theory, and so do you – it’s hardly news. But why so much work, so much careful digi-crafting, to make what is essentially a very banal observation? These pieces need more time in the lab.

On the other side of the clever/stupid divide are Delvoye’s spectacular "Marble Floor" photographs, which I readily admit fooled me until the optical illusion was pointed out by Madame Korper. I don’t want to spoil the fun, so I’ll just say that Delvoye’s luscious images of complex Middle Eastern tile work are more than a celebration of ancient decorative flooring.

Until you catch on, you’ll be struck by the fleshy, chipper pinks and glistening, fatty whites Delvoye captures in the veined marble. Once you do catch on, you might have larger questions about why Delvoye chose to pay homage to classical Islamic art with materials considered verboten, even insulting, to Muslims.

Attention-hungry prankster or master ironist?

~
Painter/poet Joe Rosenblatt and I read together years ago, when I was a young and fresh poet and he was already a living legend. I don’t remember much about the reading, (mine, I mean), but I’ll never forget Rosenblatt’s series of off-the-wall observation poems about cats - because, unlike so many poets who write about animals, Rosenblatt was not having any of that Peter Rabbit nonsense. Rosenblatt’s cats were merciless predators, amoral night creatures always looking for something to kill.

It’s hardly surprising that Rosenblatt’s latest collection of animal paintings conveys the same ferocity and unapologetic sneakiness.

First off, it’s hard enough just to find the grasping little monsters inside Rosenblatt’s heaping mounds of paint. Fist-sized cow patties of unmixed paint are smashed onto the canvas in rough clusters, turning each painting into a kind of blurry, dangerous trek through the underbrush (or coral reef, or leafy tree top). The nominal subjects of the works – birds, cats, fish – are indistinct from their mucky surroundings, which is the whole point. Animals, Rosenblatt posits, are not of our world, but of a more febrile one, a world where sense and action and identity are indistinct.

Rosenblatt’s paintings are not for everyone. There is something decidedly retro-1970’s looking about these works, with their emphasis on clashing citrus colours and aggressive treatment of paint as a sculptural material. Some viewers will find the work too messy, too unrestrained, too … not Toronto.

Raffael Iglesias
New Work
Peak Gallery 23 Morrow Avenue Until May 21

Wim Delvoye
Recent Works
Olga Korper Gallery 17 Morrow Avenue Until June 4

Joe Rosenblatt
New Paintings
Pteros Gallery 2255 Dundas West Until May 28

The Big Picture 30

2005-05-10T12:18:00.000-04:00

In any other context, sculptor Gareth Lichty would be (rightly) diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive. But the art world is a forgiving world, by habit and from necessity (there’s an understatement).

Lichty’s elaborate, wildly impractical creative processes would make even the most fanatical, detail-crunching artist flinch. Lichty doesn’t just build things, he builds entire manufacturing systems - starting a project not from scratch but from itch, and putting himself through workloads that, by their exaggerated difficulties and foolish meticulousness, cause the process to be as much a part of the work as the final product. It’s a good thing he doesn’t work in film, because he’d probably try to grind his own lenses from geodes and make 35mm stock out of birch bark.

Lichty’s latest project is a perfect demonstration of his inability to cut corners. Ostensibly three large paper sculptures, the works are actually the final result of months spent making everything from the paper itself to the miniature bricks that give the paper it’s distinctive pattern. Here’s what Lichty did, as far as I can figure. First, he hand moulded and fired 250, 000 (as in, a quarter of a million) tiny bricks, each about the size of a thumb. The bricks were then made into a huge sculpture. After the sculpture’s run finished in 2004, he disassembled the work and re-laid the bricks in flat panels. Then, he made his own paper out of pulp, slathered the wet paper over the brick flats, and peeled it off once it dried. There goes another month or so.

Finally, the brick pattern paper was cut into squares and formed into wall mounted sculptures, using only paper clips and thumb tacks. I’m exhausted just writing all that down.

The big question here, of course, is whether or not the ends justify the means? What does all this manic productivity lead to? The answer is, three quite lovely sculptures. The patterned, pressed paper catches the light unevenly, causing tiny pockets of dark to form across the otherwise pristine and glowing surfaces. The texture also gives off a kind of domestic familiarity, reminding the viewer of embossed paper towel.

Of the three sculptures, the large bent log form is the most accomplished, as it looks like a benign growth emanating from the wall, a bit of infrastructure cellulite. The two kidney shaped pieces are pleasingly curvy, but appear to be more the beginnings of sculptures than finished works.

I usually find art about art-making tiresome, too full of the pride of its maker. But the process half of Lichty’s work is so over the top, so spectacularly pointless, that I can’t help but read it as an absurd exaggeration, even mockery, of the work ethic and its wholesome posturing. And nothing makes this Atlantic Canadian’s heart sing more than a hearty jab at the pomposities of the work ethic.

~
When I was a pot smoking teen, my favourite way to come down from a quarter ounce was to steal the percolator from the kitchen and poke the coffee grounds out of the filter. It took hours to finish, and patterns emerged in the filter. Clouds, trees, the face of Saint Jude ….

Um, anyway, the trigger for this cozy childhood memory is a series of new photographs by Toronto darling Chris Curreri - a young photo-constructionist who became hot news last year when he exhibited a series of archival photographs decorated with delicate embroidery. For his latest series, Curreri reverses his earlier motif and shows us the needle holes, not the threads.

Starting with a collection of vintage photographs of couples, Curreri traces the shape of the figures with pin-sized holes, thus reducing each person to a connect-the-dots outline. He then photographs the back of the original photo, further negating the image’s specificity. What is left is a kind of anti-photograph, a counter to the mimetic exactness of the source image. Curreri’s couples could be anyone. The hole tracings reduce the individuals to cartoons - rounded, amorphous blobs devoid of identifying content or context.

Underneath this intriguing experiment lies an aggression that is not immediately apparent. The backs of the original photographs are a dull paper white, and Curreri’s holes are gentle pricks, not gouges. It all looks so pensive and cerebral, until you consider that what you are staring at is an act of vandalism.

Curreri’s puncture/erasure effectively wipes out whatever history was contained in the original photos. Depending on your mood, these works can be read as a subtle commentary on the frailty of all commemorative devices, or as a violent attack on photography’s questionable claim to capturing history. Or both.

~
If you hear low moaning and tortured shrieks coming from your neighbour this week, he or she might be an artist going through cable TV withdrawal (among other types).

This time last year, multimedia artist Timothy Comeau received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to purchase cable services for eight artists for one year. The goal, Comeau says, was to see what the artists would make if they were suddenly given access to dozens of channels.

“I feel that we're entitled to as much media/information as possible,” Comeau tells me.

“Cable TV is a library and gallery that media artists, due to their relative poverty, don't have access to. Painters and sculptors can go to museums on free nights, but is there free access to music videos, commercials, or news programs? All are worth knowing about if your medium is video. But most artists simply can't afford a cable TV subscription – so this project became an experiment with one person socialism.”

Performance artist and filmmaker Keith Cole used his time in front of the box to discover that he spends way too much time in front of the box.

“I will not miss having cable! I have wasted so much time – I’m happy to see it go. Although I loved it, I will not mourn it - kind of like this guy I stalked last year.”

Cole plans to make a dance piece and “a truly horrible painting” based on what he learned from reality television about successful stalking. He’s also come up with a starring vehicle for his acting career.

“What about a show with a drag queen /actress who is slightly washed up and overweight but whose career is suddenly revived … with the adorable Paul Gross as my on again/off again boyfriend who is from the wrong side of the tracks?”

Stay tuned.

Gareth Lichty
Paperworks
Redhead Gallery 401 Richmond St. West, Suite 115
Until May 21

Chris Curreri
Circa 1960
Edward Day Gallery 952 Queen Street West
Until May 15

The Big Picture 29

2005-05-02T20:55:00.000-04:00

Loyal readers will already know that I am not overly fond of the Distillery District, that insta-community at the swampy bottom of the east end better known for its cocktail jazz concerts and doggy dress up parades than its cultural vigour. Although practically every third space in this cobbled quaint-o-sphere is called a “gallery”, few of these alleged art venues are more than hobby painter consignment shops – the kind that sell competent paintings of dewy tulips, worried Asiatic damsels in gauzy veils, and placid seascapes painted with loofa sponges.

I sometimes feel sorry for the real galleries that have to compete with these tourist lures, but then I remind myself that nobody forced the galleries to move down there, and that capitalism is inherently merciless. So, I wander the bumpy laneways looking for something exciting to write about, something that will make all that stroller-dodging and knick knack-evading seem like a minor annoyance, not a penance.

This time, I got lucky. Three new shows at three credible galleries, while varied in their merits, have made me promise myself that, at least while summer winds (and my cycling legs) hold, I will pay more attention to the Distillery District. But I draw the line at in-line skating demonstrations, “PartiGras” (I’m not making that up), or anything involving theatre students in Edwardian costume.

Let’s go from the cheesy to the considered, the well-intentioned to the wondrous, and start at the low end with Sandra Ainsley Gallery’s exhibition of multimedia sculptures by the American glass artist Steve Linn.

That Linn is an accomplished craftsperson is not up for question. His life size sculptures and busts of famous artists, rendered in deftly carved and sandblasted glass, are stunning achievements in technique. Linn treats glass not as a fragile semi-liquid to be coaxed and cuddled, but as a precious stone to be cut, shaved and scratched into submission. His results are admirable. Linn pushes the boundaries of glass sculpture to bizarre limits, making sculptures that do not, like most glass works, celebrate or fetishize the material’s fragility, but, rather, ask us to look at glass in the same way we do wood or steel – as a durable material capable of impressing us with its strength and presence. And he’s pretty good at carving faces too, in case you care about verisimilitude in portraiture.

I’m fond of glass art, and, unlike many of my colleagues, do not consider it inherently tacky. But Linn’s sculptures will not help make my case. While his technical skills are undeniable, Linn’s overall compositional tendencies lean – oh, why be polite? – trip and fall toward the didactic, the overwrought, the obvious … and, yes, the tacky.

Jackson Pollock is recreated here, and of course he’s surrounded by his signature drips. Michelangelo’s bust is encased in a picture frame, and, just in case you missed the message, backed by a pair of angel wings. Joseph Cornell’s head can be found inside, you guessed it, a Cornell box. I could go on, but it’s too sad-making – these are not portraits, they’re editorial cartoons (minus the humour).

I can’t remember the last time I saw such evident talent so sorely hampered by pedantic literalism. These sculptures are too obvious for a children’s book. I wanted to take a hammer to all the gewgaws cluttering Linn’s masterful glass treatments, to set the action free from the props. But that would be illegal, and costly.

~
Things picked up over at Artcore, where Montreal’s Kamila Wozniakowska’s series of neo-Surrealist figurative paintings flit across the walls like an art history slide show gone amok – which is no coincidence, since her sources appear to be taken from ancient Greek vases, Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, and contemporary dance.

Wozniakowska paints simple, unadorned panels depicting various forms of (mostly bad) human behaviour. Relationships between the sexes are treated with a kind of zoological clinicality - women rough up men, men are caught fondling ladies, and groups of men and women are busy doing everything from holding hands to playing S/M games. It’s a merry parade of sexual and interpersonal foibles, a Gashlycrumb Tinies for advanced neurotics.

However, the reason I use the word clinical to describe Wozniakowska’s seemingly freakish side show is because Wozniakowska does not imbue her misbehavin’ figures with any tangible vitality – they are nondescript players, rendered with no more depth than stock characters from a paper theatre. Wozniakowska’s types lack any real power to communicate particular emotions or desires, despite all the posed heavy breathing and knuckle sandwiches, because they are about as lively or metonymic as SimCity characters.

Wozniakowska’s dispassionate panoramas are only further hindered by her decidedly flat, sterile painting style. These paintings want to be allegories for everyday (and deliciously kinky, not-so-everyday) power exchanges, but instead their dullness causes them to feel more like academic exercises, like an exploration of the history of socio-sexual power dynamics in art, not the dynamics themselves.

Oddly bloodless, given the bloodthirsty subject, Wozniakowska’s works are an amusing but ultimately trite curiosity that would be better served by judicious inclusion in a related group show than by the full gallery treatment. Pick one or two works randomly, give them a good look, then walk out.

~
After two flawed exhibitions in a row, it was a relief to walk into the Corkin Shopland Gallery and swoon over Barbara Astman’s evocative, chilling Clementine Suite installations.

Inspired by images of Jewish orphans fleeing the Nazis, Astman has created a three part work that pays tribute to the survivors while subtly acknowledging the sad truth that the memory of their struggle is fading.

In one part of the project, Astman prints faces of the children on small cloth bags, the kind used to store spare parts, handfuls of nails or any forgettable thing worthy of only the humblest vessel. The combination of loaded photographic symbol and disposable ready-mades is achingly blunt, as it reminds us that these children were once considered flotsam by most of the world.

The other two pieces play games with projected images, turning the children’s faces into faint spectres. First, Astman decorates a string of ordinary Christmas lights with dozens of small, printed transparent discs; each one containing the face of a single child. The faces, suffused with twinkling light, reappear in reflection on the nearby wall, looking like shadow puppet heads. Or ghosts.

Meanwhile, in a small alcove down the stairs, the same discs are fixed on the business ends of flashlights that have been hung upside down from the ceiling. The children’s faces are cast onto the floor in bright circles, but because the flashlights twist and jostle, they appear blurry and indistinct. Their history literally hangs from a thread.

Admittedly, Astman is being as literal in her representation of the vulnerability of Holocaust memory as Linn is being in his crib note reductions of his heroes (or as I’m being in my interpretations). But Astman’s prosaic approach is easier to take, because her humble tribute does not attempt to encapsulate her subjects’ entire experience, nor to act as a grand commemorative gesture or monument. I wonder if she ever works in glass?

Steve Linn
Recent Works
Sandra Ainsley Gallery 55 Mill Street, Building 32
Until May 14

Kamila Wozniakowska
Exercices de Style
Artcore 55 Mill Street, Building 62
Until May 10

Barbara Astman
Clementine Suite
Corkin Shopland Gallery 55 Mill Street, Building 61
Until June 2

The Big Picture 28

2005-04-23T13:09:00.000-04:00

At the end of every April, the GTA’s many colleges and universities set dozens, if not hundreds, of visual arts students free to roam the streets. Animators, graphic designers, film and video technicians, printers, set designers, needle traders, and, worse off, full blown artists (i.e. people with no sellable skills) clean out their lockers and wander off campus by the dazed busloads - with nothing to protect them from the cold, soul-eating world but their dreams, their looks, and a cash payout from their aging boomer parents.

What’s to be done with all this youthful talent, energy, and ambition? Some of these bright heralds of the future even have valid degrees. Personally, I think a forced relocation program is long overdue. Toronto has enough artists. But can the same be said for, say, southern New Brunswick (the north is lousy with whimsical Acadian potters – I’ve been there), North Bay, or the mountainous regions of Alberta? Hardly. As unattractive as the sight of a locked plane full of crying post-teens might be, it’s for their own good. And mine.

Of course, there are always do-gooders determined to reach out a helping hand to youth – well meaning people who don’t realize that today’s emerging artist is tomorrow’s competition for wall space. But nobody listens to us prophets anymore, so I’ll let the helpful helpers cut their own throats.

One such patroness is Toronto curator Sophie Hackett who, with co-curator Jennifer Long, has assembled Flash Forward, an enormous exhibition of photographic works by graduating students from Toronto and New York.

To call Flash Forward a revelation might be overselling the show, but it pains me to admit that I walked away from this exhibit with a renewed sense of urgency – namely, that particular panic faced by all senior artists when confronted by their inevitable replacements. I felt like Francis Ford Coppola watching Lost In Translation, or, more accurately, an early Trump wife shopping for an eye lift. Time to gas up that plane!

Hackett is the first to admit that emerging artists are becoming something of a fetish object in the art world, at the expense of mid-career and established artists – but, on the other hand, she’s glad she took the assignment.

“It wasn’t my idea!”, Hackett jokes, “One of the mandates of the Magenta Foundation, who paid for Flash Forward, is to support emerging artists, so I wanted to do the best job I could within that framework.”

“And, kidding aside,” she admits, “I do have a soft spot for emerging artists. It’s gratifying to provide people with their first chance to exhibit. I certainly agree that there have been a lot of initiatives for emerging artists lately, which is part of the generational shift that will continue as the boomer’s kids start taking up the space occupied by their parents … and maybe this interest in the young is pursued to the exclusion of mid-career artists, but a good show is a good show.”

And Flash Forward is a very good show. Like any large group exhibition, FF has its bright and dim moments, but the overall impression it gives is that younger photographers are playing fast and loose with core, indeed sacred notions of what constitutes a proper “high art” photograph. Many of the works here look like little more than digital snapshots, or, conversely, are so flamboyantly stagy and artificial they might as well be 19th century story paintings. Most of this work would be equally at home in a theatrical installation or as a prop in a performance piece. And the level of technical finesse proves the cliché that kids today are the most technologically savvy generation in human history.

The works that struck me as the most accomplished were those that were obviously samples from a larger, cohesive body of work - such as Adam Peters’s “Crop” series, a collection of ruthlessly cropped, colourful party pics that focus on sexily intertwined dancing limbs, Johanna Warwick’s unnerving images of a not-so-happy couple trying to glare each other to death, Nicole Stafford’s drive-by shootings of run down, working class store fronts (the kind her generation’s grandparents founded, to pay for her education), and Jesse Boles’s night shots of fairy-lit industrial wastelands (an obvious nod to Edward Burtynsky, but everybody goes through a shoplifting phase).

Hackett is not surprised by my faves. “One of the yardsticks we used was to see if the artist had a committed vision already in place. We wanted to find artists who were steadily pursuing a visual goal, not experimenting with anything just because they can do it.”

Experimenting? That’s kid’s stuff.

~

Toronto video artist Leif Harmsen is a hopeless exhibitionist. I, and everybody who travels in art circles, have seen more of Harmsen’s unmentionables than I’ve seen of my own. His motto seems to be: If I’m outdoors, why am I clothed?

It’s only natural (pun intended) that Mr. All Access should create VendaVision, a video nickelodeon and pop machine designed to bring new video art to the masses for a mere dollar a peek.

VendaVision works just like a snack machine: you put in a loonie and pick your can of pop. The pop choice determines what video you will watch – a one minute sample from Harmsen himself or local stars Peggy Anne Burton, Ed Sinclair or John Greyson, among others. What could be easier?

There’s no great message on offer here, no pretence to anything grander than mixing art and fun (and carbonated drinks). My only question is, why set up VendaVision in a building full of art galleries? This quick fix belongs in Niagara Falls, right beside the fortune telling puppets and mystery grab bags.

~

This space is supposed to be filled with my report on a terribly important piece of art by a terribly senior artist, but said artist washed out on me at the last minute and, lucky day! I discovered instead some unassuming, disposable art by an unassuming young artist.

Frank Maidens is a graphic designer wondering what to do with his off hours. He has decided to make art – clever, colourful and light-as-a-pill art based on the familiar shapes of capsules. Is this an homage to General Idea’s 1991 One Year of AZT? Maidens claims he’s never seen the work. Is he a pill head himself? No.

What Maidens is doing is even simpler than it looks. He’s taking the pill shape and turning it, via endless repetition and a Turkish carpet’s worth of primary colours, into a pattern standard, an ubiquitous form and symbol no more loaded with medical or personal subtexts than an asterisk or a triangle.

As a design exercise, Maidens’s work is a telling example of the nullifying power of visual reiteration. But as art, it’s very, very cute – perfect for the bathroom wall, beside the medicine cabinet.

Flash Forward
Lennox Contemporary 12 Ossington Ave.
Until April 30

VendaVision
401 Richmond Street West, 1st Floor (across from YYZ Gallery)
Indefinite run

Frank Maidens
Things That Are Pretty
Le Gallery 1183 Dundas Street West
Until May 1

The Big Picture 27

2005-04-16T15:46:00.000-04:00

John Abrams is a movie nut. The Toronto painter, whose latest cinema-inspired series of painting, Betty Blue (based on Beineix’s 1986 film of the same title) opens today at Zsa Zsa Gallery, admits to watching “three or five movies a week, sometimes more”, all in the pursuit of his art. I want that job.

Abrams is one of Toronto’s most consistent and consistently fascinating painters. He has painted everything from mug shots of alleged Caribbean-Canadian criminals (all culled from The Sun, a paper addicted to less than flattering representations of black Torontonians) to blotchy, gin blossomed Prime Ministers to glowing Hindu goddesses to intimate scenes from the films of Stanley Kubrick. His interests are nothing if not diverse.

A self-confessed magpie, Abrams is always searching for the next bright, shiny moment to capture on canvas. Subsequently, his paintings are dappled in intoxicating, unnatural colours, in spooky television screen greys and blues, yellows culled from lemon dish soap, and Emerald City greens.

The evident beauty of Abrams’s paintings, however, sometimes causes viewers to look no deeper than the handsome colours, to perceive Abrams as a talented colourist unburdened by subtexts. It’s tough being so pretty.

“I made the Betty Blue paintings after seeing the Beineix film for the first time, about six months ago”, Abrams tells me in his slow, careful way, “I was looking for one really good film, a really good looking film … something with sex and nudity and sexy people and artists behaving like crazy people … all the fun stuff.”

“I’m becoming more and more intrigued by video art, by how artists who work in video are far more progressive and open to new ideas than artists who work in the static arts. Painting needs to have a conversation with film and video, because film is the dominant visual media of our time. ”

“But, I also made this work in reaction to the shows I’ve been seeing lately where the curator’s imprint is more important than the artist’s work. The Betty Blue paintings are meant to be seen in a kind of narrative sequence, loosely following the story in the film – so, whoever hangs them has to more or less hang them the same way every time. It’s my way of making sure there is a limited amount of mediation between my work and the presentation of my work.”

To wit, Abrams has crafted a tantalizing oil on canvas Cole’s notes of the film, comprised of twenty small, film cell-like paintings and two large projection sized paintings. The small paintings are arranged in a rectangle, like a screen, with key scenes (and subtitles) selected to both trigger our memories of the original (remember when French cinema was as hot and vibrant as Asian cinema today?) and to compress the film’s core romantic themes. The larger paintings are overt celebrations of Betty Blue’s still startling gorgeousness – stars Beatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade, the cutest poor people ever seen in a movie, have never looked better, and the burning beach house finale remains a haunting sight, a romantic echo of Rebecca’s Mandalay.

But fans of the film will wonder why Abrams has recast Beineix’s signature Pop Art colour scheme in an almost monotone selection of oranges and bruised reds?

“The question in the film, the one Anglade’s novelist character is facing, is how do you make your way in the world as an artist? I have the same questions, because I have to keep a part time job to make ends meet. I think this question is still urgent, so I gave the film a new, more urgent colour scheme.”

“Now”, Abrams chuckles, “the film looks like everything in it is on fire, which might be me being pessimistic.”

Abrams days of pessimism should soon be coming to an end. After spending years painting scenes from films, the film world is starting to come to him.

“Art directors are starting to rent my paintings for films, even if they don’t understand them. It’s fun to see them in the movies a year or two later. In Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Lindsay Lohan dances around with one of my paintings of pop stars’ lips in front of her face, and in another scene one of my spirals of small paintings is hanging on her boyfriend’s bedroom wall.”

“Do more lips! Do Lindsay Lohan’s lips!”, Abrams’s partner, the exuberant curator Carla Garnett blurts out, “Do you know how many crazed fans she has? More lips!”

Abrams shrugs. “I’m thinking about doing The Aviator next.”

“Oi,” Garnett sighs, “he never learns.”

~
There’s a rumour flying around town that I am the person behind an anonymous, perfectly evil little ‘zine called, appropriately enough, ArtFag.

As much as I’d like to take credit for the poison penning of the ‘zine, I can’t. I can only wish I’d written that overrated video artist Daniel Borins was guilty of “his usual glib hack job”, or that too many gay artists have “that whole Ab-Ex raging phallus thing to get over”.

However, I did hunt down the elusive ArtFag, via some shady parking lot conversations and hefty bribes, and he agreed to this top secret, email-only interview. I’ll let the Gallery Govani speak for himself.
“We (that’s a royal we – RMV) are doing this because the Canadian art-critical persona, much like the rest of the Canadian cultural persona, is infected with an appalling politesse. It’s present everywhere, from our Great-and-Powerful National Papers to local, alternative presses. There is a crippling lack of real criticism in this country, and without the public dialogue that real criticism engenders, the art scene
suffers. When was the last time any paper, national or other, took a great, big, incontrovertible dump on someone’s undeserved reputation?”

“Lord knows there’s plenty of opportunity.”

Yes, and Lord bless the ArtFag. As the old drag saying goes: It’s not mean if it’s true.

~
My recent grousing about the snobbish Images Festival notwithstanding, check out the goofy Images-sponsored installations at Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

Montreal’s Stephane Gilot has built a cozy game booth that challenges you to control the wobbly trajectory of a tiny, camera-jacked toy car circling above your head, and Toronto’s Nell Tenhaaf invites you to meet Flo’nGlo, two giant robot blobs who sing to each other like love birds.

I smartly skipped the Images opening gala film, but, based on the reports of victims, I’ll bet that Gilot and Tenhaaf’s sci-fi funhouse beats a two hour American experimental film about vacant shopping malls and greasy exurban bus stops.

John Abrams
Betty Blue
Zsa Zsa Gallery 962 Queen West
Until April 30

ARTFAG: A Cahier of Criticism and Witticism.
Available at many downtown galleries, or c/o leartfag@yahoo.ca

Nell Tenhaaf
Flo’nGlo
and
Stephane Gilot
Videogame
Paul Petro Contemporary Art 980 Queen West
Until April 30

The Big Picture 26

2005-04-09T14:02:00.000-04:00

The term Conceptual Art strikes me as redundant. Isn’t all art conceptual? Even the most low brow acts of representation are fuelled by some sort of idea.

When curators today talk about “Conceptual practice”, what they are often doing is alerting you to the fact that you are about to see art about art, or art made within some sort of post-modern framework that privileges pastiche and reference over product and originality.

Fine. Originality is an illusion, and the world is already full of pretty things. However, the problem for the average visitor to a Conceptual show is that there is rarely much to actually look at, because the ideas and processes behind the work are more important than the finished pieces. Inevitably, such shows smack of in-on-itness and exclusion, of art made for other artists. And that’s no fun, even for the artists.

A new survey of recent Conceptual art at the Power Plant goes a long way to curing some of the genre’s worst in-house habits. Although there are definitely moments in this exhibition where one feels one is missing something, and the old brick barn does look a bit spare and grey in spots, Dedicated To You, But You Weren’t Listening (now that’s a passive aggressive title!) is peppered with clever works that seek to break Conceptual art’s audience-maker disconnect and, gasp, entertain the viewer.

Dedicated To You is a very full exhibition, featuring works by fourteen artists from half a dozen countries, so let’s start with the good news.

The first thing most viewers will gravitate to is Scottish artist Dave Allen’s giant birdcage sculpture, the home of two starlings on loan from the Toronto zoo. Based, the brochure tells me, on French composer Olivier Messiaen’s 1959 piano works about birdsongs, the installation seeks to reverse the composer’s creative process by having the birds react to music. Beside the birdcage, a CD of Messiaen’s compositions plays over and over, with the hope that the starlings will eventually begin to mimic it and incorporate the music’s tones into their songs.

Depending on your views on Messiaen, this is either a great vacation for the birds or a form of torture, but there is nothing like art stocked with live animals to turn even the most hardened art watcher into a cooing tender heart. I’m not certain Allen’s menagerie is much more than a sweet one-liner, but I’ll take pleasure whenever I can, and the birds are the most lively things in the gallery.

Equally cute is Zin Taylor’s video projection The Allegorical Function of Dirt, a kind of compost pile tribute to the Eames’s famous marching toy film Parade. Taylor’s camera caresses clumps of brown stalactites and mini earth mounds as if he were filming a tray of jewellery for a commercial, or an especially scrumptious assortment of pastries. The gag, of course, is that the dirt forms resemble dollops of poop.

The chipper, nursery room ambient music that accompanies Taylor’s video only reinforces the sandbox silliness of the project – and yet, Taylor’s excremental landscape grows more and more dreamy, even inviting, the more you watch it unfold. Quirky and fun, the video has the same gentle appeal as Allen’s birds. Everybody, after all, knows from dirt.

The strongest work in Dedicated is, not accidentally, the work with the most to say. Jennifer Allora, an American, and Guillermo Calzadilla, a Cuban, have collaborated on a series of performances and works to protest the US military’s presence, and activities, in Puerto Rico. The resulting works are full of both conceptual cleverness and real-life content (a rarity in the over-academicized ivory tower of conceptual art).

At first glance, Allora and Calzadilla’s photographs of foot prints on sand are not much to look at – until you realize that the footprints are from specially made shoes that contain political slogans and cartoons. Although some of the actual text is hard to read, the general anti-military stance is clear enough. It is hard not to read these quiet acts of resistance as a commentary on the futility of dissent in Dubya’s America, on trying to fight tanks with sand castles.

But just when that gloomy thought slides in, Allora and Calzadilla present “Returning A Sound”, an exuberant video that follows a young man on a pimped-out motorcycle as he zooms across a plot of Puerto Rican jungle abandoned by the US army. The former tank roads and landing strips are littered with washed out warnings to the public not to enter the military grounds – warnings the cyclist cheerfully ignores – and the green jungle is gradually reclaiming the bunkers and shooting galleries. To celebrate the arrival of peace, the cyclist attaches a trumpet to his muffler and blasts the hills and valleys with joyful noise.

The urgency of Allora and Calzadilla’s art both helps and hinders the overall exhibition. Without these works, Dedicated would be too much of a wank off, a collection of largely meaningless, if sometimes fun, artist parlour games. The downside is that as soon as you realize Allora and Calzadilla are the meat in the sandwich, you begin to notice all the pale iceberg lettuce taking up space.

Andrew Dadson’s lacklustre photographs of a neighbour’s ugly hauling trailer are, well, about as attractive and alluring as they sound. Apparently, the photos are meant to record Dadson’s minor acts of suburban resistance (he moved the unwanted trailer slowly down the street over a period of days), but when compared to images of successful anti-war actions, Dadson’s minor vandalism doesn’t amount to much. And, without the information I just provided, you’d be hard pressed to know why you were looking at these boring pictures of a trailer in the first place.

UK artist Jeremy Deller’s wall sized mural delineating the connections between 1980’s British popular music and key political events is equally unimpressive. Deller has done some solid political work before, such as restaging key protests and strikes, but this inflated nerd’s guide to underground music and civil strife trivializes the events Deller seeks to highlight and turns living history into a doodle (which, granted, may be Deller’s point, but we already know we’re living in a dumbed down time). Rarely has so much space been used to say so little.

Similarly, Jonathan Monk uses the loaded terrain of Afghanistan to indulge in a bit of T.E. Lawrence-style romance, complete with postcard images of impoverished locals. Although this work comes with buried references to a dead Italian poet, and thus, indirectly, Eurocentric visions of the Middle East, Monk can’t overcome the flat truth that his project is about as visually interesting as a plate of beige hummus.

The Mexican collective Tercerunquinto contributes a door to the proceedings. Yes, a door. A standard glass door built into a side wall of the gallery. That must have taken, what, a minute and a half of thought?

Another collective, G.L.N., offers a video record of a series of performances wherein the artists sat outside and made cheesy electronic music to accompany their surroundings. I guess they had fun. Too bad the music sucks.

Despite the show’s brighter moments, too much of Dedicated is taken up by works like those above - thin jokes that engage the viewer for about 15 seconds.

While viewers will undoubtedly walk away (sometimes very quickly) from this show with a partial realization that conceptual art doesn’t have to be dour and overly theoretical, they will also realize that, too often, time spent with conceptual art is time wasted waiting for something to happen.

The Big Picture 25

2005-04-02T14:00:00.000-05:00

Every spring something happens in Toronto that no person without limitless patience, plenty of Tylenol and an MA in semiotics (that they do not regret getting) should endure – the annual Images Festival of film, video and that catch-all phrase for any piece of art generated by a keyboard, new media.

Like many local filmmakers, I have my issues with Images – largely because, like too many local filmmakers, Images consistently shows only occasional interest in my videos. The festival’s reputation among Toronto artists for outright snobbery, a slavish devotion to overcooked, pretentious nonsense - Images actually gives out an award every year for the most difficult to endure film, so at least they have a sense of humour about themselves - and an offensive “anybody but a Torontonian” programming is well deserved (but has greatly improved with the recent addition of executive director Petra Chevrier, a Toronto culture lifer and overall good time gal).

Having crabbed that much, I have to cave and admit that there are still many gems to be found amongst the head-scratchers – including a retrospective of the always amusing videos of Robert Lee, a new installation piece by video mesmerists Leslie Peters and Dara Gellman, and short films by those old reliables Wrik Mead and Steve Reinke.

And for those of you who want the Images experience but also, wisely, want to be able to walk away from the Images experience, there’s Off Screen, a huge collection of installation works scattered amongst twenty city galleries. To my mind, this is the best way to get a taste of the festival without investing cash or irretrievable time: if you like what you see in the galleries, go to a screening. Otherwise, you pays yer money and you takes yer chances.

Although all of Off Screen’s thirty plus works were not available for screening at press time (thank God), I did manage to sit through samples from a dozen projects and can handily recommend David Warne and Kevin Krivel’s goofy “New Creatures”, a dance/slapstick piece that looks like a Gap ad gone horribly right, and local legend bh Yael’s beautiful and chilling “The Fear Series (2-3-4)”, a peephole view of the violent landscapes of the Middle East that focuses lovingly on the gorgeous but gun wielding young men who perpetrate the crimes.

Avoid, however, the tiresome sea bound video “Contained Mobility” by Switzerland’s Ursula Biemann – unless you find voiceovers that contain phrases such as “he signifies the itinerant body” and “suspended in the post-humanist lapse” entertaining. This sort of bloated crap makes a critic’s job easy. It makes fun of itself.

Even more baffling than an Images screening is the controversy surrounding Iranian artist Mehdi Forouzandi’s multimedia project The Key To Heaven. As far as I can tell from reading various media accounts and visiting the show (where half the art was rather alarmingly covered over by the artist), Forouzandi’s display of Islamic liturgical camp caused so much dismay amongst the conservative elements of the city’s Muslim community that he decided not to show the bulk of the exhibition. The Key To Heaven was banned in Iran, and, according to sources, Forouzandi fears that any further uproar here will make his return to Iran even more difficult.

But many questions remain unanswered. For instance, the press release for the show states that the controversial articles not on display were found “in an unusual bazaar in Tehran”. Said articles include party hats with Arabic inscriptions, a Monopoly-style prayer game that leads the winner to everlasting glory, and snow globes containing miniatures of Islamic holy places. But if this kitsch was actually purchased in Iran and manufactured in Iran, how can it be offensive? Surely if the junk was sacrilegious, the mullahs would have gotten to it long before Forouzandi.

That leads me to wonder if Forouzandi made the stuff himself, and if the “unusual bazaar” is a conceptual hoax? If so, it’s a great idea. I love sacrilege (if I had a car, the first thing I’d do is put a bobble doll Jesus on the dashboard), and love even more artists who perpetrate it under dire circumstances. Of course, it’s easy for me to be brave.

Adding to the mystery is the question of what actual text is inscribed on the offending articles. Forouzandi’s statement claims that the party favours are decorated with verses from the holy Koran. Yet, when I asked his representative Fay Athari if the problem lied in Forouzandi’s use of the Koran, she repeatedly told me that the party hats et al did not contain Koranic texts. Huh? Again, if the Koran is not being quoted in the art, what’s the big blasphemous deal?

I have nothing but sympathy for Forouzandi’s plight. Apart from being a questioning artist, he’s also gay – a double whammy in theocratic Iran. But if one is going to make politically and liturgically charged art, and then make hay out of the fact that one has been censored for doing so, and then go to the extreme of censoring oneself … well, a bit of clarity over the content would help, not hinder, the artist’s cause.

I can’t champion Forouzandi’s efforts with anything more than a meek reminder that censorship of any sort is bad, because I don’t have enough information – one can’t even see the works. But I also don’t have a tribunal of religious zealots hanging over my head, nor can I imagine ever working under such conditions. The best I can do is wish Forouzandi the best, and remind fundamentalists of all stripes that Canada is a free country, so frig off.

Andy Fabo’s moving tribute to his deceased lover Michael Balser reminds us that part of remembrance is forgetting, that part of what we keep when we lose someone is the certain knowledge that we will not be able to keep all of our memories intact. Faces fade, the sound of a voice dilutes, dates and places blur.

Fabo conveys this bitter truth with a stark yet reflective collection of portraits of Balser, each rendered in intentionally watery watercolours and brutally faint pastels. Assembled in a loose progression (or regression, depending on the direction) from indistinct blob to recognizable head and shoulder, Fabo’s paintings of his lover’s face vibrate with the expected blacks and dirt browns that connote loss, but also with angry blood reds and hot pinks, with raging, rough pencil scratches and sudden flares of fire orange.

Memory may be fragile, Fabo demonstrates, but the truths you construct defy decay.

Images Festival: Off Screen
April 7 to 16
Multiple venues
www.imagesfestival.com

Mehdi Forouzandi
The Key To Heaven
Arta Gallery 55 Mill Street, Building 9, Suite 102 (Distillery District)
Until April 7 (mullahs permitting)

Andy Fabo
Phantom Limb
SPIN Gallery 1100 Queen Street West
Until April 16th

The Big Picture 24

2005-03-26T13:57:00.000-05:00

Toronto photographer Michael Chambers has never shied away from controversy.

An exhibit at Harbourfront in February, entitled The Sandbox, contained a space for children to make photographs and describe how they were viewed by their friends and teachers. It brought many parents to tears, especially parents who had no idea that their seemingly happy kids had already been exposed to the nastiness of being treated as an other.

Chambers’s newest works, on display at the O’Connor Gallery, mine similar terrain by asking the viewer to look at a wide variety of human forms encased in a constricting yet oddly welcoming box. Chambers describes these intentionally contradictory images as “ways to see the human body within a frame, a space that allows both limited and limitless readings”.

And sexy ones too. Few photographers love the human body as much as Chambers, who apparently has never met a model/subject he didn’t adore. Chambers’s gorgeous visions of real people and real bodies - bodies treated with the same attention and regard given to supermodels - are a welcome sight after a long winter spent packing on fat, wearing three jackets and fighting off Seasonal Affective Disorder.

“The box series,” Chambers tells me, “really started about 10 years ago, with me placing a model in the box and realizing that the box came already heaped with metaphors - in both directions, because we impose metaphors on ourselves and too often leave our actual selves out of the mix.”

“The thing to remember is that we have control of how we present ourselves on all levels, which I’ve been saying with my works for years. And yet, we live inside and outside these perceptive boxes. Being “boxed in” is something we react to and also can’t entirely function without. That’s why so many of my subjects look very comfortable in what is a very uncomfortable situation.”
How Chambers started photographing subjects in boxes is one of those happy accident stories that make the art world go ‘round.

“I had a show in Montreal, and came back with this huge box I couldn’t get into my studio. Showing in Montreal was the first time I was felt appreciated in this country, the first time I didn’t think about throwing away my camera . .. so, I became obsessed with this box and what it signified, which was not giving up.”

“Naturally, I started asking friends to hop in too - but because I couldn’t get the damned thing in my studio, I had to take photos in the hallway, had to sneak nude models around my building. I think in some ways this gave the works a real sense of fragility, because I literally had models running around my hallway in towels.”

“The surprising thing was that many of the subjects found it comforting to enter the box - about 80 percent. And not just because they were nude and looking for a place to hide. They found it very safe because when you are in the box you have no peripheral vision.”
Even the claustrophobics?

“Well, some people felt entrapped. That’s why I included people from as many cultures as possible, to mix up the diversity of the responses. Eventually, even people who were at first uncomfortable started tumbling around like kids. People became very candid once they were in the box, very trusting.”

I admit to Chambers that my first impressions upon viewing a person confined in a box are not entirely positive. Boxes, after all, are where you put dead people, and, to be topical, the Americans have reportedly taken to tucking Iraqi captives into small crates. Add in the fact that many of Chambers’s models are men of colour, and a slew of oppression metaphors pops into my head. Is the political subtext intentional?

Chambers pauses. He’s heard this question before.

“When I was studying at York, I had issues with how I saw blacks portrayed in photography. Some of the images were degrading or stereotypical, but also blacks were not photographed with attention to how black skin appears on film. I wanted black models to reflect light as well, to work against all the metaphors for darkness.”

“Secondly, I wanted to see images of someone like myself treated with the same normality that white models are treated with, as representations of the human race. But I admit that interpretation is all about context. You can see a black man in a box and think about the history of blacks in North America … but when those images were shown in Japan, people thought of Hiroshima!”

“I’ve always said that people will interpret based on their own history, so people should let their interpretations take them on a journey. It’s ok to ask questions.”

On the other side of the photographic spectrum are Mark Ruwedel’s stark and haunting images of western Canadian landscapes – mountains and valleys pillaged by the building of the transcontinental railroad. If Michael Chambers is a humanist searching for the sweet inner lives of his subjects, Ruwedel is an archaeologist searching for nasty messes left behind by our ambitions.

This is definitely bleak work, but in a fascinating way. Ruwedel photographs the split hills and ravaged (but slowly healing) forests as if he were a photojournalist covering a war (or an apocalypse). The dark, knife-sharp rocks that line the crevasses are straight out of Tolkien’s Mordor, and the long stretches of wind blasted, broken track could easily be the fabled canals of Mars.

I’m not sure I’d want to own one of these photos (I am keenly aware of the folly of human endeavour - a.k.a. my career), but I have to hand it to any photographer who so unflinchingly captures our national romance’s scarred underbelly.

I am not a psychiatrist, but I’ve been to many – so I feel qualified to opine that painter Andrew Rucklidge has suffered a nervous breakdown (or, as one shrink taught me to say, “nervous breakthrough”).

Rucklidge used to be such a gentlemanly painter. His early landscapes and storm-tossed skies were painted with a 19th century fastidiousness and a loving fidelity to nature. One imagined Rucklidge at his studio, pipe in mouth, fussing over the exact shade of blue for a 4pm sky, the right brown for an April mud.

Well, that’s all gone to hell. Rucklidge’s fantastic new exhibition of mixed media panels is a riotous barrage of wide trowel swipes, aggressive ink smears, pretty rainbows (yikes!), scratched-on stars and space ships, and enough fibrous texture to fill a breakfast bowl.

I love surprises.

Michael Chambers
The Box
O’Connor Gallery 97 Maitland Street Until April 2

Mark Ruwedel
Westward
Stephen Bulger Gallery 1026 Queen Street West Until April 2

Andrew Rucklidge
New Works
Angell Gallery 890 Queen Street West Until April 2