Your Cultural Concierge! VoCA offers critical commentary on the Canadian art scene, with a focus on Toronto. Featuring exhibition previews, critics picks, interviews and in-depth articles on art in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax.
Click HERE for a questionnaire with Vancouver artist Jeff Wall in this month’s issue of Frieze magazine.
“I get so much from looking at great works, but some days – or even some months – I get more from not looking at them. You experience the art also by being away from it and not seeing it.” - Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room, 1978. Image: tate.org.uk
Also, HERE in Art + Auction, Souren Melikian writes on the shifting perceptions in the Old Masters market, where mediocre works are achieving great prices, thanks to scarcity of the real gems.
Last week we posted HERE part one of our conversation with Douglas Coupland. In this post, Coupland talks about his collecting habits, coming from a “guns-and-ammo” family, his interest in nuclear culture and his new TV mini-series, among other things.
Douglas Coupland’s tiny cubes of 100 stamps. Image: VoCA
Coupland brings out a bowl filled with small cubes of 100 stamps, held together with a band of paper.
VoCA: Wow, did you make all these?
DC: Oh God, no. I collect stamps, I collect Japanese stamps.
VoCA: See, you do collect! You collect tons of things!
VoCA: I’ve heard of it. It’s about people who obsessively collect things.
DC: No, no. I collect. These people don’t get rid of shit. (laughs) These are people who use a paper towel and don’t throw it out thinking it might be useful in the future. People who hoard have almost always had a huge, catastrophic loss in their life, a family member usually and it’s almost impossible to get rid of once you’ve got it. It becomes for them, ‘something you can’t take away from me,’ kind of thing.
Last week at his beautiful, art-filled Ron Thom designed home in Vancouver, VoCA sat down with artist-slash-writer Douglas Coupland to get his views on everything from Warhol to techological obsolescence to City of Toronto love.
“All young artists secretly think they’re the next Warhol,” says the Generation X author.
Douglas Coupland. Image:anthonygeorge.com
Here are some highlights:
VoCA: Douglas Coupland, are you more artist than writer or vice versa?
DC: I don’t differentiate. I don’t see a real difference. Is cooking different from roasting?
“Money and art: it’s a difficult question,” (says Miuccia Prada.) “But art has always been about very rich people – think of the great popes and princes of the Renaissance.”
The Prada Transformer, Rem Koolhaas’s incredible re-think of what architecture is. Image: gadget.ca
We think Ms. Prada is on to something here. Today, we were at a talk sponsored by the Canadian Art Foundation, by the Paris-based curator Vincent Honore, who works for the David Roberts Art Foundation in London.
Canada has a strong culture of Government funded artist-run centres in every province. These are public galleries, run by artists for artists, with a strong exhibition program that supports artists from Canada and abroad.
Another type of artist-run gallery in Toronto opened earlier this month. 47 is run by three artists, Dennis Lin, Jaclyn Quaresma and Jennifer McGregor, with – so far – no grants, investors or outside funding. But it’s not an artist-run centre.
Images from Rock Bottom, the opening night exhibition, by Steve Richards. Image: 47gallery.blogspot.com
47 spoke to VoCA by email:
On artist-run centres:Though similar to, we are not an artist-run centre. The only thing that seems to connects us with the conception of an artist-run centre is the fact that we are all artists.
When we are working at the gallery we are gallerists/curators, the artists we show are our focus. Independently we are artists with our own, separate practices.
VoCA has long championed Winnipeg as a hotbed for contemporary artists - Guy Maddin, Sarah Anne Johnson and Paul Butler among them.
Since he was included in AA Bronson’s School for young shamans at John Connelly Presents in NYC last year, along with other VoCA favorite Item Idem, young Winnipeg artist Michael Dudeck is fast emerging as one of the country’s most intriguing performance artists.
Michael Dudeck, Parthenogenesis at Pari Nadimi Gallery. Image: courtesy the artist.
Fresh from his first exhibition at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery, VoCA contributor Whitney Light caught up with Dudeck in Winnipeg:
Plus - As featured in the November 2008 issue of W magazine: The CANADIAN premiere of Herb and Dorothy, a documentary by Megumi Sasaki about a postal clerk and a librarian who built one of the most important contemporary art collections in history.
Founded in 1993, Mammalian Diving Reflex is a “research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences, producing one-off events, theatre-based performance, theoretical texts and community happenings.”
According to their website , “It is our mission to bring people together, engage them, challenge them and get them talking, thinking and feeling.”
VoCA has been wondering for some time whether Mammalian artistic Darren O’Donnell is one of the most interesting and relevant artists in Canada. We sat down with him in Toronto to find out what his work is all about.
One of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s popular performances, “Haircuts by Children”. Image: torontolife.com
Click HERE for my article on the sculptors for Azure’s DesignLines magazine. They’ve just reworked the language of the traditional children’s jungle gym for their new city commission at Lee Centre Park in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. Their design-y pieces reference Modernism using such unusual materials as Ikea furniture and bicycle tire.
Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, Mao, 2008. Image: cdgy.com
Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, Fullerene, 2003. Image: aceart.org
CDGY are represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary - click HERE.
VoCA sat down with Christian and Dan to talk about their work:
VoCA: How would you describe your artistic practice? You have made many sculptures, but also a film and a comic-book inspired print.
CG: We are primarily sculptors.,,our collaboration is born of shared sculptural interests. Our concern is still sculpture, but we’re not confining ourselves to making objects. It’s a hard question. Have we taken a sculptural approach to film? Yes. It’s a typology of comparison between the vocabulary of building construction and the sense of a moment of life in the city. Not just form but the social parameters that shape that form…Also in the history of sculpture…we research how we go about making work. It doesn’t always come naturally. It’s a way of thinking about forms.
DY: We’re interested in the fabrication process..the fabricators – we represent their realm, the industrial base. As you get to know a tool, it guides your process. No one masters anything anymore, it’s all super specialized.
Andrea Carson writes on contemporary art, architecture and design...