View on Canadian Art

So we went to New York for five days last weekend. It was the usual late August sticky mess but we had two amazing art experiences that made it all entirely worthwhile.

1. Big Bambu on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum.

Doug and Mike Starn’s 40-foot high bamboo structure exemplifies what I always say about artists that do design-y type installations. It’s important to go big. The installation should always overwhelm the viewer so that the viewer feels the effect of the artwork. And that may mean that the artist needs to work for days, months on the project to get it large enough. A lot of young installation artists should heed this advice, I think.

We didn’t get to take a tour through the bamboo, but friends of ours did and said it was incredible.

All images of Big Bambu: VoCA

2. Dia: Beacon

The only photo I was allowed to take. Image: VoCA

Robert Smithson’s Ithaca Mirror Trail, 1969. I couldn’t find specific images of the works they had at Dia, especially my favorite, Leaning Mirror, 1969. Image: c4gallery.com

We had always wanted to check out the Dia Foundation’s outpost in Beacon, New York. It is the perfect thing to do in 100 degree heat. Somehow, the minimalist sculptures had a cooling effect. It is, essentially the perfect venue for minimalism. I finally came to totally appreciate Donald Judd. And the Chamberlain crumpled automobile sculptures were stunning, there was one of the finest Lawrence Weiner wall works I’ve ever seen and a wonderful Bruce Nauman video of his empty studio at night, completely still save for a mouse now and then.

The Richard Serra sculptures were astounding. You realize why he’s one of the greatest American sculptors.

Serra’s large spirals at Dia make you feel free and constrained at the same time. Awesome. Image: coloradocollege.edu

Michael Heizer’s North, East, South, West, 1967/2002. Image: saatchi-gallery.co.uk

One interesting thing to note if you’re headed there is that if you email or phone ahead, you can book a tour every day at 10:30 am, to be toured around Michael Heizer’s fantastic installation North, East, South, West, 1967/2002.

But my favorite piece – by far – was Robert Smithson’s excellent Leaning Mirror, from 1969, which was a large pristine mirror that had been elegantly inserted into a pile of dusty earth.

Click HERE for the Dia Foundation’s website.

I’m working on a video exhibition with the public art organization No. 9 Contemporary Art & the Environment. It’s called Four Directions, and its opening will coincide with the opening of Evergreen at the Brickworks, Toronto.

SUNDAY September 26, 2010 – December 31, 2010

The exhibition is designed to reflect the mandate of the public art organization No. 9: that contemporary art can stimulate positive social and environmental change. The group video exhibition features four powerful environmentally themed video artworks, each screened inside one of four restored drying kilns (long tunnels). The kilns are located at the North end of the Heritage Brick Factory, Building 16, which is a 52,000 square foot space, the largest building on-site.

A still from Lessons of Darkness. Image: uashome.alaska.edu

The works to be screened are Lessons of Darkness by the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and three Canadian artists:

L’Or blanc/White Gold, a No. 9 commission by Isabelle Hayeur
The Cyanide Flats: 50?54´15´´N / 95?20´20´´W, a No. 9 commission by Val Klassen
Waterspeak by Dana Claxton

The exhibition’s goal is to acknowledge manmade environmental destruction and to offer alternative ways of thinking about a healthy earth that suggest re-growth and healing. The exhibition will present a journey for the viewer from Herzog’s bleak documentation of Kuwait’s burning oil fields to Isabelle Hayeur’s curtain of softly falling salt crystals, followed by Val Klassen’s still signs of hope within a ravaged landscape, to Dana Claxton’s mesmerizing plea on behalf of water.

Without being overly didactic or preachy, together the three works will provide a response to Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness. As the viewer progresses through each tunnel, he/she will witness environmental devastation, followed by works that engage the emotions to suggest mindfulness, respect and honour for our environment.

Check out No. 9 Contemporary Art & the Environment, HERE.

Every city is full of those little artistic gestures, those flourishes made - sometimes deliberately, often not - by people who take the time to do things a little differently.

I think they are too often overlooked - and I find them inspiring. Not as high art of course, but possibly inspiring for architects or designers looking for ways to inject more visual interest in our world.

At Harbord and Spadina, a framed piece of fence, decorated with string that blow in the breeze.

A city worker spraypainted the sidewalk, then dug up the bricks and layed them back wrong.

In Manhattan, someone decorated the curb by gluing nickels down.

Image: doobybrain.com

And we’ll be back soon with reports on Doug and Mike Starn’s Big Bambu at the Met and Dia Beacon, among other things…stay tuned.

I love this proposal by German artist Katharina Fritsch for London’s Fourth Plinth. I love that it appears to be in International Klein Blue, which I blogged about a while ago.

Katharina Fritsch, Hahn / Cock. Image: london.gov.uk

As you probably know, the empty plinth has been a site for artistic proposals over the past few years, including Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and one of my favorite artists, Thomas Schütte.

Originally designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1841 to display an equestrian statue which was never completed, the empty plinth became a site for contemporary art in 1998.

Six proposals - all very good - by Allora & Calzadilla, Elmgreen & Dragset, Katharina Fritsch, Brian Griffiths, Hew Locke, and Mariele Neudecker can be seen at DeZeen, HERE.

Read more about the Fourth Plinth program HERE.

DECONSTRUCT – PERCEIVE – ACT – QUESTION

Speaking of young artists, I recently ran into the young, formerly-Toronto based curator Alissa Firth-Eagland, who had been living in Europe for the past two years and who was back in town for a few weeks of studio visits before taking off again.

Firth-Eagland, second from left, with her fellow participants of the Curatorial Training Program. Image: ecoledumagasin.com

She handed me a copy of one of her recent publications, The Learning Public, which she co-edited with Veronica Valentini from Milan. It was published on the occasion of a round table, back in May, which corresponded to an exhibition called How not to make an exhibition at the international cutarorial training program Ecole du Magasin, in Grenoble, France. The round table was titled How to Act in the Public Sphere, the participants were The Bruce High Quality Foundation and the French artist Clarie Fontaine.

The publication is clearly intended as a work of art. On its cover is a story of Bruce and Claire, but the story asks the reader to consider: “What if this text is a public space? Yes. This one.”

Members of the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Image: nytimes.com

Inside, a manifesto of sorts from the BHQF, whose mission, on their website, HERE, is, in part “to resurect art history from the bowels of despair.” Discussing what they term the learning public, or the public that exists in order to validate art history and the art market, they put forward the idea that that this public has relinquished its power because they have “misconstrued the battle for power over what art is as a battle between the private and public sectors. Currently, the most significant and creative remodeling of art’s institutions are coming from the private sector…”

It goes on to say that this is because the private sector is more creative, more willing to take risks, acts like an engaged student. Nonetheless, the private sector “still instrumentalizes art for profit.”

Their goal? “To position the learning public of art in such a way that it can engulf the public and the private…to understand art through the educational frame.”

Claire Fontaine submits an allegorical text, using her words “to address her own powerlessness in today’s messy apolitical world”.

The exhibition poster, courtesy Alissa Firth-Eagland.

The exhibition was designed to offer alternatives to established systems of learning by putting into question their coercive aspects.  It’s interesting - especially in light of the last post on Hugh Scott-Douglas - how young artists and curators are thinking about and reacting to the market, how it is formed and what their place is within it.

For more information – in French – please see the website HERE.

More on Alissa Firth-Eagland, is HERE.

The other day, I did a studio visit with the young artist and very recent OCAD grad (2010) Hugh Scott-Douglas.

I had seen his ceramic sculptures at a collectors home and fell in love with them. They were mid-sized, off-balance ovals and loopy shapes that were roughly modeled but heavily and sophisticatedly glazed. Some, he showed at Clint Roenisch’s gallery in a 3-day exhibition this spring, had working light bulbs in their ends.

Hugh. Image: VoCA

I was expecting to see sculpture when I arrived, but Hugh’s tiny studio room was hung with paintings, which he was preparing for an upcoming show in L.A. (One of many shows this year, a testament to his ambition and social networking skills, but that’s another post, coming soon.)

Some ‘bad’ paintings by Hugh Scott-Douglas. Image: VoCA

He explained that while he studied in the sculpture program at school, he now worked in other media, mainly since he could stack more paintings together than he could store his extremely fragile, unfired clay sculptures.

A sculpture by Hugh Scott-Douglas. Image: verykunst.com

We spoke at length about his practice, mostly about ‘bad’ art, and the ‘willful idiocy’ that some young (and less young) painters have been bringing to their practices in recent years and which he is himself investigating.

I’m also interested in the idea of ‘bad’ art – in fact, what I loved about Hugh’s sculptures is the dichotomy between the off-kilter shapes and rich, heavy glazing. I love how much ‘bad’ art looks wonderful inside a white walled gallery. I love how clumsy execution is magically balanced by the artist’s intention. Of course, when artists make ‘bad’ art, it’s a deliberate move, a way of investigating new possibilities, or, as Raphael Rubenstein mentions in THIS article (that Hugh sent to me) a way of ignoring the ‘impossibility’ of painting.

His inspiration wall. From Mark Rothko to Tonya Harding - that’s kinda great. Image: VoCA

His tools. Image: VoCA

I feel it’s also a reaction against the market. From THIS article “Waxing Durr” in the quarterly publication Art Lies, on what they term “retard art”: “Posed as an act of passive market resistance, this recent slackerdom ultimately occupies a position of privilege and luxury, highlighting the market’s ready recuperation of any production, even the most retarded.”

Another of Hugh’s ‘bad’ paintings, soon to be shown in L.A. Image: VoCA

Check out Hugh Scott Douglas’s website HERE.

I think he’s definitely one to watch.

I saw Julian Schnabel introduce his film Before Night Falls, about the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas when it had its North American premiere at TIFF in 2000; the artist and filmmaker shuffled up onto the stage in his bathrobe and slippers and gave a highly entertaining Q and A.

Artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. Image: salon.com

This year, he’s back - for his upcoming show at the AGO, which opens September 1st - and will introduce his Carte Blanche selection, which is Hector Babenco’s film Pixote (1981), about child criminality and survival in the Brazilian slums and Before Night Falls. Schnabel will introduce both screenings, which will be followed by a discussion.

Surely, a screening and talk not to be missed. If Schnabel is an excellent artist, he is surely an equally excellent filmmaker.

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The Walrus has a good interview with Simon Brault, author of No Culture, No Future, the new book that exploresthe fact that the arts are a necessity, not a luxury.

As he puts it, the book is a “call to action” - for Brault, it’s up to everyone to communicate with one another to promote and encourage the arts.

Image: cormorantbooks.com

Here is some of what Brault has to say in the interview:

“When you look in the papers, the conversation around arts and culture is reduced to the economy or to presenting a particular cultural product. It’s not a broad conversation about what arts and culture bring to people — to children, to people who are lonely, to people who have a need for expressive life.”

“Every human being has a relationship with the arts. The fact that we are ignoring that — and trying to lecture people as if they are completely ignorant, as if they are completely disconnected from everything we believe in – is a big problem.”

“I read, I think, I write, but mostly I act. And I try to act with people around me. I still believe that ideas can change the world. I know it can sound like a very romantic vision — but it’s not so romantic because things are changing… ”

Author Simon Brault. Image: cormorantbooks.com

I haven’t read the book, but I’m looking forward to it.

If you want to know more on Brault’s thoughts vis a vis the arts in Canada (and the world), buy the book HERE.

From this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, we learn that Shirley Thomson, the former director of the National Gallery of Canada, has died.

Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987. Image: makefive.com

Thompson is known for her staunch defence of the gallery’s decision to purchase Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire for $1.8 million in 1988. You can’t help but smile remembering the hou-ha that that caused, considering today’s $100 million plus prices that we see at auction. She also acquired the famous “meat dress” by Montreal artist Jana Sterbak.

From the article, which quotes her as saying “We know that some of the cutting-edge Canadian artists, by the very nature of their innovation, are not necessarily going to please a broad expanse of the public. However, we are morally and esthetically committed to these artists.”

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