Scandal At The Owens, Gossip In Sackville

For the class of Tuesday, March 19th.

-I heard that thing... did you hear? That thing that happened at the Owens Art Gallery, in the 90's, that got them in court. Can you believe it? Who did you hear it from? 

-I heard it from Vanessa who heard it from Gemey. I'd heard it from John before, and a little from Jerry. Little from Jerry. Mostly from John... but Vanessa told it well... Gemey's version, that is.

-You didn't hear it from me.

INSERT VIDEO THAT WON'T UPLOAD HERE

Video Art

For the class of Thursday, March 14th.

During this class, we saw Lisa Steele's video art "Birthday suit with scars and defects" recorded on her 27th birthday, and it inspired me to make my own video art. It's a little out there, so either bare with me or skip to the next post.

"All You Can Eat Porn: My Apple", Claire Gallant (2013)

First, I prepare an apple: 
I wash it, remove its sale sticker, and peel the fruit.
Peeling apples is a very tender act to me, 
which I associate strongly with my mother, 
my aunts, and my grandmothers, and their gendered rituals. 
I love the sound of apples being peeled. 
Eventually, the gesture is meant to feed loved ones, and maybe to treat them. 
However, the action is uneasy to my hands since it is alien to my daily life as a 23 year old;
I've never found it easy.

Second, I strip naked to devour the apple as quickly as possible. 
I gag rushing through it, and most of it is wasted.
Planning and then making this second half of the video, 
I was referring to mainstream internet pornography, 
especially ones featuring women performing fellatio on men.
Today, the internet facilitates and increases the distribution and consumption of pornography, and brings along questions that are difficultly muffled in my conscience, such as:
What is being portrayed in the most popular videos?
What kind of sexuality does it exemplify for the genders?
Why is it being consumed so vastly and what are its effects?

This video performance, although a display of negative emotions from me 
(I wear them on my sleeve, or rather, on my face), 
is meant as a comment to be heard and interpreted by viewers as they wish. 

Thanks for your attention.

Globe and Mail article.

Drawing on Krazy: Lunar Thoughts with Tintin

For the class of Tuesday April 2nd, 2013.

Today's class focused mostly on drawing, with a pronounced emphasis on comics and graphic novel artists, many of which from the publishing house Drawn and Quarterly. Check out this page for a delicious variety of artists published by the company.

I am a fan of graphic novels and of comics. Some of my favorites include Charles Burns, Guy Delisle, and Marc Bell. How it all began though, was probably through the series Asterix et Obelix, and Tintin.

I am still very interested in Tintin. There is a specific term for people like me: "Tintinophile", and therefore of course, internet fan clubs to match! Here's one of them. In comparison to some (this stuff gets pretty serious), I am definitely a Tintinophile Light, but I still wear my badge with honour.

In this selection from "Tintin and The Crab With The Golden Claw", the viewer's gaze is encouraged to wander along with Tintin's, as explains Fred Sanders in this great article from the Scriptorium Daily.

Personally, part of what interests me so much about Tintin is the richness of the story's narrative and of its symbolism, in combination with its ability to remain simple, clean and seemingly effortless: The testament of a true masterpiece. Tintin is an over acknowledged work, and as a comic classic has even been debated to be a literary classic by Tom McCarthy in his book Tintin and The Secret of Literature, conquering new grounds for the medium of comics in general.

I am currently reading McCarthy and loving it.
Borrow it after me if you're so inclined,
it's in Mount Allison University's library collection.

Comics are so powerful. I see the medium as an intersection between the story-telling tools of cinema and written word, incidentally on the same page as paintings, drawings, and other 2D art forms. So much can be communicated between the frames.

Themes and symbols that particularly interest me in Tintin, specifically, are those of good and evil-delegated and concentrated to specific characters-, and the themes of dreams and craziness. Here are some of my favorite examples of these enchanting follies:

1) The fast inflating and exploding mushrooms on the fallen meteorite island in The Shooting Star.

2) Dupont and Dupond's (in English Thompson and Thomson's) bubble burping and fast rainbow beard sprouting in The Land of black Gold. They are later still afflicted by this mysterious illness in Explorers on The Moon.

3) In The Shooting Star again, a mad street prophet announces a supposed upcoming apocalypse. 

Finally, seperate from the themes of dreams and craziness, I also love that Tintin goes to the moon. Two books are dedicated to the destination, Destination Moon and Explorers on The Moon. I am myself very interested in the moon and in its symbolism, as a subject of fantasy and impossibility, symbol of impossible dreams and of madness. Yet we have walked on the Moon, have done the impossible. What now? To me, it is the most beautiful and mysterious metaphor for our present time in history and our direction in the world. We have gone further than we ever thought possible. Technology has permitted the unimaginable, and yet it has also shrunk our world: We now have to pay greater attention to what we have instead of wanting more. Having looked to the stars and not found a planet as hospitable to life as ours (although I am sure it exists), we have, I hope, realized our luck and renewed our responsibility towards to fragile ecosystems on Earth. Yet despite having known it physically and "conquered" it as a human species, there is still something that makes us, and undoubtably always will make us dreamily look up at it at night... and this is one of the many things that I just love about the moon.

Earth seen from the Moon.

The Griffiths, Gender and My Queerness

For the class on Thursday February 21st.

Eliza Griffiths, General Idea, and the movie Lianna.

There's something about Eliza Griffith's work that reminds me of the movie Lianna and a slightly trashy friend of a friend that this friend suggested I add to my Facebook lately. And I did. She writes and is a woman born a man, both of which I think are great things. However she posts so much that she ends up all over my home page, and it's all a little much when combined with heavy internet-styled spelling.

I feel a little like this about the movie Lianna, and about Eliza Griffiths' paintings, although in different ways.

Eliza Griffiths painting.

With Eliza Griffiths' paintings, my verdict is that the gaudiness pays off. Although, most often, the ghost of gender stereotyping is very much so present, Griffiths bends them and reverses them, often making the men of her paintings the beings (or objects?) to be most desired. In combination with her bright and attention fetching color palettes, they run in danger of being obnoxious, but something in them saves them from this ill-fated destiny. Maybe it's their slightly illustrative style, or the thick clay-like rendering of the figures, most often based on Griffiths herself and her husband. Either way, they seem in the midst of communicating impressions, feelings and a narrative, which saves them, in my mind, from being needy or worst, desperate.

Maybe that's what bugs me a little about watching Lianna today. Although I understand that it came out in a different time and place, I found Lianna (a $300 000-budget movie from 1983) odd to watch today. In it, Lianna, a married mother with two children, played by actress Linda Griffiths, takes night classes and begins a liaison with her instructor, a woman in her mid-fifties. She leaves her husband, and is heartbroken when her lover admits to having a permanent partner in another city. We follow her as she discovers lesbian bars and as her entourage responds to her coming out.

Although both the movie and Griffiths' paintings deal with gender norms and sexuality, I find that Eliza Griffiths' paintings are much more flattering in their depictions of the norm transgressors. In Lianna, the final "hoorah" comes when Lianna's best friend decides to "tolerate" her homosexuality by saying something along the lines of "I don't understand it and I'll never understand it, but I've known you since a long time and if you're a lesbian, than that's something that I guess I'll accept about you". Gee, thanks. Better than a declaration of war, but it's still a little bit too close to the similar statement (concerning gender equality and heterosexual relationships) of "I may not be nice, or there much of the time, or treat you nicely, but at least I don't knock you around, woman!", which I've also heard many times between popular culture film protagonists. Again, "Gee, thanks". In Lianna, sexuality is also a black and white situation, one of gay or not, and of conformity or of being an outcast. Not once was it envisioned that Lianna might be bisexual. Given that she never once alluded to not having been attracted to her husband (soon to be ex-husband), the suggestion is not a radical one, but, I assume, perhaps one that was not considered by the writers and director. Or maybe the nuance between lesbian and bisexual escaped them.

As a bisexual woman, I am lucky to be comfortable with this facet of my identity almost 100% of the time. When I am not comfortable, however, is sometimes not so much when faced with sexist or queer-phobic ideas or language (which I mostly either directly address or dismiss as the result of insistent denial or stupidity), but when I am faced with too much of a good thing. Before I sound like a spoiled brat, let me explain myself. Have you ever had someone be too nice to you? Like, condescendingly, uncomfortably, over-insistently too nice to you? That's what I'm talking about. It's the type of discourse that may come from good intentions (somewhere), but that come off all wrong. What I read into it, instead of "You are just as worthy of my acceptance and attention as the average Joe or Jane on the street", is "I will pay all of my attention to you to convince you that you are worthy of me, and mostly that I am an open and accepting person." That's hard to deal with. How do you deal with that?

The best behaviour is the behaviour that meshes my sexual identity in with the rest of my perceived identity. I am not just a bisexual woman. I am also a Canadian, an artist, an environmentalist, a leftist, a feminist, an Acadian, a francophone, a Frederictonian, and the list goes on. The best behaviour is when my friends give as much validation and conversation when (and if) I speak about a female crush as when (and if) I speak of a male crush. If you'd gush with me about a man (yes, because I'm still 12), then gush with me about a woman! And if you just don't care, then you just don't care. I'm not out for your sympathy or your charity, I just want the same opportunities while being fully myself.

In the spirit of General Idea.

"P is for Poodle" (1983) by General Idea

The Real Treat: Contemporary Canadian Performance and Installation Artists

For the class of Thursday, March 21st 2013.

I love the work of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, most specifically, their experiential walks. Have a look at one below, called Alter Banhoft Video Walk (made in 2012). I very highly suggest watching it expanded to full-screen, and plugging in some headphones if you have them.

It's been awhile since an artwork moved me to tears. This did it. It is vivid and haunting, but softly so, like waking up to a nurse cleaning your bloody but anesthetized wound, soft white gauzes abounding around you, with your last memories being of angry grenades and battlefield dirt. It is personal, but magical and removed. I love that she talks of people watching, and of being in your head, when all the while her voice is dictating the viewer's experience of the space that he or she calls her own. Is this experience truly the viewer's? Having spent a week mute as an art performance two years ago, I relate immensely to the narrating voice, since by the end of that week, my own thoughts were as loud and clear as the voice in the headphones. I assume that this was because of their inability to be manifested into the outside world. By the end of the week I also "heard" my voice when I wrote to myself, to an imaginary audience (such as would a writer), and directly to others, as a live substitute for talking.

The theme of memory is also one that I am exploring currently in a collaborative project called "Somebody that you used to know." For it, I am making composite drawings based on people's  descriptions of a "past romantic interest", a category that includes (but is not limited to) exes, childhood crushes, friends with benefits, one night stands, almost boyfriends or girlfriends, and ex-partners, married or not. With this project, like Cardiff & Miller, I am interested in the subjectivity of memory and in transplanting the past into the present. Unlike Cardiff & Miller however, "Somebody that I used to know" also brings memory's failures into the limelight, when the memory-holder rates the final composite drawing out of ten for resemblance to what they think the past romantic interest really looks (or looked) like.

Although there are many differences, another similarity comes to mind: Both have the possibility to be highly personal, and yet are very public, either by being made for a wider (mostly art) public consumption or by treating universally relatable themes. And, if everything goes well on my side, both works are complimented if not primarily defined by sound.

All comparisons aside, I'm so glad we saw Cardiff & Miller's works in class today. Other installation and performance artists seen were Shawna Dempsey & Laurie Milan, John Sasaki, Adad Hannah, Daniel Olson, and Rebecca Belmore.

Fringe (2008) by Rebecca Belmore. This photograph of a stitched-up Native woman, red beads strung onto the stitching tread, has been installed in galleries and as an outdoor billboard. 

The Ever-Evolving Medium of Film Meets The Internet

For the class of Thursday March 7, 2013.

Today, a treck through Canadian animation in Art History class lead us through the works of Norman McLaren, Graham Patterson (living and working in Sackville), Amy Lockheart and Elizabeth Belliveau. Through them, we also got a brief overview of the National Film Board of Canada, which has been producing animations since the 1930s.

This reminded me of how awesome the National Film Board of Canada is, and of a recent discovery of mine from its site:

Bear 71

A screen shot from "Bear 71".

Bear 71, in the words of this The Next Web article, is an "interactive documentary that blurs the line between wild and wired worlds". In it, the documentary film viewer gets to navigate a true-to-life reconstruction of the Banff territory and encounter wildlife in its actual-time location on the map. I'm not sure I'm explaining it clearly, so if you're any bit curious, please be my guest and check it out for yourself. Believe me, it's well worth it and makes you wonder... what will come next, and to what other possible applications could we give this wonderful innovative medium?

You Were Always On My Mind: Thinking of Native and Japanese Culture

For the class of Tuesday March 5, 2013.

The only thing I can remember without notes right now about Tuesday's class is the very end of the class when some movie clip was playing and I started to feel sick. So sick. Run to the bathrooms 'cuz you have cramps and and then be confused about which end you want stuff to come out of sick. So let me take out my notes one second...

While I do this (in the future when I'll have them... wait, what?) let me give you an overview of some things I've been up to lately that I find very interesting.

There's this paper on Tokyo, you see, and it's kind of my baby. It's making me really want to go there one day and, knowing me, there's a good possibility I will. I've even been checking out flights there "just to know", but let's face it, I'm actually testing out if the lake's ice is hard enough to walk on, and it's looking pretty smooth.

This list of 100 things to do in Tokyo is pretty much the best (written in French). Some of my favorites are:

70. Wander and get lost in the Shinjuku train station, the largest in the world. 
Given my current obsession with trains, YES PLEASE! The station is situated in the district of Shinjuku, pictured below.

74. Enjoy some sushi by taking the metro to a kaiten-zushi in Ameya Yokocho (Ameyoko) at Ueno.
Because I LOVE sushi, and also because their metro looks like this:

83. Have one beer, then two, then three in a neighbourhood Izakaya.
Izakayas are the japanese equivalents of the english pubs. They moslty serve Japanese beers, sake, and hot or cold foods to be had in a casual atmosphere. Before reading this, I had totally forgotten that Japan is a big producer of beer and I was very glad to be reminded... I'm a total beer gourmande! Check out this website on Japanese beers.

97. To have a zen time in a Neko Cafe, petting cats. 
Neko Cafes are cafes, you guessed it, with cats. To me, it's like the the idea of sushi: simple, but brilliant! Ever feel like petting a cat and have none around? No problem! Just drop by a Neko Cafe and hang with the masters of the house there. They'd sure have my business... I'd be hooked!

Also, although I didn't see it on the list, Tokyo has many green rooftops, and some of the ones in Ginza are a-buzz with excitement! (hehehe) Check out Ginza's rooftop bees and beekeepers in the following news cast:

Alright, are you still there? I've found my notes! They remind me that on March 5th, we saw the works of artists Andrea Mortson (living in Sackville), Christian Pflug, Kent Monkman, Eleanor Bond, Wanda Koop and George Shaw. Out of all these, and to relate to all the Japan-esque information above, the one that kept my attention most was by far Kent Monkman.

Kent Monkman is a Canadian artist who identifies as Cree, Irish, and gay. A dabbler in many media such as film, installation, and performance, he is the author of "Icon for a New Empire" (2007), of "The Impending Storm" and of the film "Group of Seven Inches". By presenting himself as an individual of mixed and surprising identities, Kent Monkman breaks the rigidity of the Native stereotype as defined by descendants of Europeans colonizers. Yup, that includes me, and statistically speaking, odds are that it includes you too. 

"The Trapper's Bride" (2006) Kent's images often feature his alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testicle, cross-dressed and in homo-erotic situations such as this one, alluding to Jacques-Louis David's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps" (1801-1805).

Kent Monkman, as I mentioned, does performances for which he often fabricates his own accessories and dress. Here, a spicy pair of high-heels have been modified by Kent.

To me, what all of this has to do with Japan is the way in which learning about a culture diversifies your understanding of it. Indeed, skimming is very limiting, and in the case of the West's approach to Native and Japanese culture, some stereotypes are simply false. For example, as Jessica Danforth pointed out it in a mind-blowing talk last night, great respect and even veneration was often expressed in many native communities for what we call today members of the LGBT community (lesbian, gay, bi and transexual). Such individuals in Aboriginal communities since the 1980s refer to themselves as "two spirited". What more, many Aboriginal communities were matriarchal, a structure that patriarchal colonizers intentionally set to destroy to gain control of the land on which we, as Canadians, now all live on. I do not strive for a matriarchal society anymore than I thrive for a patriarchal one, but from such a culture, (also one that honours the land and its resources) us Euro-descendants have so much to learn!

In much the same way, my History of Japan class is enriching my understanding of Japanese culture, one that was before dictated mostly by popular culture and its often limiting idiomatic characters. An article I just read this afternoon, for example, talks of the 1960 Mi'ike Coal Dispute and of the subsequent second phase of the Citizen's Movement and Public Protests. Yet simplistic stereotypes would have it that the Japanese are an orderly and docile people, both to the state and to the opinion of the masses. Information such as this reminds us of human individuality and underlines the importance of stepping into another's shoes and of trusting that he or she is the larger authority on their lived experience, something I am sure both Jessica Danforth and Kent Monkman can agree with. Dare to be proven ignorant every once in awhile, and we will all be the better off for it.

"Baked Ham" Features Tsukiji, Felt Cats and Desire Lines

 For Tuesday February 19th's class.

I found these today and don't know what to do with them. I can put them here, right? Let's do a class post in reverse!

First, Anita Hairston talks about city design objectively following data- however diverse the source of that data- instead of ideals. A nice call back to earth if you ask me! Anita Hairston is the senior associate for Transportation Policy at PolicyLink and an adviser for the National Building Museum's Intelligent Cities initiative.

Second, "Welcome to Tsukiji", a documentary about Tokyo's legendary fish market.

Third, Illustrator James Davies' stuffed felt cats dressed in various costumes. Yep, they're pretty awesome.

So, what do any of these have to do with Tuesday's panel discussion class about "The Center and The Margin In Canadian Art"? Find out as I do! In the style of Sackville's "Baked Ham Community Speaker Series", I'll connect things that are seemingly completely unrelated for the pleasure of creativity and of learning about new things.

A poster for a talk. The speaker series features two speakers per evening presenting on two seemingly completely unrelated subjects. It is then left to the audience to ask questions and figure out similarities between subjects.

In a few ways, this makes me think of Anita Hairston's mention of desire lines in cities. Desire lines are the worn-down paths created most often on grass by frequent pedestrian traffic. These pedestrians "desire" a footpath where there is none, and who so make their own by force of habit. Many consider desire lines to go outside the beaten path -pun intended- and we could say that they are in the margin. But the margin is sometimes desirable to the center, to keep playing with words, and this is where Anita Hairston comes in and listens, as a good urban planner should.

The desirability of the unknown - and so of the margin - can also be considered when looking at tourism. Does tourism not bank on this human curiosity for the marginal, sometimes for the exotic? Yes, and sometimes to controversial effects. The famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo is a good example, where the market was as of late closed to tourists, because there were simply too many for the local merchants to function efficiently! However, curiosity can now be satisfied via the acclaimed documentary "Welcome to Tsukiji" by J. Almena Redondo.

As for illustrator James Davies' felt cats, we can perhaps tie them in by noting that the domain of illustration is itself a marginal one within the Canadian art world. Come to think of it, documentary-making and urban design also fit quite well into the margin of Canadian art. Are they art? Not all the time, and not to everyone. But are they creative? Most certainly. I prefer this idea, that of being a creative rather than an outright artist. This idea of being a creative takes much of the mysticism and supposed glamor away from the act of creating compared to that of the "artist" title. Instead, it is swapped for a professional, diverse way of approaching situations and a flexibility in occupations, professional or otherwise.

Now if only my university diploma read "Bachelor of Fiiiiiine Creativity"... !

Panel discussion: Art and Audience in Canada

For the class of Thursday, February 14th (Happy Valentine's Day).

What a great class! I just love panel discussions. Once Emma, Alex and Matt had presented their talks, the floor was opened to what ended up being a great class discussion (as per usual). Emma scanned across performance art and audience or crowd, Alex explored the gap between the usual art-going audience and the general public's art philosophy, while Matt presented a study that found that "the crowd seems to need reassurance from itself before being able to accept new art". Once they had presented their talks, the floor was opened to what ended up being a great class discussion (as per usual). All of the subjects sent me thinking in an array of different directions, multiplied by the comparison of art and music to which we kept coming back.

Another thing that kept coming back was the need for what we called "art education", and I definitely agree, especially since Matt's mentioned study seems to emphasize that familiarity with art breeds further acceptance of it. However it seems to me important to emphasize the social aspect behind art's popularity, and to add dimension to what might otherwise be a narrow institutional definition of "education".

Last year, I experienced another social and cultural environment by spending the year in Europe. Here, I found that people were generally more knowledgeable of what can still be called "mainstream" or "famous art" such as works from Picasso, Rembrandt, but also the modernists and, to my utmost surprise, even of performance art! All this without necessarily having had classes about art. Rather, as Matt and Alex suggested, the crowd seemed to have become its own motivator to learn about art. Have a few friends casually referring to Degas or Van Gogh? Well you'd probably want to be let in the loop, wouldn't you? Furthermore, the same applied to national and international politics and history.

Social context and play are and always have been powerful learning motivators. Indeed, when have you learned better than being tutored one on one, or when what you're learning is fun? Students learn best when they're actively practicing, and this is instinctively how we learn the very first things in life. During childhood (a time of extraordinarily condensed  learning), we learn by playing. We create a set of rules, design worlds of our own, and explore the boundaries and possibilities of these worlds, breaking the rules when appropriate. Entrepreneurs still use these skills. Lawyers use these skills. Are plumbers not just slightly more sophisticated versions of children playing with connect-a-sticks? Even socialite entertainers play by the rules of their world's books. Point is, everyone still learns and manoeuvres this way. Play encourages risk-taking and builds confidence, both of which have been shown to improve adult chances at success. So why not play still as an adult, then, and make institutional youth education more like play and more like our natural education through social osmosis?

Different understandings of knowledge, demonstrated by a Khan Academy mathematics map. Visit the website for some free learning on this and many more subjects.

My father works at New Brunswick's Department of Education. As a part of the francophone department, the team is small, ideas are shared readily, and changes are perhaps easier to implement. This summer, I was invited to a talk by a retiring senior member of the department, who has basically never stopped learning, and is also an amazing teaching. What a powerful combination! A respected hard worker deeply integrated into the social fabric of the department, he opened the minds of coworkers as he spoke positively of sustainability, (disguised) feminism, and new methods of learning. What I got out of it and what I would like to share with others of my generation, was the assertion that the world, when you look at the right places, is ready and indeed thirsty for the changes we so dearly wish to see. What we need to do is to back it up with researched knowledge and our enthusiasm for new technologies we've created.

Since this summer, I often get (non-confidential) emails being circulated from the department about innovative ideas, new technologies or pressing sustainable information and solutions. What I've noticed from these emails is that there is a lot of talk about re-defining "education". I recently found this playlist, and was very pleasantly surprised to see that I had been previously been introduced to much of its speakers by the mentioned emails. In case you zoned out, I'll mention it again: The older generation is listening, and even innovating. Have a look for yourself at this TEDtalk playlist on re-imagining education , or check out my favourite out of them all here below by the founder of the Khan Academy Salman Khan.

If we want change in the educational institutions, it isn't that far away from reality. There are receptive people working in positions of influence. To me, this Canadian Art History class has been a prime example of this, and I can recount other countless examples of great receptive educators. Maybe we only need to speak up.

Lexier's Collaborative Portraiture Through Text Is Good Public Art

For today's class (Tuesday February 12th), I will be writing two journal blog posts to make up for the class I missed January 29th. This is the second.

Artists seen today: Christo and Jeanne-Claude,  Robert Smithson, Micah Lexier, Micheal Snow, Richard Serra, Eric Fischel, and Tagny Duff.


Micah Lexier, a Canadian artist working and living in Toronto, is tossing around very interesting ideas, revolving around themes that I myself have been thinking about lately as well.

First, that of time and the finiteness of our lives. His works "A Minute Of My Time", "A Portrait of My Grandfather"  and "Self Portrait As A Wall Divided Proportionally Between This Black Type..." make me think of "Lessons For Living", a "Tapestry" CBC radio show episode which I was lucky to discover about a week ago. I highly recommend it! Click on the link above to have a listen. For me, I took it both as a "new traditionalist" look at how we used to do things, looking for answers to current world challenges, and as an an opportunity to re-value golden age wisdom, discarding the modernist and capitalist understanding that everything new is better, mostly if not entirely because it is new.

Micah Lexier's self-explanatory installation "Self-Portrait As A Wall Divided Proportionally Between This Black Type..." at Concordia University. The same work has also been displayed at the Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick.

Second, Lexier explores portraiture -sometimes personally and individually, and sometimes anonymously- with very pleasing results, something I am also currently working through artistically myself with a series of second-hand collaborative memory-portraits. I won't ruin the surprise by sharing my work quite yet, especially since it isn't resolved, but Lexier's installations definitely hit a close nerve. Particularly, I find his "Hall of Names" and "Ampersand" to be poignant as examples of collective portraits, "Hall of Names" speaking about its space (the subway station), and both helping define their spaces into multidimensional places shaped by the people that frequent them and their relationships.

"Ampersand" is a collaborative installation on the walls of Toronto subway stop Sheppard & Leslie. In this project, Micah asked locals to write the name of the station onto the tiles, which he later had installed.

"Hall of Names" a public installation at the National Trade Center in Toronto. Here, Lexier lazer cut the first 1000 anonymous submissions of names out of stainless steel and suspended them.

 Lastly, you'll also notice the prominence of text in his work. This, again, is something I quite like, since I am influenced by biographic and auto-biographic graphic novels, authors (such as Annie Ernaux), and artists crossing text and images such as Sophie Calle. A good story is a good story after all, whether you tell it through images, words, or anything else. And after Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" (see last post), it sure is nice to see Lexier master public art.

Que "Serra" Ne Sera Pas

For today's class (Tuesday February 12th), I will be writing two journal blog posts to make up for the class I missed January 29th. This is the first.


Artists seen today: Christo and Jeanne-Claude,  Robert Smithson, Micah Lexier, Micheal Snow, Richard Serra, Eric Fischel, and Tagny Duff.

Richard Serra: Matthew Barney respects him, and it shows. In his surreal four part film "Cremaster", Barney features Serra in the chapter "The Order" as somewhat of an all-American Thor figure, shoveling vaseline in his forging suit at the Guggenheim, while the main character of Barney's film completes a puzzle surrounded by a stomping herd of punks. Manly! (...but confusing.) Point is, as a very respected American Modern sculptor of colossal influence, Barney's portrayal of Serra is somewhat appropriate. If you're comfortable with nonsense or really enjoy finding metaphors and symbols in practically anything (like me), watch "The Order" here below.

And yet, I can't not mention everything that I think is wrong and pompous about Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" (pictured below), including his response when confronted with people's negative response to the public sculpture. They found it obnoxiously obstructive to their daily activities, unaesthetic and lacking in evidence of artistic skill, and over 1300 employees petitioned against it.

That wall, forming a stripe in the middle of the Foley Federal Plaza in New York, is Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc". Erected in 1981, it was dismantled in 1989 after a controversial lawsuit.

In many ways, it reminds me of what is inherently wrong with much of Modernist City arrangement, with the city of Brasilia as its emblem: It all looks great from a plane, but Godiva forbid a person of average means actually try and live there. See this link for a french article in Le Monde on some of Brasilia's contemporary shortcomings, as designed by Modern architecture icon Oscar Niemeyer. Places are dislocated from one another, little is done to bridge sci-economic gaps, and transportation systems other than the automobile were until very recently virtually nonexistent.

In the same way, "Tiled Arc" cuts the public from its destination, is arguably an eyesore, and blocks off circulation and a view to what appears to be a wonderfully pleasant fountain. Cool of Serra to assert that not all art should be pleasant and to want to intervene and interact with the surrounding architecture, but should he really use this opportunity and platform go to war with the public? As a people-inclined closet urban planner (and after all I just wrote), I'm sure you can guess my two cents on it.

To take sides, I first asked "what" and "why". Why did the workers want it removed? What were the artist's intentions? What were both of their (apparently opposing) values, and who's do I believe in the most? As far as I can see, the workers wanted it removed because it did little to add quality to their lives, and in fact did the contrary, while the artist's intentions were relating to advancing his study and expression of modern minimalist art, and so "art for the sake of art's 'progress'". But what is progress and where are we going? Debates, controversy and publicly deemed failures such as Brasilia and the Tilted Arc keep us on our toes, offering an opportunity for us to renegotiate destination. In both cases, I am glad of the position taken since both demonstrate that "art for art's sake" or "modern for modern's sake" (not to mention for the ego) is not enough, and should first serve the populace, especially on a larger scale such as a city or plaza where many will be affected. Put that in your bucket and stir it, Serra.

Re-Humanizing the Landscape With Diversity

For the class of Thursday February 6th.

Here are some of my favorite works from those we saw in class today:

"There Is No Place Like Home" 2000 (4.39x20.42m) a public installation by Ken Lum.

Jin Me Yoon's "Group of Sixty Seven" of photographic installation from 1996.

 

A "Mask" work by Arthur Renwick.

To me, what all of these works have in common (and wonderfully so) is their focus on the human. In addition to speaking about home and belonging (or a lack thereof), they all put a spotlight on individuals by either re-inserting them into the empty landscapes of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr such as in "Group of Sixty Seven", or by saturating the frame in distorted faces such as in Arthur Renwick's "Mask" works.

Either way, this focus back onto the person makes me think of a local photographer's project that you might have heard of already: Humans of Sackville.

Indeed, what is a place without the familiar faces it houses, day in and day out? People make places, and then the places, in turn, shape people. Urban planner Jan Gehl understands it well, having slowly absorbed his psychologist wife's professional wisdom over his career's lifespan. People is where it's at, what it's all about, and Ian Chew, a photographer, Mount Allison University student and the founder of Humans of Sackville, has understood the message.

Run as a Facebook page and as a weekly column in the Sackville Tribune Post, Humans of Sackville is a branch in a much larger tree: There is also a Humans of Brazil, Humans of India, Humans of New York, Humans of Amsterdam... and the list goes on! With these, forget the fashion photography, super glam idealized humans. Although fashionable people will be found amongst the photographed, the "Humans of..." find beauty in all the humblest places, indiscriminate of age, skin tone, gender, and status. It doesn't get any better.

Despite being a small place, (perhaps even tiny,) Sackville is rich in interesting people who would give you the shirts off of their backs if you needed it. Yes, maybe even in January. Humans of Sackville is a great testament to that and to our community spirit, and a catalyst of the later as well. Humans of Sackville was lately acknowledged in Canadian Geographic magazine, and rightfully so! For all these reasons, I tip my hat to you.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

                                              -Margaret Mead

Our Canadian Heritage: A Conceptual Moment

For Thursday January 24th's class.

It's kind of funny to do these journal entries in reverse. I'm sure that this way will produce a different recollection than if I were writing in forward chronologically.

But back to the point! In January 24th's class, we saw conceptual art making in the 70's in Canada through the intervention of Garry Neill Kennedy's crew. The new director of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Kennedy hired new faculty members such as Eric Cameron and Gerald Ferguson, conceptual artists. He also invited world-renouned conceptual artists to Halifax such as Vito Acconci, Sol Lewitt, Dan Graham, Eric Fischl, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Beuys and Claes Oldenburg.

Conceptual art isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I love it. Yes, I don't mind that it is ripped away from skill set and craft, allowing for flipped upside down urinals to be regarded as art. Instead, the ideas behind a work are examined as the ultimate qualifier of value and beauty in an art work, and I find this trade-off to be worth it. Ideas are, after all, incredibly powerful. There are reasons why oppressive regimes have burnt books, and one of them is that books, like much successful artworks, carry ideas... powerful tools in the hands of the right individuals indeed.

Somehow here the old Our Canadian Heritage TV commercial pops into my head. "The medium is the message!", fanatically exclaims Marshall McLuhan. For a fuller description of his ideas, click here for part one of three of a broadcasted lecture by McLuhan.

I'm not sure why this comes to mind; Although I think that "The medium is the message" might tie back to conceptual art in a few ways, I find it most strongly relates to Modernism, which makes sense given the chronology. Conceptual art, as I mentioned, is first motivated by the immaterial, its physical manifestation only subsequently emerging from the idea.

Perhaps something they have in common is that they both bring us back to materiality. In Conceptual art, the relation is at times ironic, but very much so present, if only at times by its extreme absence. For example, who can deny the pleasing and sumptuous materiality of Eric Cameron's "Exposed/Concealed" pieces?

An "Exposed/Concealed" painted object "sculpture" by Eric Cameron.

With these, Cameron paints a layer of paint per day onto various objects, repeating the process over and over. The results are objects that insinuate ritualistic performance, while yielding surprising physical results. However the most important part of these works is still the idea. Does it matter that the medium  is paint? In my opinion, it doesn't, although it might have been most practical and a nice reference to the painting tradition, and a pleasant merging of it to that of three-dimensional art. Cameron could have accumulated layers of cumin, of mustard, or of tar, in my opinion, and the piece would have resonated the same. What he is really painting with within our minds is time, once we are aware of his process and of his dedication to his task, so diligently repeated.

Through the act of writing this, I have changed my mind: Conceptual art should not bare the logo "The medium is the message", but should instead be reversed to "The message is the medium", the medium ideally acting only as a window through with to understand the message, the idea. If this entry was a bit densely semantical, sorry. I love playing philosophically with words, and conceptual art indulges me... Thanks for the snazzy catchline McLuhan.

Manufactured Landscapes, Slum Development and Communicative Planning

On last Thursday's class (January 30th), we started the movie "Manufactured Landscapes". I had seen this movie already, but it was great to revisit it.

Without a doubt, the images by Edward Burtynsky (such as the one below) were stunning. Hear him talk about them in this wonderful TEDtalk video:

What this relates to for me is the cyclicality of our creations. What we make, often does not disappear into the ether, and these images are a beautiful but haunting reminder of that closed cycle.

This work made me think of the documentary Urbanized. I don't think I talked about it yet on this blog. Here's the preview:

Specifically, I thought of Urbanized's chapter "A Walk in the Mumbai Sky" during which Sheela Patel is interviewed and shares her expertise with the pavement dwellers of Mumbai and her implication in SPARC, the Society for the Promotion of Area Ressource Centres.

The rapid urbanization of countries in the South of the globe is predicted to be of huge impact in the 21st century. At the moment, a new city the size of Seattle is being born every 4-7 hours, (quoting Alex Steffen, himself quoting others). However, in the South, many of these city's slums are also growing at an alarming rate, further widdening economic disparity between inhabitants. This is where people like Sheela Patel and non-profit organizations like SPARC come in, working to improve the lives of slum dwellers (both in India and across the world).

Here is part one of a short documentary about a slum upgrading in Pune, India, narrated by Sheela Patel:

I admire their process and would love to learn from it, especially when it comes to the system of communication they've established with the community. Planning a city- darn, even just a neighbourhood- should always very intimately include the people who will be living in it, and who have lived in it. Are they not experts themselves of what has worked and what hasn't?

I was glad to learn lately of similar efforts here at home to involve the community in the revising of the region of Moncton's city plans. We might be not as close to slums, but the process is certainly an important one, and I was glad to see it implemented here at home!

Tomi Ungerer and the Canadian Photographers Go to Neverland

CLEAR!

Ok. We're back. This blog died for a little but it's now back up again.

This is on today's class, Tuesday February 5th, in which we finished the movie "Manufactured Landscapes" and saw some Canadian photography work, most notably from the National Film Board's Still Photo Division and the United State's exhibition "The Family of Man" in the 1950's. Later we saw artists Robert Frank, Michel Lambeth, Lutz Dille and George Zimbel. Later (from the 70's) we talked of Jeff Wall's cibachrome photographs and the Sanchez Brother's theatrically set-up photographs.

It was probably the fine line photography can draw between fiction and reality, and the creepy magical quality of the photographs that kept making me think of Peter Pan.

Probably that, and a few themes and conversations such as those we had about William Eugene Smith's "The Walk to Paradise Garden", and the visual prompt of Jeff Wall's "The Drain" (both below).

"The Walk to Paradise Garden" photograph (1946) by William Eugene Smith.

"The Drain" by Jeff Wall, 229x287cm cibachrome (1989).

Why Peter Pan? Well, on a recent movie-watching binge *cough cough, yesterday, cough*, I slipped into the wonderful land of life-inspired fiction with Marc Forster's Finding Neverland. Ignore the formulaic Hollywood film-trailer (breaks the magic for me) and have a look at the trailer below if you're curious. I've mentioned having seeing and loved the movie Hugo too, and between then and now I also re-visited Pan's Labyrinth, which has great monsters!

I love how both film and photography lend themselves so readily to creating a convincing fictional world, perhaps because we are so used to taking what we see as reality. Also, you'll notice that these images have a lot to do with children's worlds, crossing over into adult's, or perhaps more accurately adults reminiscing about childhood and seeing their world as magical and perhaps better than the one they grew up into.

Do I think this to be true? No, not really. Johnny Depp's character, author of Peter Pan J.M. Barrie, probably has it the most figured out, as do the writers of Pan's Labyrinth. Children's worlds are not flawless or oblivious to adult problems, and appreciate honesty. In Finding Neverland, the Davies brothers very well understand that their mother is dying, and are incredibly (and understandably) frustrated that no one will tell them what is going on. Mr Barrie is probably the most straight-forward to them, although still a protective role model.

Are children's worlds innocent? Yes and no. Children need to be protected, but children's worlds are rough terrains with intricate narratives of good and evil, as the best children's authors demonstrate.

A good example is the work of the Alsacian satirist and illustrator Tomi Ungerer (click for his official website).

In Strasbourg, a poster for the Tomi Ungerer on a tramway bus stop. So many things I love in one picture!

Last year in Strasbourg I had the chance to visit the Museum of his work, which was a wonderful opportunity. Tomi Ungerer was nothing short of controversial, always stating what was on his mind politically and at times at great risk. His kid's books were banned in the US until Obama. He is famous for his posters against the Vietnam War and Racial injustice in America. Click on this link for a (french) interview of Ungerer in which he speaks vividly of his second-world war memories as a child amongst other things. My favorite instant of the interview is without question at the very end, when the interviewer comments (translated):

It's surprising when you realize that in all your books, it's actually the bad guys who are the heroes.

To which Tomi replies: What impassions me is the no-man's land between good and evil. I think that everyone can learn from each other. I especially want to show that what counts in life is to respect [others] and to smile.

I think that Mr Ungerer shows great respect to children this way, understanding that they are able to grasp much more complex situations than we give them credit for while stimulating their imaginations. And I really respect that.

Regionalist on a Math Trip

So this may qualify me as a bit of a nutcake, but oh well.

Lately I've been thinking about art and math and psychadellics. Specifically DMT, Alex Colville and geometry including fractals. Far out man.

But no, really. I find them strangely related too, since Colville's paintings are strangely spiritual and certainly reverencial to classical geometry such as the notion of the golden mean, which is clear when looking at his preliminary drawings.

Colville's drawing for Woman in Bathtub, painted in 1973.

All of this coincides with a recent conversation I had with a friend who told me about the documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule. I watched it last night, and it got me thinking about mathematical laws of nature we might not have figured out scientifically yet, but that nonetheless exist and have a profound effect on us. Check out the trailer here. Alex Grey features in the film, another artist sensitive to the possibility of mysticism in mathematics.

"Vision Crystal" by Alex Grey

Which leads me to my next point: Fractals. The above image by Alex Grey actually portrays a fractal (in red, embellished with the eyes). Fractals were discovered in the 70's as explained by Benoit Mandelbrot, and in short explained as a pattern repeating and encompassing itself. I'm not sure if I'm explaining it well, but my point is, they're really cool, apparently useful, and in my humble opinion have to have something to do with our perception and understanding of visual beauty, which in a way is what we all deal with.

For more on fractals, here's a great PBS Nova episode on the matter. I wonder what Alex Colville thinks about it all, or if he knows about it at all...

Curnoe, Favro and Colville Today

Never mind the news that this blog has stopped being for Gemey's Art History class! The second part of this class also requires a journal, so this class blog a' keeps a' goin'. So bare with me a little longer. For those of you from the class who might be new to this blog, welcome, and please don't hesitate to comment (here or by responding on your own blog) or share and steal things from here and adapt them in your own ways. Cheers.

Today's Art History class, amongst other things, gave an overview of regionalist artists Greg Curnoe, Murray Favro, and Alex Colville. As I mentioned in class, I was pleasantly surprised at the relevance of these artists to contemporary discourse, artistic and otherwise.

Artistically, Favro brings in the methods and the craft of other disciplines to explore his concepts, particularly in his "Projected Reconstruction" series. In these, he sculpts, builds and arranges white objects onto which he projected slides or videos. The result is visually enchanting, such as in his installation "Van Gogh's Room" reconstructing Van Gogh's painting "Bedroom in Arles" (1888).

"Van Gogh's Room" at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1973-74). The projection fills the warped white furniture sculptures with colour. If you haven't seen the original painting, check it out here.

Favro's medium of choice, installation, is still still talks to us and challenges us today. Artists such as Tony Oursler and Krysztof Wodiczko continue and extend his practice of projection.

Oursler's "Marlboro, Camel, Winston, Parliament, Salem, Marlboro Light, American Spirit" (2009) source

Wodiczko's "Hiroshima Projection" (1999-2000) source

I was also struck by Colville's attention to detail and to the skills of his craft. His paintings are meticulous, but full of mysticism and symbolism. This reminds me of a talk by my painting teacher Chris Down, and of how there seems to be a resurgence of representational painting in the department and in contemporary art, or perhaps a new lack of distinction between abstract and representational painting.

"Horse and Train"(1954) by Alex Colville. The painting was inspired by the line “Against a regiment I oppose a brain, and a dark horse against an armoured train.” in South African writer Roy Campbell's poem “Dedication to Mary Campbell”. source

Additionally, in terms of subject matter, all three artists had works depicting what we refer to today as "sustainable transportation", a coincidence (?) I couldn't pass up. The trains in Colville's famous painting "Horse and Train" and Murray Favro's "SD40 Diesel Engine" refer to very different ideas, but capture my interest just the same, since I wish little else more than a Canadian (passenger and freight) train revival. As for Greg Curnoe, he was a notorious bike enthusiast, a fact that spilled over evidently into his art practice, and I'm sure he would have loved the current revived interest for the green mode of transportation.

Favro's "SD40 Diesel Engine" (2000) source

One of Curnoe's many paintings of bikes, "Untitled (orange bicycle)" (1990).

That's all for now!