Some thoughts on the role of women in the visual arts: American artist Barbara Kruger makes the cover of W magazine’s Art issue, via the famous-for-nothing Kim Kardashian. The opening line of the article goes like this: “Kim Kardashian can’t sing, act, or dance, but she’s found the role of a lifetime in the fine art of playing herself.”

Image: highsnobiety.com

Meanwhile, a new feminist art documentary is about to come out this fall. It’s called !Women Art Revolution, and it’s by artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson. Watch the trailer HERE.

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Last night we went to a performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who we had seen a few years ago at MOCCA and blogged about HERE, this time together with the American First Nations artist James Luna.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena with curator Philip Monk. Image: VoCA

La Nostalgia Remix is the last in a series of projects called The Shame-man meets El Mexican’t, “in which they challenge assumptions and lazy thinking about ethnicity and culture in our society with a strong dose of melancholic humour and sharp-edged conceptualism.”

Remix is a series of live performances that explore the cultural, symbolic and iconographic dimensions of nostalgia both on the Native American “rez” and in the Chicano “barrio.”

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You may not imagine too much of a happening art scene when you think of Calgary, Alberta…

Wednesday Lupypciw, Lucky Charmz Clubb (video still). Image: stride.ab.ca

…but you’d be wrong. There’s a good art scene in Cowtown, as you can tell by a quick browse of VoCA’s ‘Calgary’ link, on the category sidebar on the left of the screen.

Here’s some of what’s on this fall:

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Did you go to Toronto’s “All Night Contemporary Art Thing” – Nuit Blanche this year?
What did you think – Did you LOVE it or LOATHE it?

Fujiko Nakaya’s fog installation at philosopher’s walk at Nuit Blanche 2006. Image: topleftpixel.com

The organizers blocked of Yonge Street – was this a good thing?

How did the art fare? Better or worse than last year?

What were your favorite installations? Least favorite?

Let us know – Nuit Blanche will only improve if we generate a discussion on what worked, and what didn’t.

Please comment below!

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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Lady Gaga’s meat dress. Image: highsnobiety.com

Well, ok not exactly.

But Lady Gaga definitely channels Montreal artist Jana Sterbak, who made a huge splash when her piece Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) was first displayed at the National Gallery of Canada.

The Vogue cover was shot – big surprise – by fashion provocateur Terry Richardson and styled by Nicola Formichetti.

According to THIS excerpt, Sterbak’s installation, originally shown on a hanger for emphasis, was aiming to “emphasize the contrast between vanity and bodily decay.”

It’s quite interesting to think of that idea in relation to Lady Gaga, no?

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Last week, we attended a cocktail party in honour of the new director of Canadian Stage (CanStage) – Matthew Jocelyn. He has just announced his programme for the 2010-2011 season in Toronto, and it sounds FANTASTIC.

Merce Cunningham dancers performing against a backdrop by Robert Rauschenberg.
Image: nytimes.com

I spoke briefly with Mr. Jocelyn, who is interested in encouraging multidisciplinary artistic collaborations a la Merce Cunningham/John Cage/Robert Rauschenberg.

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Here’s a quote from Nancy Bauer’s opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday, which asks Are Lady Gaga and the women who identify with her confusing sexual power with self-objectification?:

Lady Gaga. Image: ftweekly.com

“There is nobody like Lady Gaga in part because she keeps us guessing about who she, as a woman, really is. She has been praised for using her music and videos to raise this question and to confound the usual exploitative answers provided by “the media.” (Journalist Ann) Powers compares Gaga to the artist Cindy Sherman: both draw our attention to the extent to which being a woman is a matter of artifice, of artful self-presentation. Gaga’s gonzo wigs, her outrageous costumes, and her fondness for dousing herself in what looks like blood, are supposed to complicate what are otherwise conventionally sexualized performances.”

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The 2010 Power Ball, the annual fundraiser for Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery, took place June 3, and took as its theme ‘The Ball that Started it All‘, which, it turned out, worked well!

All photos VoCA/Scott Barker.

Billed as “a carnivalesque line-up of amazing art, extraordinary entertainment, and spectacular prizes“, it aimed to “remix the best of the best from Power Ball’s glorious (and often notorious) past.”

Click below to see lots more photos…

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Check out my piece on artist Kent Monkman’s home and studio in the current issue of Design Lines magazine. The studio, a former factory, was re-done by Jason Halter of boutique design firm Wonder Inc.

You know Monkman for his traditionally painted landscapes into which he inserts contemporary figures of First Nations people, often doing rather unconventional things…

Kent Monkman, Achilles and Patroclus, 2008. Image: kentmonkman.com

Or for his drag performances as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle…

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