I was interested to read THIS article, from the Hamilton Spectator, about a recent symposium on culture and city-building.

Like many cities worldwide, Hamilton – a steel town outside of Toronto – is hoping to reinvent itself through creativity and culture.

Hamilton – Steeltown. Image: emeraldinsight.com

The symposium was organized by the Imperial Cotton Centre for the Arts, a not-for-profit creative industries advocacy group. A city report totals the city’s cultural resources as the starting point for a long-range “cultural master plan” that would establish cultural communities and revitalize downtown Hamilton.

The article also mentions that Hamilton is being profiled in the report, Ontario in a Creative Age: “Our goal must be to harness and use our full creative talents, to grow the businesses and industries of the future, to use our openness, tolerance, and diversity to gain economic advantage, and to invest in the infrastructure of the future in ways that enable more innovation and economic growth. Ontario can and must take a high-road strategy for economic prosperity in which all Ontarians can participate. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to build a vibrant economy for the creative age.”

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This just in…

Toronto art dealer Mira Godard has died. Until recently, no one had reported it, but now you can read more on BlogTO HERE and at the Globe and Mail HERE.

Mira Godard. Image: torontolife.com

From the Art Dealers Association press release:

Her contribution to creating an art scene and art market in Canada cannot be underoverstated. The Mira Godard Gallery has shown some of Canada’s most important artists – Alex Colville, Christopher and Mary Pratt, David Milne, the Estate of Lawren Harris, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Joe Fafard, to name a few.

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By now it’s all over the web. The story began when Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore yelled “I quit!” after a performance outside the VAG in Vancouver last Saturday titled WORTH (–statement of Defence), leading many in the art world to think that she may well do just that, frustrated as she is by an ongoing legal battle with her Toronto dealer, Pari Nadimi.

Rebecca Belmore, View of the Artist and Truck, 2009. Image: canadianart.ca

According to a press release, the performance “demonstrates the artist’s public commitment to vigorously defending herself, her art practice and more broadly, the rights of all artists against those who seek to exploit them.”

Watch the performance on YouTube HERE.

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Here’s my review of Ross King‘s excellent book on the Group of Seven, in the current issue of Quill and Quire. It’s also at the Quill and Quire website, HERE.

Image: mcmichael.com

Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven

by Ross King

From a young age, Canadians learn about our country’s most famous painting movement in art classes, yet the Group of Seven’s dramatic landscapes and blazing depictions of Canada’s wilderness still don’t seem to get the respect they deserve.

Ross King, the best-selling author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and, more recently, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, redresses this imbalance by situating the group of artists within a larger historical context. His compellingly detailed account begins in 1912, as the painters were just meeting, and continues through the Great War, culminating with the group’s eventual disbanding in the 1930s. King’s elegant prose is a joy to read as he introduces each figure, giving the reader a rare glimpse into the lives of young men who were united by the desire to create a distinctly Canadian painting style at a time when critics, collectors, and the public were hostile toward the aspiring modernists.

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The Toronto International Film Festival opens on September 9 and goes until the 19th.

An image by artist Douglas Gordon. Image: ursusbooks.com

This year, the buzz is bigger than ever, with TIFF’s new building downtown that is sure revitalize King Street near John. The small, old-Toronto style strip of buildings opposite, which house mostly touristy restaurants, have become TIFF’s poor cousins. Probably not long before they’re demolished.

In any case, this year’s Future Projections program, which sees film-based installations in galleries throughout the city, has a stellar lineup of international names, including Douglas Gordon, Michael Nyman and Stan Douglas.

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I’m working on a video exhibition with the public art organization No. 9 Contemporary Art & the Environment. It’s called Four Directions, and its opening will coincide with the opening of Evergreen at the Brickworks, Toronto.

SUNDAY September 26, 2010 – December 31, 2010

The exhibition is designed to reflect the mandate of the public art organization No. 9: that contemporary art can stimulate positive social and environmental change. The group video exhibition features four powerful environmentally themed video artworks, each screened inside one of four restored drying kilns (long tunnels). The kilns are located at the North end of the Heritage Brick Factory, Building 16, which is a 52,000 square foot space, the largest building on-site.

A still from Lessons of Darkness. Image: uashome.alaska.edu

The works to be screened are Lessons of Darkness by the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and three Canadian artists:

L’Or blanc/White Gold, a No. 9 commission by Isabelle Hayeur
The Cyanide Flats: 50?54´15´´N / 95?20´20´´W, a No. 9 commission by Val Klassen
Waterspeak by Dana Claxton

The exhibition’s goal is to acknowledge manmade environmental destruction and to offer alternative ways of thinking about a healthy earth that suggest re-growth and healing. The exhibition will present a journey for the viewer from Herzog’s bleak documentation of Kuwait’s burning oil fields to Isabelle Hayeur’s curtain of softly falling salt crystals, followed by Val Klassen’s still signs of hope within a ravaged landscape, to Dana Claxton’s mesmerizing plea on behalf of water.

Without being overly didactic or preachy, together the three works will provide a response to Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness. As the viewer progresses through each tunnel, he/she will witness environmental devastation, followed by works that engage the emotions to suggest mindfulness, respect and honour for our environment.

Check out No. 9 Contemporary Art & the Environment, HERE.

I saw Julian Schnabel introduce his film Before Night Falls, about the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas when it had its North American premiere at TIFF in 2000; the artist and filmmaker shuffled up onto the stage in his bathrobe and slippers and gave a highly entertaining Q and A.

Artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. Image: salon.com

This year, he’s back – for his upcoming show at the AGO, which opens September 1st – and will introduce his Carte Blanche selection, which is Hector Babenco’s film Pixote (1981), about child criminality and survival in the Brazilian slums and Before Night Falls. Schnabel will introduce both screenings, which will be followed by a discussion.

Surely, a screening and talk not to be missed. If Schnabel is an excellent artist, he is surely an equally excellent filmmaker.

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The Walrus has a good interview with Simon Brault, author of No Culture, No Future, the new book that exploresthe fact that the arts are a necessity, not a luxury.

As he puts it, the book is a “call to action” – for Brault, it’s up to everyone to communicate with one another to promote and encourage the arts.

Image: cormorantbooks.com

Here is some of what Brault has to say in the interview:

“When you look in the papers, the conversation around arts and culture is reduced to the economy or to presenting a particular cultural product. It’s not a broad conversation about what arts and culture bring to people — to children, to people who are lonely, to people who have a need for expressive life.”

“Every human being has a relationship with the arts. The fact that we are ignoring that — and trying to lecture people as if they are completely ignorant, as if they are completely disconnected from everything we believe in – is a big problem.”

“I read, I think, I write, but mostly I act. And I try to act with people around me. I still believe that ideas can change the world. I know it can sound like a very romantic vision — but it’s not so romantic because things are changing… ”

Author Simon Brault. Image: cormorantbooks.com

I haven’t read the book, but I’m looking forward to it.

If you want to know more on Brault’s thoughts vis a vis the arts in Canada (and the world), buy the book HERE.

From this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, we learn that Shirley Thomson, the former director of the National Gallery of Canada, has died.

Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987. Image: makefive.com

Thompson is known for her staunch defence of the gallery’s decision to purchase Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire for $1.8 million in 1988. You can’t help but smile remembering the hou-ha that that caused, considering today’s $100 million plus prices that we see at auction. She also acquired the famous “meat dress” by Montreal artist Jana Sterbak.

From the article, which quotes her as saying “We know that some of the cutting-edge Canadian artists, by the very nature of their innovation, are not necessarily going to please a broad expanse of the public. However, we are morally and esthetically committed to these artists.”

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Just saw this:

“Steven Shearer…will represent Canada at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2011 (Venice Biennale), from June 4 to November 27, 2011. The only international visual arts exhibition to which Canada sends official representation, the Biennale is among the most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions in the world.

Steven Shearer’s drawings of metal-heads. Image: wecantpaint.com

The artist was chosen by a national selection committee comprised of senior contemporary art curators from across Canada and formed by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), organizer of the Canadian representation for the 2011 Biennale. The NGC’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Josée Drouin-Brisebois, will organize the exhibition of Steven Shearer’s work.”

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