I came across a quote from the YBA godfather, Michael Craig-Martin in the Financial Times recently. Speaking about the practice of being an artist, he says, “What interests me is the part of you that you are stuck with, that you can’t control, and it comes out whatever. That’s infinitely more profound: you are who you are, even when you don’t wish to be – you can’t not do it.”

Still from whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, by Eve Sussman. Image courtesy redartprojects.com

His quote echoes an issue that I’ve had for some time with much of the emerging art that I see; the idea that the artist must maintain control over it. Of course, ultimately we can never get away from ourselves, so it’s true that all art is self-portraiture, but generally speaking, I much prefer art that leaves open what Craig-Martin identifies – that part that can’t be controlled.

Speaking of control, we saw the newest work by Brooklyn-based artist Eve Sussman and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was screening as a part of Future Projections, the festival’s artistic programme.

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With all the condo development going on in downtown Toronto recently – the good, the bad and the embarrassingly ugly (hello there, Bohemian Embassy – what is with that sign?!) has come a smart new wave of Toronto’s downtown art scene.

Hunter & Cook, the magazine. Image: hunterandcook.com

Little galleries – The Department, Tomorrow, Erin Stump, General Hardware, the Feminist Art Gallery – and others – have popped up, anchored by stalwarts like the beloved Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) Clint Roenisch, MKG127, Jessica Bradley and Jamie Angell, not to mention the now nearly ancient artist-run space Whippersnapper.

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Last weekend, we went up to a friend’s cottage on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park.

You may recognize the name – it’s well known as the lake where Group of Seven painter Tom Thomson mysteriously died at age 42 in July, 1917. He had left to go on a fishing trip, but after only a few hours his canoe was found floating in the lake. It wasn’t until a week or so later that his body was found.

Getting ready to head out. All images: VoCA/Scott Barker

On our way across Canoe Lake.

Thomson, who was a recognized outdoorsman, spent six months of every year in Algonquin Park hunting, fishing and of course painting. He had worked as a guide and fire ranger in the park, so the fact that his death was declared an accidental drowning on what was a apparently a clear and normal day seems unusual. Even at the time, people couldn’t believe it and rumours swirled about suicide and murder.

The gravesite is in Mowat cemetery, about a ten-minute walk into the bush off the west side of the lake. We took my dog, Hudson. You have to go through people’s cottage properties to get there and it’s entirely unmarked. You basically go up an un-maintained grassy road to the first big birch, and take a left into the bush, whereupon a faint trail becomes clear.

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Cindy Sherman, the American artist known for her Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980 and subsequent self-portraits in which she transforms herself, through hair, makeup, prosthetics and costume, into various female characters from the seductive to the grotesque, is all about disguise.

Cindy Sherman for MAC Cosmetics. Image: heartymagazine.com

She’s been working this way for decades and is one of America’s best-known artists. In fact, she now holds the record for highest price paid for a photograph at auction when her work Untitled #96 was sold for $3.8 million at Christie’s in May.

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Today, I went to the media preview of Haute Culture, the retrospective of famed Canadian artist collective General Idea, which opens this Friday with a FREE party at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

AIDS (Gold) 1987, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas. Katharina Faerber Collection, Geneva Image: VoCA

I had a few minutes to chat with AA Bronson, who reminded me of his upcoming solo exhibition at Esther Schipper Gallery in Berlin, in which he will be showing large self portraits with diamonds. Not the Warhol-style diamond dust, mind you….but actual diamonds. Though based in New York, AA currently shows only with commercial galleries in Europe, now that his New York gallery John Connelly Presents has closed. And in Canada, it seems our market is just not able to support him. He’s never been particularly well embraced in Canada, he says. Hopefully the retrospective will go some way toward changing that. It was supported by some of the city’s well-known collectors.

Incidentally, some in the Toronto art world will find it interesting that the retrospective was a project begun by former AGO curator of contemporary art David Moos, when he was still at the AGO.

The GI retrospective comes from La Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, where it was apparently a big success. Curator Frederic Bonnet explained that it is arranged thematically, rather than chronologically, which in the case of GI, is helpful. The themes are, according to Bonnet: Glamour as tool of creation; Mass cultures; Architecture/Archaeology; Sexuality/Ambiguity and the AIDS project.

FILE Magazine, 1972-1989, one set of magazines – 26 issues. Image courtesy the Estate of General Idea; © Pierre Antoine, Muse?e d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC, 2011.

The group famously used the mass media as a vehicle for art, putting art on television and printing a magazine FILE. They employed an impressive range of materials, from work in plaster, taxidermy, gold leaf, fluorescent tube…there is even straw on the floor of one fantastic installation, making the gallery smell like a barn. In it, the poodles (the artists) are contemplating the Canis Major constellation in the Milky Way. It’s quite funny.

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In honour of all the weddings taking place this June (including my own) I thought I would show the most famous wedding painting of them all: The Arnolfini Portrait, painted by the incredibly brilliant Flemish painter Jan van Eyck in 1434 and known to all first year students of art history as an excellent example of symbolism in painting.

The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, 1434. Image: Britannica.com

Historians still theorize about the purpose of the painting and whom, exactly it was depicting. Most agree that is was a portrait intended to commemorate a marriage and to display the wealth of the Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife. The many symbolic elements seem to add up to the depiction of a couple who are looking forward to life together, with numerous elements suggesting wealth, passion, loyalty, gender roles etc.

With its minute and extremely precise reflection of the scene in a convex mirror at the back of the room, it is a rather modern and admirably complex picture.

The painting is in London’s National Gallery.

Yesterday, a group of about 100 people from the Toronto art community gathered outside the Chinese consulate in Toronto, in support of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who has been detained by Chinese authorities.

The event was organized by a group of local artists and art writers, and was part of 1001 Chairs that took place in Manhattan and in cities around the world.

It was an unqualified success, but it’s not over:

“We call on our Prime Minister and our Minister of Foreign Affairs to express concern over the treatment of Ai Weiwei. Leaders of the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Country Museum have called for his release. So far, the only Canadian art institution to do the same has been the Vancouver Art Gallery. We call on Canada’s art museums, institutions and artist-run centres including the AGO, the National Gallery, the ROM, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art to condemn the imprisonment of Ai Weiwei and call for his release.”

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It’s been over one week since Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was arrested by the Chinese government at Beijing airport. He has not been heard from since and the government is accusing him of ‘economic crimes’.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Image: lamonodigital.net

Where is he? And why aren’t Canadians demanding to know?

Ai Weiwei is best known for his installation Sunflower Seeds, currently on view at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Each porcelain seed was made and hand painted by Chinese specialists working in Jingdezhen, emphasizing the labour that has gone into the project. As someone suggested to me recently, seeds are about potential growth. So you can imagine the impact of a hundred million seeds carpeting the Turbine Hall.

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I was fascinated by yesterday’s Slutwalk that took place in Toronto, and sorry that I wasn’t able to attend.

Slutwalk in Toronto yesterday. Image: scathinglywrongrightwingnutz.com

The walk attracted around 1,000 people and was arranged in part as a protest against comments by police Constable Michael Sanguninetti who, while speaking to students at York Unviersity, said “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

Women were outraged, and rightly so. It is an outrageous suggestion that women should bear the full responsibility in a case where sexual assault occurs. Even if she is dressing ‘like a slut’, surely the man must take responsibility for his own actions. I mean it’s hard to believe that Sanguinetti was actually serious.

More, and the Quebec art collective Les Fermieres Obsedees, after the jump:

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From Winnipeg, VoCA contributor Whitney Light sat down with painter Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline to discuss the development of his painting practice, the importance of variation, biological systems and how he keeps it all interesting.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline, Rot Samba, 2009, oil on canvas. All images courtesy the artist.

VoCA: What is keeping you busy now?

KK: I’m at the start of something new. I’m interested in taking motifs from my paintings and reusing them over and over again, in pattern making and, in doing that, exploring a parallel with biological processes, or evolution. I’m trying to develop a way of painting that employs little systems. I’m interested in the way biological systems work rather than what they look like; how they make structures out of small bits.

VoCA: Who or what has motivated your ideas in this direction?

KK: Predominantly right now the two things I’m looking at are the history of ornamentation and also really trying to understand how certain biological processes work. They don’t come out directly per se, but I’m trying to use both to shape what I’m doing. Ornamentation became interesting to me because it’s a domain within which you can see an evolution of motifs and forms; it reveals small parts generating larger systems or patterns through time.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline, Untitled, 2010, Ink on paper.

VoCA: You have been looking for a model process. How does this new work compare to your previous?

KK: I was looking for ways of making things that I could get behind. My previous work (around 2008) was really almost about working without a model. On some level I had a reticence about having a model or a system. At that time, I was really interested in making paintings that would to some degree explore ideas about the production of subjectivity, or even express doubts in relation to this idea. This also paralleled an interest in and doubt around how to pursue making paintings. Rather than depicting the figure as a discrete whole, I was interested in looking at it as an assemblage of heterogeneous parts that come together briefly to form a kind of shifty multitude as opposed to an individual.

I think that my reticence around the idea of a system or a model really came out of not seeing one that didn’t in some way involve an appeal towards some kind of abstract ideal or involve me having to impose my will on the process in an aggressive way. I was more interested in pursuing something more passive and more like tending to a practice as one would a garden, preferably a pretty scruffy English garden.

I think with the newer work, looking at areas like the study of biological systems, has provided me with models or ways of working that seem less determinist or reductive. It presents models and systems that at their core are about variation, interconnectedness, evolution, and change. So things are explored as being dynamic and in constant motion as opposed to being static.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline, Comedian (blk), 2009. Oil on canvas.

VoCA: This seems to have taken you away from representational imagery toward greater abstraction. Would you agree?

KK: When I was coming out of undergrad, my favorite painters were late Medieval and early Renaissance. I pursued that for a while. And then I became done with that idea.
I still consider my work to be representational in many ways. I think it is a myth that “abstraction” operates outside of the field of representation. I find it more useful to consider the term abstraction in its original meaning as a representation that is severed from its material referent. In this sense I just think about the more painterly effects in the work as being a kind of profane or material exuberance. I think these material events maybe open up a space in the more representational aspects of the paintings and allow for a slippery read of the image. The formal play becomes a kind of categorical play in relation to the figure depicted.

I think the move away from a more concise form of representation happened because my ideas changed. When I was making my most finely tuned representational paintings (from the spring of 2007 until winter 2008) I was interested in looking at the painting as a kind of stage or virtual arena where motifs would move around within a narrative. I was really interested in Hogarth’s paintings. On some level I think I was trying to paint a movie almost. I was really interested in seeing what could go on in that virtual space but also how things could come out of that space, and tracking those movements. So the painting surface became the looking glass or a kind of fold between two types of space.

But the problem I started having was that the actual making of the work became sort of boring to me. I would figure out the image in drawings and then just paint it to the best of my abilities. In that sense the painting was just there to fulfill a technical requirement in order to create the virtual space. I always think of that work now as some sort of failed conceptual art for a really good video game.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline, Untitled, 2010. Ink on paper.

VoCA: Whose work interests you right now?

KK: Hans Arp really interests me right now. The way he works through his drawings and his paintings and his relief sculptures. He used a lot of chance but then took the results of that and it almost became a little system. I’m interested in his drawings and collages in particular, the way he reused them to make new works. They became like little machines that function on their own.

A lot of the stuff that I’m looking at right now is anonymous patterns not attributed to anybody. They’re these free-floating entities. There are motifs that go through cultures and they’re not attributed to anybody but they’re used by everybody. For instance, in Moorish architectural patterning. There were specific influences, but the motifs got adopted by successive generations and then they become these traditional forms. But they mutate as they’re used.

VoCA: Are you interested in the motifs that pervade society today, then?

KK: I am not appropriating any specific motifs, though I look at them and try to understand them; I’m actually more interested in generating my own. It’s more interesting to start from scratch. They start really simply and then I sort of reuse them in different ways across different mediums and as I do that they change and become more complex, develop relationships with each other. It’s becoming like a kind of population that I’m using and the work itself is a trace of those interactions.

Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline, Mellon, 2010 Oil on canvas.

VoCA: It sounds like you’re creating a sort of microcosm of images, or a fabricated history of them. Does that adequately describe what you’re working towards?

KK: Yes, in some ways. I definitely recognize that there is a kind of formal genealogy being produced. As I make the work I am producing a lot of stencils, drawings and digital files so there is a really clear visual record of what’s being made. Each one is sort of like a little specimen in a field guide.