SmallTalks is a series of very short podcasts hosted by the fascinating artist Darren O’Donnell, who, “like a log drifting downstream, will snag people on the bank to slow his progress toward death, and chat with them about their aspirations.”

Artist Darren O’Donnell. Image: 2.bp.blogspot.com

Created in response to a life with too much time spent on the road, Darren will be interviewing people around the world and describing the sensation of weak knees in the face of vast heights.

Darren talks with people that he meets and finds interesting, and even offers introspective commentary from a restroom. (He’s trying to use the restroom as a place to rest, he says.)

All SmallTalks are available HERE or you can follow Darren’s twitter feed for updates HERE.

Read more about Darren O’Donnell’s work, including Mammamlian Diving Reflex and Social Acupuncture, HERE.

Great curatorial minds think alike, it seems.

After what seems like an interminably long period of preciousness with Toronto’s starchitect-designed art spaces at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, the gloves are off.

Both institutions have invited artists to literally destroy gallery walls.

The gorgeous, Frank Gehry-designed AGO. Image: seanjohn.com

At the AGO, the glorious collages and installations of Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu will, for her first major solo exhibition, include a haunting series of drawings mounted on a ‘pockmarked’ gallery wall, which will be punctured and torn to reflect the post-colonial themes at the core of Mutu’s work.

This should be a must-see exhibition!

A collage by Wangechi Mutu. Image: 55secretstreet.com

Wangechi Mutu: This You Call Civilization?
February 24 - May 23
The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Libeskind’s Royal Ontario Museum. Image: daniel-libeskind.com

Meanwhile, over at the ROM, the Romanian Dan Perjovschi will graffiti Libeskind’s walls with his cartoon-y style that offers incisive commentary on political, social and cultural issues of the moment.

Dan Perjovschi: Late News
February 15 to 21, 2010
Drawings on display until August 15, 2010
The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

Dan Perjovschi at the Taubman Museum of Art. Image: perjovschi.ro

We snuck in on the final day to see the Cut/Paste: Creative Reuse in Canadian Design show at the Royal Ontario Museum this past weekend, and, while the huge gallery spaces overwhelmed the design objects on display, there were a few things of particular interest, like objects that prison inmates had ingeniously cobbled together: water-boilers and crudely made toaster, to transform water and bread into toast and tea.

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Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus. Image: seattlepi.com

On Friday, we went to hear Joshua Prince-Ramus, the president of REX Architects in New York, speak at Toronto’s Interior Design Show, for the Azure-sponsored talks.

Prince-Ramus is an excellent and passionate speaker, who previously worked with Rem Koolhaas.  He is also an architect who - like Koolhaas -  clearly revels in the constraints imposed upon him.  As he said, “Constraints are the mother of invention.”

He spoke about architectural agency, about the need for architects to take responsibility for the fact that they have become marginalized. He noted that there was an artificial schism between creation and execution, that the idea of architect as ‘individual genius’ is a myth, and that there is a need to stitch creation and execution back together again.

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Last night, we went to the preview of the Gladstone Hotel’s alternative design event, Come Up To My Room (CUTMR). We’ve been in the past, and this year was by far the best. Each room on the hotel’s second floor was individually transformed, many with inspiring and conceptually tight installations.

Thu, Jan 21, 2010 - Sun, Jan 24, 2010
12:00 pm - 8:00 pm
$8

Here are some highlights:

1. Orest Tataryn and Bruno Billio

This was our favorite installation. A ray of neon light zooms wildly around a carefully decorated room where two chandeliers have collided. It’s wonderful, and can be re-created to commission.

Click HERE to contact the artists.

There are many more photos after the jump….

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Leading art collector and philanthropist Dr. Ydessa Hendeles is donating an extraordinary collection of 32 Canadian and international contemporary artworks to the Art Gallery of Ontario, representing the most significant single gift of contemporary art in the AGO’s 110-year history.

A work, by Barbara Kruger, currently on view at Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto.
Image: akimbo.ca

The gift includes works by groundbreaking Canadian contemporary artists Kim Adams, Ian Carr-Harris, Max Dean, Betty Goodwin, Liz Magor, Ken Lum, Ron Martin, John McEwen and Ian Wallace. The Hendeles gift also adds to the AGO’s contemporary collection the first works by international artists James Coleman (Irish), Gary Hill (American),Thomas Schütte (German), Bill Viola (American) and Krzysztof Wodiczko (Polish), and augments the Gallery’s holding by Giulio Paolini (Italian).

Plans are underway for an exhibition of works from the Hendeles donation within the next 18 months.

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We’ve been noticing something happening in the city, something slowly seeping into our daily lives without much fanfare. What is it?
Simply put, it’s artifice.

A real lawn vs. a fake lawn (in January) in Toronto’s Rosedale neighbourhood. Image: VoCA

It’s in your parks (fake grass in Douglas Coupland’s new park, down near the lake, and on Rosedale lawns), on your ice rinks (Harbourfront’s rink is now plastic, for all season skating) and on your street (bet you don’t know which downtown buildings are stone and which are stucco-covered Styrofoam.)  Not to mention in our food.

In our quest for perfection (thanks to having-it-all, all-the-time technology), we ignore what is natural in lieu of what is convenient. Where has physical labour gone? As Julian Baggini mentions in this weekend’s FT, describing Michael Foley’s new book The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy, “The promise of consumer culture, where all things good are just a chip and a pin away, makes people feel entitled to everything but responsible for nothing…”

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You may remember, if you’re in Toronto, or Calgary, that the Canadian Art Foundation screened the excellent documentary, Herb and Dorothy, at last year’s Reel Artists Film Festival.

Megumi Sasaki’s touching documentary, Herb and Dorothy. Image: now-movies.com

The film tells the extraordinary story of Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history with very modest means.

In the 1960s they began devoting all of Herb’s salary to purchase art they liked, mainly the emerging practices of Minimalist and Conceptualist art, and living on Dorothy’s paycheck alone, they continued collecting artworks guided by two rules: the piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.

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Do you ever notice how sometimes you go into a shop, or eat at a restaurant, and you can just tell–usually by the outfit and the attitude–that you’re being served by an artist or, more likely, an art student. They seem bored, and clearly dislike their job.

Rikrit Tiravanija makes art. Image: columbia.edu

Every job holds creative potential, and every act is a creative act, as many artists–particularly practitioners of relational aesthetics– have noted. In fact, every situation holds potential. We saw the film Invictus recently, which is, in part about the revelations that Mandela came to terms with while in prison.

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The debate continues.

Barnett Newman, Voice of Fire, 1967. Image: gala.univ-perp.fr

Yesterday, VoCA reader Earl Miller posted a comment HERE in response to the post ‘Should VoCA be More Critical?’ He says that, given the amount of ‘bad’ art in the world, it’s important as an art journalist to find art that he likes or feels is important, but flawed.

We were inspired by Miller’s comment, a topic which is something that VoCA spends a lot of time thinking about.

It is perhaps useful to turn it into a question – which is more important to write about, art that the critic ‘likes’ or art that is “important for its stature, timing or positioning?

For that matter, does the critic automatically like art that is important?

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