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In a recent article in the Globe and Mail, author Margaret Atwood asks:

Why did the Conservatives take the weed whacker to Canadian arts promotion abroad?

During the last days of September, I was at a trilingual literary festival in Vincennes, near Paris. It’s called Festival America: Littératures et Cultures d’Amérique du Nord. It was Canada’s year of honour, so there were 26 Canadian writers there, as opposed to two Cubans, four Mexicans, and 24 Americans. The festival was attended by 23,000 people over three days, and generated a million mentions of Canada in the French press. Continue reading →

Happy Man, 2000. Image: sparklehorse.org

Sparkehorse, 1999. Image: sparklehorse.org

Happy Man, 2000. Image: sparklehorse.org

When experimental filmmaker Garine Torossian defied authority at York University by pasting Super-8 footage onto 16mm film offcuts, it was a harbinger of things to come. She has become adept at mixing formats (super 8, 35mm and video), perfectly illustrating the desire of artists to redefine the boundaries of artistic expression, what Tom Sherman has called “the phenomenon of intermedia, in which new relationships are forged between genres.” Continue reading →

Image: dccomics.com

Check out the response to my article on Art and the Media in Canada, on Zeke’s Gallery.

Ouch!

And then check out my comment…

A cursory Google of this year’s Turner Prize announcement in London found coverage in the Telegraph, the Guardian, on BBC news and on Channel 4, among others. The same search conducted for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s annual $50,000 art prize that Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook won in October, found coverage from CBC.ca and the arctic paper The Nunatsiaq News. Continue reading →

The Art Gallery of Ontario has just recieved Bernini’s Corpus, donated by collector Murray Frum. Cast around 1650, the sculpture was seen as one of the most significant Old Masters works still in private hands. Corpus was traced back to Bernini’s own collection.

Bernini (1598-1680) is considered the most important sculptor, architect, draughtsman and painter of the 17th century. He was a celebrated child prodigy who trained in his father’s studio and carved his first portrait at age ten. Except for a six-month period in 1665 in Paris when he worked on designs for the Louvre, he worked exclusively in Rome. Continue reading →

Ever feel that you’re missing out on the art world? Couldn’t get to Miami in December? Or you’re just not feeling up to hobnobbing..? Well, you can indulge your voyeuristic tendencies - and it’s great people watching - at vernissage tv.

Bruce Nauman, Violins Violence Silence, 1981-82. Image: pbs.org/Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society

Play ’spot the art-world celebrity’ at the opening of the MoCA Miami’s Bruce Nauman exhibition HERE

Some of Canada’s most interesting contemporary art is happening within ARTIST COLLECTIVES across the country.

Collectives – such as the ancient sculpture workshops set up near marble quarries in Greece and Italy – have been around for many years, and are wonderful forums for cross-pollination of ideas, beliefs and experimentations. They also can be taken as a sign that artists are serious about sharing and developing their ideas further.

Some other well-known Canadian artist collectives are the GALLERY POTEMKIN/POTEMKIN TOO COLLECTIVE (Lethbridge), the media arts collective VOLATILE WORKS (Montreal) and of course, the Canadian patron saint of artist collectives, GENERAL IDEA:

General Idea. Image: aabronson.com

Probably the best-known contemporary artist collective in Canada is the ROYAL ART LODGE, whose most high profile member, MARCEL DZAMA has taken the international art world by storm. His excellent, idiosyncratic drawings – in ink and root-beer – of walking bears, Marcel-waved, fur-coat wearing ladies and trees smoking cigarettes had seemed, for a while at least, to have spawned a trend in young artists toward wishy-washy line drawings.

Marcel Dzama. Image: sobeyartaward.ca

Some of VoCA’s favorite Canadian art collectives:

THE ARBOUR LAKE SGHOOL

The Arbour Lake Sghool. Image: thearbourlakesghool.com

VoCA first encountered this Calgary-based group’s work last year at The Centre Cannot Hold, a group exhibition at the Toronto Free Gallery, curated by BRENDA GOLDSTEIN. These guys live in a suburban house. They make art in their front yard, their garden, their basement…

Image: thearbourlakesghool.com

The ALS has recreated WW2 in their yard, and on their website you can learn how to become “the best graf artist ever”, by making a stencil of Calgary mayor Dave “Bronco” Bronconnier’s signature and applying it to everything in sight.

Mountain, 2005. Image: thearbourlakesghool.com

They created Mountain in their yard in 2005 (also, we belive, known as Volcano in which a red carpet is pushed through the top.) The neighbours sent a letter of complaint to the father of the Frosst brothers , who owns the house. The ALS published the letter, which has now become part of the work. There is also a hilarious video of the letter being videoed, word by word, on a computer screen.

BGL

Bosquet d’espionnage, 2004. Image: artmur.com

BGL were shortlisted for last year’s Sobey Art Award. Part of their installation featured a small room (the door of which, when opened, triggered a large, artfully lit disco ball to roll up and down a bench, creating a stunning display of light reminiscent of Fischli & Weiss’s early video Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), from 1987:

Fischli & Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge, 1987. Image: kunsthaus.ch

We also particularly love BGL’s Bosquet d’espionnage (2004), in which wooden shrubs on wheels, painted bright green, are used as easily portable urban camouflage.

Other notable installations have included A l’abri des arbres/In the Shelter of the Trees, at the Musee d’art contemporain in Montreal in 2001 in which the viewer/participant wandered through a labyrinthine passage of cardboard boxes below a forest of cardboard trees.

In 2001, they created Sentier Battu, at the Jardins de Metis/Redford Gardens in Quebec. This was an installation of bits of green tape attached to nylon string, shimmering like healthy green plants in the sun just above a desolate, broken down garden.

Sentier Battu, 2001.

640 480

640 480 is a Toronto-based international video collective. In December 2004 their project Vs. consisted of tape exchanges between video performance artists and post-producers. The artist relinquished control of the work to the producer, who was able to edit and finish whatever the artist had begun. Pairings included these VoCA favorites:

BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY VS. COOPER BATTERSBY:

Image: 640480.com

TOM SHERMAN VS. TASMAN RICHARDSON:

Image: 640480.com

and EMILY VEY DUKE VS. DANIEL COCKBURN, among others.

Image: 640480.com

FAMEFAME

Renegade Toronto-based video collective FameFame makes agressive, intense and occasionally brilliant works whose grotesque imagery wash over the viewer thanks to the speed at which they are edited.

Jubal Brown, Screaming Head in Space, (still), 2001. Image: dumboartscenter.org/Artcore gallery

Their goal “is to promote an immediacy, that transcends the physical means of the work itself, threatening the boundaries of video, sculpture, performance and event arts, audio and music, generating new strategies for culture making.”

Tasman Richardson, Apollo Shrapnel: Part 01 (still), 2001. Image: vagueterrain.net

THE DISCRIMINATING GENTLEMEN’S CLUB

Image: dgc-cga.org

We can’t say too much about this Montreal-based interdisciplinary group, since they are a “performative and all-together private arts collective.”

But we do know that they aim to “implement full ostentation and conjure up the most gentlemanly of images.” They are constantly developing new activities such as their annual fox hunt, planting a mosaic garden or flying large black kites against the sky. The collective has shown internationally, and has a clubhouse in Verdun, Quebec which hosts two monthly window exhibitions and performances as well as two major salon-style exhibition each year.