LOVED:

The best artwork that VoCA has seen since Gregor Scheider’s Weisse Folter at Dusseldorf ’s K21 last month (see previous post below) is Andrea Fraser’s video Official Welcome, 2001 in the Power Plant exhibition Auto Emotion: Autobiography, emotion and self-fashioning, on through August 19 in Toronto.

Andrea Fraser, Official Welcome, 2001. Image: muhka.be

It’s free all summer and worth the trip down just for this one piece.

Fraser is absolutely mesmerizing to watch, and if you sit through all 31 minutes, you’ll get to see her strip down to a Gucci g-string!

More on Ms. Fraser in this article by Barbara Pollack from Art in America HERE

Never one to shy away from the extreme in her art, Ms. Fraser is perhaps best known for Untitled (2003), where her gallery arranged a commission with a private collector, wherein they would have sex, recorded on video and produced in an edition of five.

Read an interview with the artist HERE

More HERE

And HERE

LOATHED:

“It’s bold, it’s loud, it’s unwieldy, it’s flamboyant – and this exhibition is proud to state that it’s…TORONTO!”

So says the press release for LoVe/HaTe: New Crowned Glory in the G.T.A., on view through August 19 at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto.

Susy Oliveira, Time is never wasted, 2006. Image: susyoliveira.ca

The show features “over 30 of some of Toronto’s most loved and despised artistic icons” – to wit, Bruno Billio, Ulysses Castellanos, DMT Gonad, RONS & Sight, JASON GRINGLER, Anitra Hamilton, Mike Hansen, Raffael A. Iglesias, iMortified, Istvan Kantor, HAROLD KLUNDER, Bruce LaBruce and the Scandelles, STEVEN LAURIE, Los Cholos, DYAN MARIE, THE MOVEMENT MOVEMENT, Mike Murphy, Lisa Neighbour, John Nobrega, SUSY OLIVEIRA, DJ Ombudsman, Nick and Sheila Pye, Shelly Rhame, Fiona Smyth, Rashimi Varma, RM Vaughn and Jared Mitchell, MARGAUX WILLIAMSON.

Jason Gringler, Monument to all Things Lost, 2007. Image: angellgallery.com

This diverse mix of work is plonked messily inside MoCCA with little cohesion. The route for a 400-metre dash, taped out on the floor around the parimeter of the gallery courtesy of The Movement Movement, could have served as a guide for the viewer had it been installed near the entrance. Instead, it started three quarters of the way through the exhibition.

Margaux Williamson, back, before, when Leonardo DiCaprio and I were homeless, 2006.
Image: margauxwilliamson.com

Elizabeth Payton, Live to Ride (E.P.), 2003. Image: deutsche-bank-kunst.com

An installation piece by Nic and Sheila Pye took up much of the main floor (for what?) It reminded us of Ilya Kabakov’s wonderful piece My Grandfather’s Shed, 1998 in the permanent collection of Dusseldorf’s K21, only not nearly as fine.

Three pieces competed noisily for attention in the main gallery. The winner - by far - was Steven Laurie’s Thump Trunks 2007, two customized construction tool/security trunks outfitted with 12″ 300 watt subwoofers. The sound added much-needed weight to some of the other pieces on view, but one has to wonder how much a thumping baseline relates to today’s Toronto art scene. Maybe we’re missing something, but it seemed a bit early 90s to us.

Steven Laurie, Thump Trunks, 2007. Image: flickr.com/stevenlaurie

Istvan Kantor’s video Deadly Giftrecounting his altercations with the Art Galllery of Ontario might be intriguing to MoCCA’s summer audience, but really, is Kantor much more than a deluded provocateur? If he were being true to his anarchic beliefs, wouldn’t that preclude showing in an institutional show – even one at the MoCCA, effectively an institution in artist’s clothing. It smells hypcocritical to us. We would rather see MoCCA host one of Kantor’s performance extravanganzas. The last one we saw – in MoCCA’s courtyard in 2004 was a huge bonfire performance with blazing irons and computer parts.

Istvan Kantor, performance with MACHINESEXACTIONGROUP, The Museum Of Contemporary Art, Toronto, 2004.
Image: ccca.ca

Urban activist Dyan Marie’s fuzzy, apologetic video accompanied by free posters referred to her guerilla poison ivy campaign in 2007. It’s a wonderful piece that would have been much better served in a different place, or an altogether different exhibition.

The best pieces in the show were two large mixed media paintings by Jason Gringler, a Toronto painter recently decamped to New York. Gringler has come a long way, and the one piece in blue and gold was stunning, of exceptional quality and miles above much of the other work on view. His work is available at Toronto’s Angell Gallery.

Jason Gringler, Untitled (Blue Gold), 2007. Image: angellgallery.com

There were some nice, vaguely Elizabeth Peyton-esque paintings by Margaux Williamson and some fine 3-d paper sculptures by Susy Oliveira, including one, titled Time is never wasted (2006) of a young man laying on the floor – as if he had found the show too much, and had passed out.

Far too many of the works aren’t worth a mention.

We will say that MoCCA, as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, owes it to the city and the country to set a high standard for art. It is a great shame that this exhibition appears to be an excuse to show sub-standard work.

The title “Love and Hate” should suggest difficult, unrefined messy work (we’re thinking Paul McCarthy here) as well as work that is easy to love. But a museum must never show bad art – it brings down the few strong pieces, leading here to a sense of mediocrity throughout Toronto’s art scene that simply isn’t the case.

Paul McCarthy, Hot Dog, 1974. Image: themoorespace.org

We suggest that MoCCA stick to showing the best this city and the country has to offer – it owes it to audiences. The curators at MoCCA have been accused of laziness, and in this case, we have to agree.

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