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A View on Art
A point of view
August 2005
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– 1. LOVED
– 2. LOATHED
– 3. LOVED AND LOATHED
– 4. RECENTLY NOTICED…
– 5. MATTHEW BARNEY - Cremaster Cycle text
– 6. BRUCE MAU - Massive Change unpublished
– 7. UPCOMING
– 8. ARTISTS TO GOOGLE et cetera
– PLEASE FORWARD THIS NEWSLETTER

Hello,

Welcome to the THIRD edition!

I hope you’re enjoying these so far. I’ve had some good feedback and love hearing your thoughts! I should preface this issue by explaining my current predicament. I’m in need of a sponsor. Wait, please keep reading! It’s only $15/month to keep this newsletter functioning. If one of you fabulous patrons-of-the-arts sponsored it, it would give me loads of incentive to keep it going. And I could increase my mailing list from 50 to 500!

Already this letter goes to curators, artists, dealers, editors and collectors in London, New York, California, Washington, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

So there you go. Either I need one person to cover $15/ month, or I suppose three people at $5/month. That’s not much to ask, is it?

carsonandrea@hotmail.com if you want to help me out. Thanks and enjoy!

With very best wishes,

Andrea

1. LOVED
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1. Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint 9 Toronto International Film Festival

Not as good as the Cremaster Cycle, due to the slow start. Barney is best when working on a set and somehow the sweeping landscapes seemed a bit mainstream. Unfortunately I missed the artist’s talk, but here is my take on the film.

Barney’s films are hard work for the viewer. One feels compelled to try to dissect them as one is watching. I often find myself thinking, ‘What does this mean? What does that represent?’ Overall, I felt that the film dealt sweetly with his relationship with Bijork. The two of them were depicted as king and queen, respectful of one another. They engaged in a very deliberate, intimate embrace while cutting away the flesh of their lower bodies under water, in a sinking Japanese whaling vessel. The cutting away for me suggested their ability to communicate on a spiritual level. Also there appeared to be a spinal cord as a main image, representing the nerve centre. Other themes were the ritualistic wrapping (of paper, of the body in elaborate costume) and history of whaling in Japan. Whale blubber/vaseline was consistently shaped into Barney’s by- now-familiar football field insignia. Two whaling ships followed each other like the whales themselves, echoing a beautiful courtship, and both Barney and Bijork had blow- holes at the top of their spines. I didn’t think the dialogue added anything that could not have been communicated through gesture.

Please see ARTICLE 5 (below) for a little something that I wrote, a few years ago, on Barney’s work.

2. Ulysses Castellanos at the Drake Hotel. We saw a performance on the front steps, on a Tuesday night at 10, featuring an artful display of stuffed animals and a semi- naked Castellanos hack his way out of a cardboard monolith with a kitchen knife to sing a lovely rendition of ‘(Don’t Go) Wastin’ My Time’..

3. The InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto. The inaugural show in their new location showed work by four of Canada’s best new media artists: Vera Frenkel, David Rokeby, Norman White and Nell Tenhaaf.

The new director, Dana Samuel is great (and an artist herself). Check out the website for more info:

Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre

4. Jed Lind at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. Lind, a recent grad from Cal Arts, makes work of stunning quality and I liked it immediately. I’d have to know a bit more about it to make a final decision, but initial signs are really good. It reminded me a bit of some of Thomas Schutte’s work, kind of folkloric. In any case, Jessica Bradley has got an impeccable eye and is bringing a new style of programming to the city.

Jessica Bradley Art + Projects

2. LOATHED
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1. The current show at artist-run center Mercer Union in Toronto. From the press release I was expecting good things, but there were only a few dated-looking pictures by Ron Terada (visual puns of street signs) and a video by Xu Zhen, which might have been interesting had it had any kind of hook to keep me watching.

2. The photographs of a guy with a cigarette-burn necklace at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto. Not my cup of tea. Nor were the foil candy wrappers by Kristian Horton, although I kind of liked the photographs by Horton on the gallery’s website.

The space is very nice, the show is colourful, and the stable - Mexican and Canadian is unique..I got a vague Felix Gonzalez-Torres feeling at the opening.

Diaz Contemporary

3. LOVED AND LOATHED
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I heard Sarah Milroy (arts writer for Canada’s national paper, the Globe and Mail) speak at Olga Korper Gallery, on Robert Mapplethorpe’s work for the Canadian Art Gallery Hop on Saturday Sept 17.

Sarah’s talk expressed her frustration with Mapplethorpe’s work, a theme which was likely appropriate for the audience at the gallery that day. But Mapplethorpe is such a complex artist! His work relies on the fact that it pushes buttons. Here is my take: Mapplethorpe was undoubtedly a man of extremes, given his proclivity for hard-core sex. He took a manner of working (extreme classicism, extreme formalism) and extreme subject matter (S & M sex) and brought them together.

The question is less about whether one finds such imagery distasteful, and more about how successfully Mapplethorpe was able to challenge bourgeois attitudes. Faultless in composition and lighting, in the tradition of Weston et al, his work remains supremely effective at getting people to question socially constructed mores. Especially since, as Sarah mentioned, homosexual scenes are depicted on Greco Roman artifacts (on view at the Met.)

While I appreciate Korper’s decision not to show the hard core work, it must be remembered that the brilliance of Mapplethorpe’s work lies in the fact that he chose to photograph sex, not lilies.

Olga Korper Gallery

4. RECENTLY NOTICED…
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-The Wayward Cloud - a Chinese film I saw at the TIFF. It was basically a sex-filled story about a porn star with these incredible, kitsch song-and-dance sequences scattered throughout. Oh, and the film’s theme was watermelons. They are used in sex, eaten, juiced, carried around. Watermelon-pattered umbrellas are used to stunning effect in one dance sequence. Director Tsai Ming-Liang said that he wanted the dance numbers to remind the audience that they weren’t actually watching a porn film. And there is a shocking - shocking! - final sequence..

-Jeremy Shaw (aka March 21), a Vancouver new media artist and dj/producer. Check out this website and download his tunes, in collaboration with SWAYZAK. ‘In the Car Crash’ is great.

Swayzak

5. MATTHEW BARNEY - Cremaster Cycle text
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Here’s a portion of a text that I wrote a few years ago after having seen the entire Cremaster Cycle:

In the recently completed Cremaster Cycle, the astonishing body of work by controversial American artist Matthew Barney, film is used to its most dramatic potential as a vehicle for conceptual art. Critics and audiences stand divided, but Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times has described him as ‘the most crucial artist of his generation.’1 Barney fearlessly explores idea after idea, using grandiose sets, costumes and otherworldly prosthetic makeup to create a baroque extravaganza that has been described as ‘audacious and brilliant..potent in (its) symbolism and private mythology’.2 A creature incubates under a table in a Goodyear blimp suspended over an empty football stadium, notorious murderer Gary Gilmore rides a bronco at a rodeo, a goatman tapdances through the floor and into a Vaseline lined birth canal, former Bond girl Ursula Andress sings a Hungarian opera, and Richard Serra surveys it all from his post at the top of New York’s Chrysler building. The cycle of five films is designed to be looked at as a kind of pyramid, Cremaster 3 overseeing Cremasters 1 and 2 on one side and 4 and 5 on the other.3 Each film encapsulates a main theme, inside of which the artist stars as the protagonist, playing out a visual feast of conceptual ideas, strung together by a loose narrative. According to Roger D. Hodge in Harper’s Magazine: ‘Each film enacts dramas of resistance and overcoming, attachment and separation, confinement and metamorphosis’.4 The films all center on the idea of self- exploration as related to cultural evolution, examining the development of mythologies in our society alongside Barney’s personal investigation of his own sexuality, while his persistent use of such favorite masculine elements as American football, cowboys, motorbikes and the like fall into place.

Not only is he the pre-eminent artist of his generation working with film as ‘high art’, but in accordance with Berger’s idea that ‘every image embodies a way of seeing’5 Matthew Barney has changed the way in which we view film, appropriating the camera for his own needs, by carefully controlling the conditions in which he documents his highly stylized world. Barney is insisting that the viewer concentrate and accept his work in a conceptual manner at the same time as he is inviting the audience to question their automatic reception of the work by showing ‘high’ art in the ‘low’ realm of the local cinema.

In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin notes that the painter, prior to the invention of photography, had been able to paint only what his eye could see, his unique personal vision. That changed with the invention of the camera, whose impartial lens awarded each element of a scene equal significance.6 According to Barney, the characters in the films are part of an elaborate sculptural system wherein each scene is composed. He doesn’t look at a monitor or purposefully ‘direct’ his actors, because, he says, ‘the genesis of these projects is in the object. My concerns have to do with developing an ‘object narrative’, so (viewing) the monitor for me is about framing the objects rather than directing characters.’7 The ‘action’ in the film results from the juxtaposition of the many scenes; each scene generally comprises a single idea, the characters move very little, often repeating the same action over and over. For example in Cremaster 3, one scene shows five Chrysler Imperials demolishing a Chrysler New Yorker in the lobby of the Chrysler building. Barney returns to that scene as the viewer watches the car being slowly destroyed. In another scene, a beautiful woman sits alone, carefully slicing potatoes with a blade attached to the bottom of her shoe. Again Barney returns to the scene several times. The audience’s attention is drawn away from the progression of the narrative and toward the concept inherent in each scene, which is strictly controlled by the artist. Throughout the cycle, there are no characters other than those central to the story, no props intended to simulate the appearance of the real world. Football stadiums, racetracks, petrol stations, the Chrysler Building are all hauntingly empty save for the essential characters.

Barney has ruthlessly abused the dictatorial stance of the camera in the construction of his artworks. The viewer’s reception of the Cremaster cycle is tactically manipulated through the often excruciatingly slow pace of the films, each scene weighty with complex multi-dimensional meaning. In the three-hour-long Cremaster 3, for example, there is no sign of the approaching end of the film, as the pace consistently slows. As each scene unfolds, the viewer is left struggling to find the ever-elusive point. At a certain stage, one ceases to follow the narrative, or even to attempt an interpretation. The viewer is confronted with a deep dissatisfaction in his inability to ‘get’ the film, yet frustrated at his unwillingness to leave, lest it all make sense at the end. Barney’s domination of the camera means that we are straight jacketed into the artist’s world, forced into conceptual thinking; for those unable or unwilling to take this on, the Cremaster cycle remains a work of utterly mystifying beauty.

6. BRUCE MAU - Massive Change unpublished
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Here’s an excerpt from a review I did of Massive Change, the exhibition that was recently at the AGO and is currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Sept 16 - 31 December. There are plans for a world tour of the show over the next few years, so I thought I’d include my thoughts. Anyway, the piece was never published, for reasons beyond my control..

Massive Change - what does that title actually deliver? Massive Hype? Massive Boredom? There has been much conjecture and debate surrounding the exhibition since it opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery in October 2004, for Massive Change is not an art exhibit befitting a gallery, but rather an ambitious design show aiming to illustrate the potential of forward-thinking design solutions. The show expresses Mau’s fervent belief in the importance of design through eleven so-called ‘Design Economies’. His hope is that people “walk away with the realization that their world is being designed around them, that design shapes their reality, and that they can play a role in how it is shaped.” This is no mere Massive Change, but rather MASSIVE CHANGE. Mau isn’t into subtlety.

Toronto-based Bruce Mau is well known as a graphic designer - anyone with an interest in radical avant-garde book design will be familiar with his two doorstopper-size manifestos, S,M,L,XL (a collaboration with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) and his studio’s monograph LifeStyle. Through his high profile work with architects Frank Ghery and Koolhaas, his name has become virtually synonymous with bold, oversized text. So why did he make the leap from designer of font to designer of an explosive, controversial art gallery exhibition?

As Mau explains it, he was perplexed at the negative attitude surrounding design and technological advancement among the general public. He himself was aware of many unprecedented global innovations, yet he didn’t see this awareness reflected in the public realm. So when the Vancouver Art Gallery approached him with an offer to commission a show, he began to articulate his ideas. At around the same time, he was approached by George Brown Toronto City College with an idea for a one-year, post-grad educational joint project with his studio, resulting in the Institute without Boundaries, a program wherein students from a broad range of backgrounds spend one year at Bruce Mau Design collaborating on various projects, the first of which is this traveling exhibition.

The scale and ambition of the show demands an intensive collaborative effort, reflected in the dense visual effects and over-design that is obviously the product of much dogged brainstorming. Be forewarned: the show is challenging, overwhelming, stimulating to the senses, educational and loaded with information. Difficult to absorb in its entirety, it suffers from too many facts, statistics, quips and data. Ideally, you would have a browse through the website (www.massivechange.com) or the comprehensive exhibition book beforehand, but in any case it will help to remember the following: it exists to show you how design unites technology with the consumer. Each object should thus be viewed as a kind of marriage between technology and design. Upon seeing Daimler Chrysler’s POEMAtec car seat, for instance, made entirely of coconut fibers and natural rubber, you need to remember the exhibition’s unstated mantra, that design is what allows this technology to be visible to consumers, which ultimately improves the health of the planet and of our lives. The same goes for the entire show. The exhibition is both a really neat science exhibit and an overly didactic text-driven manifesto wrongly placed in an ‘art’ gallery. It aims to make you feel happy that design is creating great hope in the world, which is fair, but it does this without assessing the larger picture - that behavioral changes are necessary for innovative technologies to really succeed. Warp speed kicks in immediately upon entering the exhibition. Everything seems larger, louder, faster, more modern and all encompassing than normal, giving it the feel of Tokyo’s Shinjuku station at rush hour. The catchphrase ‘Now that we can do anything, what will we do?’ begins the experience, which is then is divided into a number of ‘Economies’, obscurely explained as the events, ideas and people investigating various design dilemmas.

The website www.massivechange.com is a more successful way of digesting the often fascinating information. The site offers two options: Learn and Act. You can ‘Learn’ about the exhibition under four subheadings, and then under the second option, ‘Act’, Mau has provided an online forum, intended to encourage the progression from ‘communication to action.’ You can connect with people around the world or down the street to discuss critical issues and exchange ideas. Finally, there are tools for learning and case studies, through the Institute without Boundaries, where likeminded organizations can be contacted.

Sadly, the exhibition lacks finesse. It should be thought of as an adjunct to the greater project Massive Change, whose nucleus is either the website or the unsurprisingly excellent book (which should be required reading). Other notable ‘Project Outcomes’ include a radio show and an educational curriculum. Massive Change seeks to broaden our thinking. What do these objects reveal about our abilities to shape our world? Yes, it is too optimistic, too complex, too ambitious, but the opening quote suggests that technology can encourage a new way of seeing our world. Can it also encourage the behavioral changes that such design innovations require to be truly successful? Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries are betting on it.

Massive Change

7. UPCOMING
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I can’t print them now since they have yet to be published, but next month find excerpts from my review of Martha Rosler’s show “Garage Sale” at ICA London for C magazine and Geoffrey Farmer/Joelle Tuerlinckx at Toronto’s Power Plant for Art Papers.

I’ll be at Jessica Bradley’s room at the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International (TAAFI) at the Gladstone Hotel November 3 - 7. Please drop by if you’re in town!

I’m foregoing Frieze this year for New York. Expect a report on NYC in the next month or so..

8. ARTISTS TO GOOGLE et cetera
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Stuart Croft (London)

Ella Gibbs (London)

Robert Morin (Montreal)

Ronny Heiremans & Katleen Vermeir (Belgium)