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A View on Art
A point of view
August 2005
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– 1. LOVED
– 2. LOATHED
– 3. RECENTLY NOTICED…
– 4. KELLY MARK – excerpt from my review in the current issue of Fuse magazine
– 5. DAVID ROKEBY – excerpt from my article in the current issue of Canadian Art
– 6. GUNILLA JOSEPHSON – excerpt from catalogue text for ‘Resistance’ at the SAAG
– 7. SOME RESPONSES
– 8. ARTISTS TO GOOGLE et cetera
– PLEASE FORWARD THIS NEWSLETTER

Hello,

Please consider this newsletter a peek into an obsession with art, architecture and design; some of the people, places and things that have caught my attention recently, both in Canada and abroad. Each newsletter will be short and to the point. It will provide names and links to the best artists that I come across, along with relevant books, magazines and articles and websites. It will introduce you to dynamic people making positive changes in the art world worth knowing about.

Future issues will include interviews with collectors, curators along with some ideas for improving cultural awareness in Canada

Hopefully it will also become a catalyst for debate and opinion.

I hope you enjoy reading it!

With very best wishes,

Andrea

1. LOVED
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-The JEFF WALL retrospective at the SHAULAGER in Basel – a portion only of which will be shown at TATE MOD from 21 Oct – Jan 8, 2006

-A huge, breathtaking quasi-religious painting by KATHARINA GROSSE in the upper hall of the first (main?) building at the Extreme Abstraction show at ALBRIGHT KNOX in Buffalo.

Albright Knox

-Cinematheque Ontario’s programming. LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS (voted best French film of the century) is a Brechtian must-see!

-Works by MALCOM MORLEY ‘At a First-Aid Center in Vietnam’ (1971) and Martha Rosler’s ‘Bringing the War Home: In Vietnam’ (DATE) in ‘COVERING THE REAL’ at Kunstmuseum Basel. Both are reminders of the positive and negative effects of physical and emotion al distance.

Kunstmuseum Basel

2. LOATHED
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-The TAMPON CHANDELIER by Joana Vasconcelas that opened the Arsenale at Venice – I’m not a fan of ‘one-liner’ artwork. Shouldn’t art be more sophisticated? One good thing about the work was its size – enormous. Filling the room with such presence almost made up for the works’ tiresome feminist rhetoric.

-A sculpture by (product designer) Karim Rashid at the Albright Knox show entitled…get ready…’Karim-sutra’

-The writer DOUGLAS COUPLAND as an artist? I’m not convinced but check for yourself at:

Monte Clark Gallery

3. RECENTLY NOTICED…
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In the latest issue of AZURE, Wiel Arets, the architect of the dark, stunning new library at the University of Utrecht says: “In a time when individual separation is an issue, to be in a social place is important.’ This recalls McLuhan and by extending the logic further I think we can expect communal buildings, public spaces, PERFORMANCE ART and interactive events as becoming increasingly important.

FOX(Y) HOTEL Art, architecture, design, advertising… Copenhagen’s new Fox Hotel is a brand-free (artistic) ADVERTISING ENVIRONMENT subtly masterminded by Volkswagen for the launch of the new Volkswagen Fox.

Read more…

4. KELLY MARK – excerpt from my review in the current issue of Fuse magazine
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Glow House was a temporary installation by Toronto-based artist Kelly Mark. The piece was curated by Ried Shier of the Power Plant as part of this year’s Off Screen program at the IMAGES FESTIVAL, a program of curated new media installations throughout Toronto that has been a part of Images since 1995.

Fifty television sets had been tuned to the same channel and installed around the front rooms of a house on Palmerston Blvd, transforming it into a living sculpture. This year, Glow House was the only ‘public’ art installation to be part of the festival. Mark likes the idea of an artwork as a subtle intervention, so Glow House had only a small notice on the door, informing people of its status as an artwork meant to be viewed from the exterior.

The idea for Glow House evolved from an earlier piece called Prime Time (1999), a video of intermittently changing channels, played on a television set within a living room-style installation. From working with television, Mark became interested in trying to capture and isolate its glow. Throughout her practice, Mark deals with the peripheries, the empty space surrounding an object.She is adamant about her own working class background, and is thus eager to avoid over-intellectualizing her work, intentionally relinquishing control to exterior circumstances, freeing up the audience’s reactions; with Glow House she opted for City TV, a channel particularly ‘of the people,’ but not one that guaranteed constant visual drama, as Much Music might have.

The work, which had shown twice before, for one night in Winnipeg in 2001 and for just over a week at Birmingham’s IKON GALLERY in 2003, elicited varying reactions. Winnipeg brought a small but dedicated group of art lovers, while the Birmingham installation, in a posh area of town, drew a large, enthusiastic response.At the ‘opening’ in Toronto, on April 7th after dark, as a crowd gathered on the sidewalk opposite, both curator and artist had to endure some viewer’s reservations about the artwork. Palmerston Boulevard in Toronto is a street of old mansions that have been mostly divided into apartments; locals responded with bemusement. Mark recalls a passer-by wondering aloud “But they can’t all be watching the same program?!”

From an aesthetic standpoint, Glow House seemed to encourage an instinctive response in the viewer. It tapped into the sublime in a way that can be compared to the feeling when one stands before the saturated paintings of ROTHKO or the grand simplicity of BARNETT NEWMAN. Like work by these painters, one could have sought to ‘understand’ Mark’s work, but it was enough to simply experience its effect. It was ‘just a bunch of televisions,’ like Rothko is ‘just a bunch of paint on a canvas’, yet it was also truly odd and unexpected and gorgeous. An alternate reading might be one of loss; the house’s unusual nocturnal lighting suggested that’real’ life had been relinquished, showing up the unsettling solitude and potential danger of (sub)urban neighborhoods, represented in films like Poltergeist and Twin Peaks.

Arguably the most successful aspect of Glow House was its site-specificity. There is a significant need for contemporary artistic urban interventions in public spaces, for bringing art out of the cloistered environment of the museum into a realm where it can be more relevant to the viewer. Temporary public installations generate immediate and heartfelt reactions,they encourage debate and challenge the public.

Read the rest of the review in Fuse Magazine

5. DAVID ROKEBY – excerpt from my article in the current issue of Canadian Art
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David Rokeby develops new software like a painter who invents new colours for his paintings.The comparison is apt because Rokeby’s work, its disparate aptitudes and technological complexity notwithstanding, is at its core uncomplicated, his medium a vehicle for ideas. Rokeby’s spare use of computer hardware gives his transcendent installations a sophisticated quality in which screens, monitors and surveillance cameras together create ambiguous environments in which viewers become participants, finding themselves integral to the functioning of the artwork, often with oddly disorienting results.

As with many other artists involved in new media, Rokeby has worked quietly beneath the radar of the commercial gallery system, yet he has screened works to great acclaim at national and international festivals, sustained by organizations such as the Banff Centre, FONDATION DANIEL LANGLOIS in Montreal and the Canada Council for the Arts.

The result has kept many of his most interesting works from the view of the general public. Despite a stellar career that has seen his participation in international exhibitions such as the 1986 VENICE BIENNALE, Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (three times), the GWANJU BIENNALE (in 1996) and the 2002 Venice Architecture Biennale, wide public recognition has thus far eluded Rokeby; nonetheless, he is without a doubt one of Canada’s most exceptional artists.

INTERFACE-the systems that communicate with one another to facilitate navigation through cyberspace-is the starting point for Rokeby’s work.In his practice, the computer interface is likened to a road map and the artist is a kind of technological urban planner. He investigates the systems that create our cyber-experience, sharing with many other current artists an interest in how systems, economic, social, linguistic or otherwise, have shaped our experience of the world. Rokeby is acutely aware of the power of interface; indeed, a concern for society’s ignorance of the hidden systems that ultimately shape contemporary ideologies is central to his practice. Marshall MCLUHAN predicted such trouble long ago and, as Rokeby says, “The phrase ‘the medium is the message’ became a tired cliché long before our media became flexible and intelligent enough to live up to its epithet.”

Read the rest of the article in Canadian Art

6. GUNILLA JOSEPHSON – excerpt from catalogue text for ‘Resistance’ at the SAAG
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Words are often used carelessly, with little regard to their precise meaning or indeed to the great difference in meaning of apparently similar words. The terms resistance and rebellion seem at first to both stem from a similar reluctant, opposing stance, yet the former suggests an emotional abandon and the latter a stubborn, solid control. Rebellion recalls the chaos of unorganized political uprisings, while resistance brings to mind a studied plan of action, alluding also to the French Resistance of World War II. Finally, rebellion is the female quality, resistance the male.

THE BLOOD-RED HEART OF JOHANNA DARKE is a tale of resistance and rebellion, illustrated by a puzzling narrative that weaves in and out of reality, history and mythology. Rebellion, moreover, is a personal theme that has occupied a large part of Gunilla Josephson’s video practice since her first work in that medium in 1998.

The effect of time’s healing and distancing nature has rendered much 1960′s and 70′s feminist video art – with its overt opposition to patriarchal authority – rather bemusing to today’s viewer. Nonetheless, centuries spent “as LOOKING- GLASSES – reflecting the figure of man” have displaced woman’s sense of self, propelling much of today’s feminist inquiry toward a more individual investigation of female identity. Josephson’s work sits comfortably within this tradition, alongside the work of Cindy Sherman, LOUISE BOURGEOIS and others, in her remarkably forthright experimentation with character, technique and a number of personal themes. Further, the prevailing intimacy of her work and use of her own body and immediate surroundings functions within the tradition set by early video art pioneers Vito Acconci, Lisa Steele and others. The grotesque, duality and issues of control and identity combine in a rebellion against limitations, an exploration of self, and a need to be accepted on her own terms.

An additional layer of GROTESQUE behavior is explored with Josephson’s alter-ego, a character named Hedda, who features in a work made up of a series of eight videos (2001). Hedda, whose name suggests either a play on the Scandinavian mythological Edda, or Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, becomes, in Josephson’s hands, a ‘mad’ woman. The home video style technique that the artist refers to as ‘guerilla film- making’ keeps the viewer aware of the structure of the work, and of the artist’s presence.

Josephson has created a distillation of womanhood in Hedda, a character both guided by and at the mercy of her emotions. She uses emotion with naïve abandon, ‘as if riding a horse, a locomotive or an ocean wave.’ Most of the Hedda videos are set in a house in Normandy, France, on or around an elegant, well-mannered suite of traditional Swedish furniture, in particular a settee. The furniture carries with it the weight of personal memory for the artist, who uses it as a foil for her character’s actions. The green rococo-style furniture functions as a memory-space of endless waiting, anticipation and nervousness, a stage for ritual, for the subversion of domesticity. In Meat Madonna, Hedda grapples with the heavy rubber looking covering of the settee. She dances, grappling with the skin as if flaying an animal, struggling with its innate “residue of conflict and oppression.” According to the artist, the work concerns ‘the human condition – the body: our prison, and our triumph.’ As the character manipulates the skin, attempting and failing to override its dominating presence, the character’s movements are edited into an absurdly choreographed dance. The artist thus works effectively inside (as character) and outside (as editor) of the video itself, resisting the conventions of video-making and again asserting control.

Find the catalogue at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery

7. SOME RESPONSES
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“It was really a smart bit of writing. Happy to see the work set historically and not just physically described (which is what most reviews consist of.) Thanks” -Kelly Mark

“Thanks! In fact there were a couple of really insightful moments that had me thinking for a while… a rare pleasure!” -David Rokeby

“Andrea, this is an extraordinary essay!!! I am delighted, shocked, impressed, happy, all at the same time… Thank you for clarifying my work, even to myself” -Gunilla Josephson

8. ARTISTS TO GOOGLE et cetera
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ARTISTS TO GOOGLE: Dirk Fleischmann (Frankfurt), Mauro Saccardo (Venice), Hannah Rickards (London)

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