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.