LOATHED: THE AGO

Umm…Is the Andy Warhol show still on? We haven’t had much cause to check out the Art Gallery of Ontario since we heard David Cronenberg’s audio tour of the show.

The Future Now is the title of one current exhibition. The website says: “Continuing the success of Favourites: Your Choices from Our Collection, this exhibition features more highlights from the permanent collection.” We recently received a press release stating that of the over 100 ship models from the 18th century gifted to the AGO by the late Lord Thompson, two are now on view as part of The Future Now.

For the rest of Thompson’s ship collection, the public will have to wait until 2008.

Favourites: Your Choices from Our Collection sounds alright, but why not commission a young artist like LA-based artist
JED LIND
who has an interest in history, or OCAD or University of Toronto students who should have, to respond to the historical ships? Art should create a dialogue, it should generate interest in the present moment. Áfter all, the Art Gallery of Ontario isn’t a museum.

Contemporary exhibitions must ask what can these historical artefacts tell us about ourselves today? This is what contemporary art is for.

While in Zurich last week, I saw an exhibition entitled In the Alps. Showing a selection of work from the 17th century until today, the show featured the impressively modern paintings of “Pionere der Schweizer Alpenmalerei” Caspar Wolf from the late 1770s and the Mort Tragique du Colonel de Savignac (1990/91) by Arnulf Rainer, showing a painting of a mountain accident scribbled over with what looks like graphite, as if to simultaneously underline and obliterate the tragedy.

Also in the show was a large mountain sculpture made from what appeared to be a grey woolen blanket covered in wax with a railway tunnel at its mouth and a small cross on top was Berg (2003) by Thomas Schutte.

A particularly resonant work was a slide presentation by Lois Hechenblaikner entitled Zeitgeister (2006) which compared Alpen life from just after the turn of the century, when people respected the land and grew from it, to Alpen life today, when the leisure industry has allowed people to treat the Alps like some kind of Disneyland.

See more: KUNSTHAUS ZURICH