View on Canadian Art

The other day I found a number of old Canadian Art magazines on sale for $2 each. I bought them, and found this questionnaire in the April 1966 issue. It’s interesting, reading over the questions how some remain relevant today and others, not so much…

My vintage copies of Canadian Art. Image: VoCA

On the following page were answers to some of the questions by the leading artists of the day, including Jean McEwen, Clive Daly, Guido Molinari, Doris McCarthy, Joyce Wieland, Christopher Pratt and Iain Baxter. I’ll reprint some of their answers in an upcoming blog post.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your replies to some of the questions. Pick just one, or several and comment below!

Button created by Iain Baxter’s N.E. Thing Company Ltd. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Active 1966-1978. Image: flickr.com

1. Do you think art criticism can be useful? If yes, to whom especially?

2. What should art criticism contain?

3. What do you feel is the role of the art critic today?

4. In your opinion, what constitutes the minimum training, academic or otherwise and experience in the visual arts that would equip a critic to fulfill his role?

5. Assuming art criticism has some value, in which of the following media is art criticism most necessary? (Check one only)
a. Newspapers
b. Quarterlies
c. Television
d. Art magazines
e. Radio
f. Other (specify)

6. Art criticism should be directed to reach (check as many of the following as you believe necessary)
a. Artists
b. Museum and public gallery executives
c. Private collectors
d. Other (specify)
e. Other critics
f. Students
g. The general public

7. Do you feel that sound critical reviews (good or bad) have an influence on artists’ work and its direction?

8. Do you feel that sound critical reviews have an influence on the buying public?

9. Do you feel that sound critical reviews have an influence on art appreciation generally?

10. Whether incompetent criticism praises or condemns, do you believe that unsound critical reviews ultimately damage and artist with his public? If so, why?

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Have you seen Beyonce’s new video Who Run the World (Girls)? I havent’ been able to get it out of my mind. Check it out HERE.

A promo image for Beyonce’s new video Run the World (Girls). Image: cdn.idolator.com

While pro-women statements have been popular in pop music for a while, (the Spice Girls and Girl Power wasn’t so long ago) with Beyonce’s video I sense an attitude of female fierceness that I haven’t noticed in mainstream pop before. It made me wonder what ‘Girl Power’ has turned into, and what its eventual impact might be. Feminist writers – like Susan Hopkins in Girl Heroes: The New Force in Popular Culture – have in recent years been identifying and deconstructing the links between ‘Girl Power’ and the notion of the female warrior.

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Toronto design collective Public Displays of Affection is bringing the ‘eat local’ concept of community supported agriculture to design. Their brand of community engaged design involves their members – mostly young furniture designers and artists including the up-and-coming Brothers Dressler, Dennis Lin (whose studio I visited last year) and MADE – working with local organizations and communities to build furniture and design interiors.

For Edmond Place, Henry Salonen and Adriana Romano’s chair of reclaimed wood shipping pallets with cushion crafted from pre-loved jeans.

PDA was founded by Jeremy Vandermeij, Katherine Ngui and Parimal Gosai, who met at Ryerson University while studying interior design, and Adam Harris, who had studied graphic design at George Brown College. I sat down with Jeremy, Katherine and Adam on a rainy afternoon at the Gladstone Hotel:

VoCA: I’m interested in this idea of very local, community engaged design. How did you come up with the concept for PDA?

PDA: It came from our interest in filling this need we saw of trying to bring contemporary design into communities that didn’t have it. It was the idea of getting people involved in their own projects that made sense in a wholistic way.

When we started, we wanted to do workshops in design in the community, simple projects for those people who didn’t think they were practicing design. We would show them that they were, in fact practicing design all the time.

We were wanting to find a way of practicing design outside of the industry. That idea brought us to the Edmond Place project, our first project. That kind of engagement made sense. It’s important to avoid the psychology of a handout. Being involved makes it more meaningful to the people we are doing it for.

That was on the clients mind before we approached them. It’s do-it-yourself, or rather educating, taking action, rehabilitation through the work. We were looking for a place to do that kind of thing.

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Rumour has it that the newly released Creative Capital Plan, which makes a strong case for Toronto’s art and culture sector as a significant industry and revenue generator, may be short-lived.

Image: ocad.ca

The report, headed up by Councillor Michael Thompson (Ward 37 Scarborough Centre), Chair of the City’s Economic Development Committee, is billed as a partnership between the City and the arts and culture community, and provides recommendations to update the City’s last culture plan from 2003.

In 1998, the newly amalgamated City had a Culture Plan drafted “to help guide the city’s cultural development for the next decade.” The first plan focused on larger cultural initiatives – and we now have the Ballet School, the Canadian Opera Company, OCAD University, the ROM and the Art Gallery of Ontario to show for it.  The new report recognizes the value of small arts operations as well as the need to connect them with like-minded organizations and their initiatives.

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I thought I’d share with you a photograph that was recently given to me. It’s quickly become one of my favorite things.

It’s a photograph of Andy Warhol examining a Polaroid. It must have been taken in the early sixties, and it was taken by a friend of mine, a German art collector, whose daughter Warhol was doing a silkscreen of.

Image: VoCA

In the photo, one of several taken surreptitiously by my friend, Warhol is examining a test, soon to become one of his famous silkscreen portraits. Click HERE to read more about the process he used to create the portraits.

The critic Arthur Danto wrote, in The Nation in 1989: “I think eventually people competed to be portrayed by Warhol because that appeared to give them instant immortality of the sort usually enjoyed only by the greatest of stars or the most celebrated products, as if they were also part of the common consciousness of the time.”

Which, of course, they were.

Well it’s that time of year again. The long list for Canada’s major annual art prize, the Sobey Art Award has been announced.

Zeke Moores, Axes, 2009. Image: zekemoores.com

It’s true that many of Canada’s fine young artists remain hidden from media attention or public view in other parts of the country. So I look forward to the Sobey longlist so that I can discover new talent.

There are fewer names that I recognize off the bat this year, so I was happy to discover some great works by a newer crop of young Canadian artists. I’ll take a closer look at other regions finalists soon, but for now, here is a glimpse into the work of the first group of finalists, from Atlantic Canada.

ZEKE MOORES is an Ontario-based artist, originally from Newfoundland. Much of his work involves creating perfect replicas of urban detritus and utility objects like cardboard boxes in bronze, traffic cones in steel, plastic milk crates in aluminum and a shiny polished bronze full-size dumpster. The fabrication looks to be excellent. But my favorite piece is called Axes, a series of cast aluminum axes installed as if they were chucked into a white, spotlit gallery wall.

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Yesterday, a group of about 100 people from the Toronto art community gathered outside the Chinese consulate in Toronto, in support of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who has been detained by Chinese authorities.

The event was organized by a group of local artists and art writers, and was part of 1001 Chairs that took place in Manhattan and in cities around the world.

It was an unqualified success, but it’s not over:

“We call on our Prime Minister and our Minister of Foreign Affairs to express concern over the treatment of Ai Weiwei. Leaders of the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Country Museum have called for his release. So far, the only Canadian art institution to do the same has been the Vancouver Art Gallery. We call on Canada’s art museums, institutions and artist-run centres including the AGO, the National Gallery, the ROM, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art to condemn the imprisonment of Ai Weiwei and call for his release.”

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If last night’s sold-out Massive Party, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s annual fundraiser, is anything to go by, fashion is most definitely the new art.

The Marchesa. Image: flickr.com

A Massive Party-goer. Image: VoCA

This year’s theme was the slightly obscure Marchesa Luisa Casati, the celebrated Italian arts patron of the early 20th century. And at one point in the evening, she and her impressively costumed entourage did make an appearance in Walker Court. But theme aside, this year artistic director Bruno Billio fumbled.

In contrast to his enormous success last year, where he brought out plenty of fantastic and (importantly) surprising artworks and performances, – read my blog coverage of that event HERE – this year they were tepid at best. The only one worth noting was a fun photo-booth piece by art duo Camilla Singh and Walter Willems.

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It’s been over one week since Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was arrested by the Chinese government at Beijing airport. He has not been heard from since and the government is accusing him of ‘economic crimes’.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Image: lamonodigital.net

Where is he? And why aren’t Canadians demanding to know?

Ai Weiwei is best known for his installation Sunflower Seeds, currently on view at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Each porcelain seed was made and hand painted by Chinese specialists working in Jingdezhen, emphasizing the labour that has gone into the project. As someone suggested to me recently, seeds are about potential growth. So you can imagine the impact of a hundred million seeds carpeting the Turbine Hall.

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I was fascinated by yesterday’s Slutwalk that took place in Toronto, and sorry that I wasn’t able to attend.

Slutwalk in Toronto yesterday. Image: scathinglywrongrightwingnutz.com

The walk attracted around 1,000 people and was arranged in part as a protest against comments by police Constable Michael Sanguninetti who, while speaking to students at York Unviersity, said “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

Women were outraged, and rightly so. It is an outrageous suggestion that women should bear the full responsibility in a case where sexual assault occurs. Even if she is dressing ‘like a slut’, surely the man must take responsibility for his own actions. I mean it’s hard to believe that Sanguinetti was actually serious.

More, and the Quebec art collective Les Fermieres Obsedees, after the jump:

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