– LOVED
– LOATHED
– SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
– SELECTED UPCOMING EVENTS
– RENNY RAMAKERS - DROOG
– JACK LERNER LARSEN
– BEST IN SHOW
– GALLERY PROFILE: PAVILION PROJECTS
– ARTISTS I’VE GOOGLED FOR YOU
– IN DEPTH
– WHAT’S GOING ON
– CORRECTION
– TALK TO ME
– AND FINALLY..

Hello,

Welcome to View on Art - the collector’s newsletter.

This month explores the gravity of art. Art is, by necessity, both elitist and accessible. Art is fun - today anyone can be an artist - but the best art is always, at its core, serious.

This month:

-We loved, we loathed, we were somewhere in between

-We breeze through the recent Interior Design Show in Toronto, and take a look at products by Dutch conceptual design collective Droog

-We rail against mediocrity

-We dissect Anselm Kiefer

-We compare and contrast the work of three well-known post-feminist artists.

-We profile Montreal collaborative duo Pavilion Projects

-We Google two new media artists and one working with design.

This letter goes to over 200 curators, artists, dealers, editors and collectors in London, Florence, Rome, New York, California, Washington, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

Please forward it to anyone who you think would be interested! Thanks and enjoy!

With very best wishes, Andrea

“Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true.” Bruce Nauman

LOVED
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Tom Sherman’s talk at the Downloading Video panel discussion, Feb 25 in Toronto.

This discussion was organized by Vtape for the launch of the new Video Art in Canada website in association with the Virtual Museum of Canada. The site will no doubt be an excellent educational and reference tool, but it isn’t without disadvantages - only partial clips of the works are shown online. This was noted by Syracuse prof and pioneering video artist Tom Sherman, who gave a fascinating perspective on video art today.

He spoke of the nature of video as an unstable medium, one that is overtaking film through the cost effectiveness of its technology. He stressed the importance of referring to video as ‘digital cinema’ and ‘cinematic video’ - noting how semantics govern how things are seen. For Sherman, television, not film is the direct ancestor of video - due to its incorporation of sound. Digital video is the future, he said, but we must watch the vernacular surrounding the medium.

Video Art in Canada

-Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s talk at OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design), February 22.

The talk at OCAD was most interesting for the clips and discussion of their more recent projects. Pianorama comprised a player piano installed in a room, with both Janet and George’s voices describing the score of a film. The piece brought to mind the ghostly sculptures of < b>Rachel Whiteread, in particular her book cases.

The Secret Hotel involved a fake, set-like chamber in the middle of a large museum. The viewer/participant entered, and encountered a hallway, lined with quaint, flowery wallpaper and modeled after a scene from The Shining. The discrepancy in tone and decor created a creepy effect. The viewer/participant climbs a flight of stairs and upon opening a second door, he finds himself wandering along a catwalk, looking down at what he eventually registers as the gallery’s glass ceiling. Mid-way down the catwalk, he peers over the edge at a tiny bedroom, far, far down. (This was a forced perspective construction, 1/4 life-size.) The disconcerting environment was reminiscent of Gregor Schnider’s Die Familie Schneider, a work that was constructed in two twin houses in London’s East End last year for Artangel.

By the end of the talk as I was leaving the auditorium, I began to notice the construction of the seating, not dissimilar to the theatre seating in the 2001 Venice Prize-winning installation The Paradise Institute. The voices of Cardiff and Bures Miller in the films blended with their real-time comments and the whole situation began to seem like a false reality. I think that their work’s strength, like Schnieder’s, lies in the way it brings us closer to another dimension, by shaking our reliance on perceived truth.

-Pierre Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain’s dedication to Canadian New Media artists.

I think this country’s best artists are working with video, film and new media. The Montreal gallerist is the only Canadian gallery doing the Digital and Video Art Fair in New York (DiVA) this month. Look out for a review of the fair in next month’s issue.

See below for more information on the fair.

-Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle films at the Canadian Art Film Series.

I loved the series. Hopefully it will eventually become something along the lines of the FIFA (International Festival of Films on Art), March 9 - 19th in Montreal. In Toronto, three of this year’s films profiled post-feminist artists exploring notions of femininity. They were Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle and Sam Taylor-Wood.

Emin and Calle comment on female experience, Emin through putting herself on the line, managing to tap into a universal experience. Her extreme self- absorbtion makes her controversial (unlike similarly narcissistic artists like Lucas Samaras.) Emin’s work is so bare that her vulnerability and defence mechanisms are implicit in the work.

Sophie Calle also does this, in a more elegant way. One can sense the artist hiding within her work, daring herself, pushing herself. As one commentator pointed out in the film, being a stalker of another person is really about a search for oneself.

Emin is so emotionally tied to her famous tent (embroidered with the names of everyone she’d ever slept with), and to the sea hut that she bought and shipped to New York for a show.. The sea hut is a lovely metaphor for lonliness, abandonment, freedom. Emin saw herself in that hut..

LOATHED
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Seeing all three women profiled one after another proved, to me, what I had long suspected - that Taylor-Wood’s work presents too much of a remove between artist and emotion. This is implied in the distance between her and the camera, her actors and the set in her panoramic photographs.

Sam Tayor-Wood’s attempt to include her personal experience into her work seems forced. The viewer gets little sense of the artist as a woman, or the difficulty of her experience, or any sense of real emotion. The work Self Portrait in Single Breasted Suit with Hare comes across simply as wryly humorous, although according to the title the work has to do with the artist’s self ordeal of breast cancer and chemotherapy.

-Come Up to My Room. The Untitled Art Awards. TAAFI (Toronto Alternative Art Fair International), all at the Gladstone Hotel.

These Toronto events are offered as ‘alternatives’ to mainstream events like the Interior Design Show, the Sobey Awards, and the Toronto International Art Fair, respectively. Alternative events need to be viable, well- organized alternatives, not ad-hoc events for the in-crowd. If this were the case, it would presumably encourage the mainstream events to re-think their strategies, resulting in higher-quality cultural events in Toronto.

Alternative events should be well-promoted, they should be attractive to corporate sponsors, they should attract the best young talent. They should be about something more than just an alternative. They should aim to be a better alternative.

-All the fawning art writing over Rebecca Belmore’s Fountainat Venice. The last straw, for me was the review in the current issue of Fuse magazine, which attempts to make something great out of what was essentially a mediocre work by an otherwise very good artist.

SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
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Tony Romano’s exhibition at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto. Romano is a promising artist. The video work in the main gallery was presented as two projections, back to back, playing at different speeds. The work is complimented by film posters as if for an entire production, whereas the films depict only the beginning and end of a fairy tale recounted within the play Woyzeck by the German writer Georg Buchner.

The idea is strong, but the problem is that by dealing with negation (what is missing), the viewer easily loses interest, particularly if he doesn’t know what was there in the first place. I found The Fisherman and His Soul, a sound piece involving a song written by the artist based on the story by Oscar Wilde, easier to appreciate. Music and flashing light fill an empty room, while a poster and a set of framed lyrics are installed the an adjacent room.

SELECTED UPCOMING EVENTS
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-VANCOUVER: Stan Brakhage, perhaps the best known of the ‘experimental’ filmmakers. At Presentation House, Vancouver, March 11 - April 9. Accompanied by Devour, an exhibition of work by Carolee Schneemann.

-VANCOUVER: Erin Shirreff and Colin Zaug at Helen Pitt Gallery and Artist-run centre, March 3 - April 1. Shirreff’s installation, a contemporary vanitas, stars a laptop, a burning candle, and a ceaselessly morphing and turning mound of clay. Zaug’s billboard-style sculpture is covered in hundreds of floating reflective discs that flutter with the slightest air circulation, concealing a more complex structure.

-NEW YORK: The Armory show March 9 - 13, 2006 Piers 90 + 92

Artcore/Fabrice Marcolini and Susan Hobbs Gallery will be the only Canadian Galleries:

-NEW YORK: Day for Night, The Whitney Biennnale 2006

-NEW YORK: DiVA - Digital and Video Art fair March 9 - 12, 2006

DiVA

RENNY RAMAKERS - DROOG
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Interior Design Show talk

Over the design weekend in Toronto (IDS and CuTMR) I noticed many young designers in Canada who put considerable thought into the aesthetics of their product, and less into its greater meaning or usefulness. This was incredibly disappointing. The beauty of design, like architecture, are its constraints. Design today, again like architecture, has a social and environmental responsibility. It’s unfortunate that students aren’t always given interesting enough project briefs, and don’t seem motivated to create anything beyond an appealing product. Is it because they aren’t exposed to contemporary design outside of Canada?

With this in mind, I present some of the values for the future of design outlined by Renny Ramakers of Droog in her talk at the IDS: Note that the categories relate to more than design.

COLLABORATION -Distribution through design, design based on interference, design by workers and universality in design. An example are cigar boxes with each worker’s signature as part of the design. (This is similar to the brilliant Fish Design by legendary Italian designer Gaetano Pesce, which transfers authorship of products from the designer to assembly line workers. It is also reminiscent of work by Japanese clothing designer Issey Miyake, who has considered new methods of production for clothing.)

SLOWNESS -A glass lamp with a lump of fat inside that slowly burned. Very Joseph Beuys.

CRAFTSMANSHIP -Tactile, process-orinted. An example is a crochet chain link fence.

SAVE THE WASTE -A chair made from a stack of recycled clothing bound together with cables, and chest of various old drawers tied with a nylon belt.

MEMORIES -Decoration based on function, like Memories of Wallpaper, a wall covering with holes through which your old paper can be seen, or a tablecloth with scalloped shapes outlined for different sized tables.

(appreciation of) IMPERFECTION -Vases held together with tape, or the Droog office, in which the original 1970’s office interior was preserved, but painted entirely in bold colours.

INTERACTION -A backyard fence with shapes cut into it through which various tools can be passed for sharing with one’s neighbours.

PERSONALIZATION -The Crack Vase, made from porcelain and silicone, you throw it against the wall yourself to create a unique pattern.

MEANING -Design replacing nature, and preserving rituals. For example, the sun umbrella that mimics dappled sunlight through trees, or Japanese rice bowls with places for hands at bottom, traditional-style. Also a bookshelf with trompe d’oeil classic literature embedded.

DOING (ALMOST) NOTHING -Slipcovers, adding pattern, recontextualizing objects in their surroundings. This is evident in their Hotel Droog at the Milan Furniture fair several years ago.

My article on Hotel Droog

JACK LERNER LARSEN
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Interior Design Show talk

Also at the IDS, Larsen, a textile designer, offered his thoughts for the future of design, which he refered to as the ‘revolution’:

-Starting with people in consideration of space, LOOKING OUTWARD.

-Creating a new kind of space, PERSONALIZED SPACE (important because little else is personalized)

-MORE CHOICE is needed to stimulate individuality

-It is our responsibility to ACT RESPONSIBLE

-We must LISTEN to consumer demand

-It is unfortunate that ‘MAXIMUM’ eclipses ‘OPTIMUM’ today. Optimum has to do with abstraction, with less

BEST IN SHOW
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Best in show were the designs from the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at U of T. Their brief was to design a lightweight stool, on the premise that if designers reduce weight, the environmental damage of materials processing and shipping will be reduced. The students’ designs were also concerned other issues such as flat-pack shipping possibilities. Work by Brett Hotson, Dov Secter and April Wong stood out.

Please see my blog for images.

The best of the rest was Nick Western’s Arte Povera -style table, ash tied together with sisal rope, from Sheridan College.

View on Art: AL & D images

GALLERY PROFILE: PAVILION PROJECTS
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Opened in 2004 by Robin Simpson and Maryse Lariviere, this gallery doesn’t maintain a permanent space, rather mounting exhibitions in ‘contextually relevant spaces.’ When Robin was still at Concordia, working at a gallery, he became interested in the work of British artists Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard and, with no resources, invited them to Canada.

Simpson and Lariviere are now working toward an art rental system, to be established this year. They want Pavilion to run parallel to artist-run centres while also catering to the younger collector and the general public.

They are interested in exhibiting “artists with whom we identify, who subscribe to a particular undercurrent - a source of energy that is outside the art milieu, that is underground. We are interested in artworks that tap into something that can cross over.”

They host exhibitions in Nice, France and in other international locales periodically too.

Of particular note are Ulla von Brandenburg who makes esoteric installations, films and illustrations.

Ulla von Brandenburg

Mattieu Beausejour, director of Clark gallery. Pavilion showed a performance of his in Nice.

Mattieu Beausejour

Stephanie Chabot, a painter working in a naïve, hedonistic style. Also she casts costumes and large rubber gloves from rubber and photographs herself wearing these monster costumes.

Stephanie Chabot

This month Pavilion is showing Re-Shuffle: Notions of an Itinerant Museum, “a survey about the possibilities for the museums of today and the future.”

Pavilion Projects

ARTISTS I’VE GOOGLED FOR YOU
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The following info gleaned from my web search:

Natalie Bookchin is involved in net art and net activism. She lives in LA and teaches at CalArts. She works collaboratively and independently and exhibits, performs and lectures widely in the US, Europe and on the Internet. In 2000, Bookchin earned an honorary mention in the .net category of the Prix Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria).

Bookchin began her career as a photographer and fibre artist. After moving from fibre works to photography, Bookchin began to investigate how to manipulate the medium and critique the media.

After experimenting with digital photography, Bookchin began to consider newer technologies such as the CD-ROM and the Internet as formal veins for her critical discourse. In 1996, she produced an interactive CD-ROM titled The Databank of the Everyday that relies on still photography of the human body, banal actions and movements, the idea of photography’s documentary role, and the principles of the contemporary database.

I could spend hours playing the art games on this site

Alan Currall is an English artist living in Glasgow, Scotland. He works in video and web-based art. He is a graduate of Staffordshire University (1992) and Glasgow School of Art (1995). He is now an Academic Researcher at Glasgow School of Art where he has lectured since 1997, currently in the department of Sculpture and Environmental Art.

In its broadest terms Currall’s art practice is an investigation into human nature. It deals with questions of belief and identity, and the limitations of our capacity to understand these concepts.

In 1998 he was awarded The Richard Hough Bursary, Scotland’s chief lens-based media prize. He was the Scottish Arts Council’s Artist in Residence at Canberra School of Art in 2001. In 2003 he received a Scottish Arts Council Artist’s Award and was short-listed for the Beck’s Futures Prize.

Alan Currall’s website

Leopold L. Foulem is internationally renowned in the contemporary ceramic world. Born in Caraquet, New Brunswick, he received his MFA from Indiana State University in 1988. He currently divides his time between Caraquet and Montreal.

Foulem creates works that are meant to address our knowledge and understanding of ceramics, while challenging our presumed stereotypes, and exploring the fringes of respected traditions. A technical wizard, Foulem’s pieces combine erudition and humour to create a vocabulary which is indisputably his own, playing on semantic reversals.

Foulem is a world authority on Picasso’s ceramic work, and has collected considerable documentation on the subject over the past 25 years, with his research resulting in a number of publications. In addition, Foulem taught for more than 20 years in the ceramics programme of the CEGEP de Vieux Montréal, and more recently has been teaching at the CEGEP St-Laurent in Montreal’s north end. In 1999, he received the Jean A. Chalmers National Craft Award, in recognition of his more-than 30-year history in ceramics.

Foulem images

IN DEPTH
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Anselm Kiefer: What you need to know.

‘After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’ - Theodor Adorno

I had first seen work by Anselm Kiefer at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, when I was eighteen. (I was taken there by the late Mrs. Gertrud Johnssen, a German collector and unbelievably chic woman to whom I owe my interest in and passion for art) Even without knowing much about art, one is immediately affected by their sheer power and grandeur. Not only in subject matter, which at first glance is somewhat nebulous, but also in its physicality. Huge, apocalyptic canvases are covered in cracked earth, lead, charcoal, broken glass, dried flowers and weeds. They are strikingly barren, starkly serious and awesome.

Walking into the show in Montreal, I was struck by how fundamental this work is. The abstract and the pictorial merge, the canvas functioning as a frame for Kiefer’s vision. They work almost look like film stills.

Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945 and is now living in a bunker-type studio in Barjac, France. He was a big deal in the 1980’s.

The title of the Montreal exhibition, Heaven and Earth (Himmel und Erde) illustrates Kiefer’s preoccupation with fundamental, existential questions. He uses art to explore these questions, indeed was influenced by legendary artist/shaman Joseph Beuys. In the introduction to the catalogue, Michael Auping writes “Kiefer’s meetings with Joseph Beuys reinforced many of his ideas about the possibility of a content that engaged a larger context for art.” Central to his art is German post-war history. Kiefer’s work is a ‘real working through of German history. He has a need to address it in his own mind.’

I think Kiefer is best appreciated in a retrospective, like Barnett Newman, because it is helpful to see where he has come from, and how his ideas have developed. One brilliant early work from 1973 is Quaternity, an investigation of which can explain much of Keifer’s later career. It is a finely detailed charcoal drawing of a dramatically tilted wooden artists studio. In one corner, three burning fires represent the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. A serpent joins the trinity. Keifer’s portrayal/use of fire, wood, forest and charcoal reflect, as Auping notes, his interest in “fire (as) a powerful symbol mediating between heaven and earth, originating in the skies (lightening and stars), as well as in the hand of man.” Forest and fire come together and play off of one another.

The serpent suggests that evil is implicit in good, “a fundamental element in the spiritual matrix.” The dramatic perspective of the room positions the viewer along with the artist in the (universal) search for balance between heaven and earth. This is central to much of Keifer’s later work.

Why is he important? I believe it is ultimately because he spends time “thinking quietly - about the larger issues”, and manages to include, in his investigation, the artist as well as humankind.

‘Religion can pretend to be pure. History cannot.’ - Anselm Kiefer.

Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal

WHAT’S GOING ON
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-Catriona Jeffries is moving into what should be a stunning space on Vancouver’s East side, perfect for the activities of the gallery’s artists: According to the press release, (which could almost qualify as a piece of conceptual art itself):

“Such activities contribute to a myriad of connections, references and overlappings that have instigated the gallery’s relocation and its configuration as a civic site of production. This practice now turns away from the one-way mirror-power retail context of South Granville and transforms eastward into an industrially zoned mix of warehouses, auto body shops, alternative galleries and artist live/work studios.

If the city is envisioned as a series of spatial complexes that interlace and interact, then as an intermediary focal point the forthcoming new practice at Catriona Jeffries presents a unique perspective on, and compelling commitment to artists’ representation in the city and the larger world.”

New space at 274 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver. From May 2006

-Stephen Bulger is expanding his world-class photography gallery. In the coming months, he will take over Camera, Atom Egoyan’s bar/screening room, where he will show films on photography and related events. On Queen Street West in Toronto.

Stephen Bulger Gallery

CORRECTION
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Last month: David Kramer’s quote came from Feigen Contemporary website, not Deitch Projects.