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

You may remember the British artist Michael Landy from his piece Break Down, in which he destroyed all of his 7, 226 belongings, including his passport.

Michael Landy’s Break Down, 2001. Image: artcornwall.org

It was a project for Artangel and took place in a vacant shop on Oxford Street, in central London. Needless to say, it was a pretty controversial – but fascinating – piece.

Michael Landy, Art Bin, 2010. Image: saatchi-gallery.co.uk.

Art Bin, Landy’s new show that is on from January 29 to 14 March, 2010 at the South London Gallery, is a bit different. Landy has constructed an enormous garbage bin that takes us almost the entire gallery. He is offering to trash your art, so to speak. But not just anyone can come to dispose of their art. Landy is the ‘curator’ if you can call it that, of the bin.

Read what the BBC had to say, and watch their video, HERE.

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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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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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Nuit Blanche 2009, which will take place on the night of October 3 from sunset onwards, looks to be excellent again this year. Perhaps more serious than past years, many of the pieces are designed to make you consider the meaning of your surroundings. With more performance-based work than previous years, there are lots of ways for you to get involved with art.

For the Nuit Blanche 2009 website, please click HERE.

Jeff Koons’ Rabbit in New York. Image: rawartint.com

Here are VoCA’s picks:

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The nomadic art school Reverse Pedagogy moves to The Model Satellite in Sligo, Ireland. The project will bring together artists from Canada, Iceland and parts of Ireland and will culminate in a visual art exhibition opening on Friday 25th September.

Reverse Pedagogy in Banff, Alberta. Image: canadianart.ca

From the Model::Niland blog, which is maintained by the Model Arts and Niland Gallery:

“For their time in Sligo, the group of artists are occupying the Model Satellite space on Castle Street and will be submerging themselves and responding to local culture, including a tag rugby game with local team The Supermodels this evening, surf lessons in Strandhill, mountain climbs, and informal meetings with local arts and cultural groups.”

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Chris Barr: Bureau of Workplace Interruptions
September 17 – 1 November, 2009
The Art Gallery of Mississauga, Toronto

Chris Barr, Bureau of Workplace Interruptions, installation. Image: mississauga.ca

This is a show in the grand tradition of conceptual art. It transforms the gallery space - itself fast becoming a tradition: see Phil Collins, Elmgreen & Dragset, Rirkrit Tiravanija and many others. Not only does it transform the gallery, it aims to transform the gallery-goer. The Bureau of Workplace Interruptions, by the American artist and designer Chris Barr, is exactly what it sounds like. If you go to the ‘office’ or gallery, or bureau, you can sign up for an interruption. You can also do it online HERE.

Who wouldn’t welcome an interruption in their workday?

Says the artist: “Our promise is to create interruptions that challenge the efficiency of our audience and the social and economic conditions of the modern workplace.”

Go on, do it! Click HERE

That’s the POINT of this exhibition. It’s only good if people participate.

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“With their artists competing on an international stage, Canadians can no longer complain of their country as a cultural backwater nor luxuriate in the nostalgic charm of provincialism. In art as in political, social and economic activities, Canada is fully involved in the world of today,”
– Dr. R. H. Hubbard, former Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada.

Guido Molinari, Untitled, 1964. Image: artnet.com

Walking down Bloor Street in Toronto last night, we stopped at a bookshop’s outdoor display and there, right in front of us, on sale for $1.99, was a copy of Canadian Art Today, originally published in 1970 by Studio International.

Edited by William Townsend, a professor at the University of London, the slim book is filled with contributions from Canada’s art elite at the time: R.H. Hubbard, then chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada, Doris Shadbolt, then curator of the Vancovuer Art Gallery, curators Dennis Reid, Pierre Theberge and David Thompson.

“Canadian artists were dependent for generations on the artistic traditions of France and England and it is only since the last war that contemporary American influences have made a decisive impact,” writes Townsend.

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This fall in Montreal and Toronto sees a new exhibition at DHC/ART in Montreal, the legendary art critic Hal Foster at OCAD in Toronto, and the Ten Commandments at the ROM in Toronto.

Ten Commandments: A Fragment
Saturday, October 10 to Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

A fragment of the Ten Commandments. Image: cogwriter.com

As part of the ROM’s excellent exhibition Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World, which is on view through January 3, 2010, for one week only in October (due to its sensitivity to light and humidity), the ROM will showcase a fragment of one of our oldest copies of the text of the Ten Commandments.

The displayed Scroll contains the text of the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy 5 and is the best preserved of all the Deuteronomy manuscripts discovered. A biblical scroll, it is written in Hebrew and dated to ca. 30 – 1 BCE.

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