Here is the final part of an article written by former Winnipegger Edwin Janzen, an artist and writer currently based in Ottawa. The article was previously published in Drain magazine - you can read the full article, HERE, (under Related Essays) or click HERE for last week’s post on VoCA.

Roger Crait, Untitled, 2009. Image: umanitoba.ca

The Power of Myth
How Did Winnipeg and Its Art Become such a Big Deal?

By Edwin Janzen

The City Behind the Myth

Winnipeg artists — and the city as a whole — owe much to the considerable efforts of these influential “fixers.” For the representation of Winnipeg as a sort of mythic art mecca has surely been a good thing, hasn’t it? Winnipeg and its artists are receiving more attention than ever before, so can the repackaging of Winnipeg as a geographically and creatively charged nexus be anything else than an unmitigated good? If life gives you lemons….

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Here is part four of fascinating article written by former Winnipegger Edwin Janzen, an artist and writer currently based in Ottawa. The article was previously published in Drain magazine - you can read the full article, HERE, (under Related Essays) or click HERE for last week’s post on VoCA. Stay tuned as we publish it serially, every week.

Winnipeg’s Border Crossings magazine. Image: i.bp.blogspot.com

The Power of Myth
How Did Winnipeg and Its Art Become such a Big Deal?

By Edwin Janzen

The Winnipeg Art Industrial Complex

Winnipeg was not built in a day. The current currency of this city and its plucky arts scene is not, as commonly suggested, the result of its endless, cold, winter nights or its many-hundred-mile isolation from the nearest centres of comparable size (though both conditions are real). Integral to Winnipeg’s international reputation have been the tireless efforts of a handful of influential local art mandarins like Wayne Baerwaldt, Meeka Walsh and Robert Enright. These individuals lose no opportunity to draw national and international attention to the city.

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Here is part three of fascinating article written by former Winnipegger Edwin Janzen, an artist and writer currently based in Ottawa. The article was previously published in Drain magazine - you can read the full article, HERE, (under Related Essays) or click HERE for last week’s post on VoCA. Stay tuned as we publish it serially, every week.

Winnipeg band The Weakerthans, with album cover art by Marcel Dzama. Image: pitchfork.com

The Power of Myth
How Did Winnipeg and Its Art Become such a Big Deal?

By Edwin Janzen

Part Three: Loving to Hate Winnipeg

Looking back at what I just wrote, I wonder if “arrogance” and “meanness” aren’t a little harsh? The little angel speaking into my right ear delicately says so. The little devil speaking into my left ear, however, eagerly asserts that I’m right on the money.

My condition, here, is what is known as ambivalence, a ubiquitous quality that born ’Peggers like me come by honestly. A consistent inclusion in every creative Winnipegger’s psychological toolbox, ambivalence arises again and again in the art that Winnipeggers produce, and, broadly speaking, it characterizes the selling of Winnipeg’s art scene.

Winnipeg film director extraordinaire Guy Maddin. Image: stopsmilingonline.com

The ineluctable fact is that Winnipeg artists and musicians make better boosters than its political and business leaders ever did. Of late, Winnipeg artists have aggressively sold the city like never before, have achieved its transformation into a cultural product, not by avoiding ambivalence as a civic characteristic, but by embracing it.

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Here is part two of fascinating article written by former Winnipegger Edwin Janzen, an artist and writer currently based in Ottawa. The article was previously published in Drain magazine - you can read the full article ,HERE, (under Related Essays) or click HERE for previous posts on VoCA. Stay tuned as we publish it serially, every week.

The City of Winnipeg welcomes visitors. Image: eclairefare.com

The Power of Myth
How Did Winnipeg and Its Art Become such a Big Deal?

By Edwin Janzen

Part Two: Booster Town

Winnipeg in its early days was a boom town, but the dream went south with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, and the city entered a decades-long economic winter. To be sure, Winnipeg has many things going for it. Ukrainian perogies and Mennonite farmer sausage are easily had. Every summer the neighbourhood streets are transformed into cathedrals of foliage by rows of towering elms. And the city’s electorate tends to return NDP legislators, a successful record undermined in part by its record of electing silly mayors.

The best thing about Winnipeg is hope, which allows Winnipeggers to put aside the fact that the factors in favour of their city are outnumbered by the factors against. Winnipeggers turn a brave face to their city’s seemingly intractable social and economic problems, even as they lack, and lament the lack, of the resources to address them.

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Here is part one of fascinating article written by former Winnipegger Edwin Janzen, an artist and writer currently based in Ottawa. The article was previously published in Drain magazine - you can read the full article HERE, (under Related Essays) or stay tuned as VoCA publishes it serially, every weekend.

A work by the Royal Art Lodge. Image: booooooom.com

The Power of Myth
How Did Winnipeg and Its Art Become such a Big Deal?

By Edwin Janzen

“Winnipeg is an oubliette,” says Guy Maddin in his mythical memoir “My (Other) Winnipeg” in Border Crossings magazine.

It is? The conception of a cold city populated by sleepwalkers, perpetually astonished at its own age may work for the city of Maddin’s mythologies. Yet, this author left Winnipeg for Montreal five years ago quite ready to forget the place — but forgetting Winnipeg has been impossible.
It is impossible because, in the realm of art nowadays, Winnipeg is everywhere.

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Here are some things I suggest checking out, if you can.

Montreal art duo Maryse Larivière and Robin Simpson of Pavilion Projects regularly host art-plus-dinner series, and in a few weeks they will bring the series to Toronto with a screening by the artist Rosa Barba’s 2007 film Outwardly from Earth’s Centre.

Rosa Barba, a still from Outwardly from Earth’s Center. Image: carliergebauer.com

The film tells the story of a fictitious society founded on an unstable piece of land in danger of disappearing, and the dinner will be held at the very arty Oddfellows restaurant.

The evening includes a presentation by curator Catherine Dean followed by a prix fixe three-course menu for $45 involving shredded duck confit, pan roasted sea bream and Pork loin with whiskey maple baby carrots.

Mmmm.

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A new sculpture by the 2007 Sobey Award-winning Montreal artist Michel de Broin was unveiled in Winnipeg a few days ago.

Michel de Broin, Monument, 2009. Image courtesy Denis Prieur.

The granite work, titled Monument, is the inaugural sculpture for the Jardin de sculptures at Le Maison des artistes visuels francophones in Saint-Boniface, in Winnipeg.

Up to 20 sculptures will eventually be placed on the site by various provincial, national and international French speaking artists.

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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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Sarah Anne Johnson: House on Fire
Art Gallery on Ontario, Toronto
July 4 - 23 August, 2009

Sarah Anne Johnson, House on Fire, 2008, Chromogenic Print. Image: bulgergallery.com

Winnpeg-based artist, Yale grad and 2008 Grange Prize winner Sarah Anne Johnson debuts a new exhibition titled House on Fire at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The last time we saw Johnson’s work, it was 2007’s Galapagos Project at Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery. We loved her use of different media including sculpture and photography, and the push-pull between them.

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How relevant are art schools today? Do artists really require education beyond basic technical training? Do art institutions hinder, rather than help the creative expression of artists today?

Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967.
Image: truthinart.wordpress.com

And what does Bruce Nauman think?

Read my opinion piece on the brand new news website, The Mark.

Click HERE.