CMCP: Use it or lose it -- sign the petition now!

Apropos of Contact, I received an email the other day from Winnipeg artist Diana Thorneycroft, whose truly excellent "Group of 7 Awkward Moments" comes to the McMichael Gallery this summer.

The long and the short of it is that the Harper government sits poised to shut down the lovely Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, which has been collecting and showing a breadth of top-notch work in its intimate below-ground galleries in Ottawa since 1992. Not long ago, there was some kind of complaint that the gallery's building was too humid to house the collections after a 2006 flood, but that appears to be bunk, as the government intends to use the building as oveflow office space for Parliament Hill bureaucrats.

It certainly seems par for the course for the Harper government, which would rather spend money on thumbtacks than culture, which it has made all-too-clear that it regards as unnecessary frill. They've also made it fairly clear that they don't really care what we, the Canadian public, think about a lot of what they're up to, but don't let that stop you from signing the petition that CMCP founding director Martha Langford has been circulating recently, and which arrived in my inbox via Thorneycroft.

Here it is, in two venues:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/CMCPhttp://www.savecmcp.ca/

http://www.savecmcp.ca/

Sign it. I did. But don't hold your breath. Instead, hope there really ARE humidity problems -- the better to mould the stacks of bureaucratic documents destined for what was once a wonderfully intimate cultural space.

Contact '09: A Photo A Day, V. 1.0

Here's something new: This year, I've asked the Star to run -- in the actual newspaper, no less -- one image from the Contact Photography Festival, each and every day. This will be in addition to a handful of features I'm planning to do in conjunction with the event, which I've made no secret of as my favourite festival free-for-all the city has to offer every year.

I tried to explain why in the paper today; in a nutshell, it's simply that the festival has matured into something with critical heft -- something early installations of the everyone-in-the-pool iterations of the festival simply didn't have -- without sacrificing the wonderful democratic vibe it's had since day 1. Simply put, anyone and everyone can have a show in Contact. These days, they're just given a context to respond to.

That in mind, our first image of the festival is drawn from that wonderfully democratic stew of open exhibitions, of which there are almost 200 city wide. In this case, it's an image from former Star editor John Fitzgerald's show China Hot/China Cold, which presents the long-time travel writer's work from several back and forths to China over the past couple of transformative decades there. Fitzgerald is showing at George Brown College alongside a selection of work by faculty member Annette Hemerik at 230 Richmond Street East. Let the games begin!

Turner time: Is the British prize losing its mojo?

Britain announced the four finalists for its annual Turner Prize today, and the British press seems to be lauding the prize's 25th anniversary edition as the establishment of quasi-traditional values. 

Why? Three of the four finalists -- Enrico David (that's a detail from his "Bulbous Marauders," at right), Richard Wright, and Lucy Skaer -- are painters. Here's how the lead in a story in today's Daily Telegraph reads: "Three out of four artists on this year's shortlist either draw or paint, a far cry from recent years which have been dominated by video installations and hard to understand 'sculptures.'

The British have a marvelous way of conveying contempt through dry, repressed language, don't they?

But the tone is reflective of how the public at large has mostly viewed the Turner -- as a show case of the eclectic, the bizarre, the stupefying, and the utterly useless. (An irresistable further sample as the reporter goes on to make clear his own view of the situation: "This year's shortlist is dominated by what might be called more traditional art forms, if the organisers at Tate could bring themselves to use such a term ... Despite being described by Tate as a "contemporary surrealist", (David's) shortlisted work contains a number of paintings containing the theme of a harlequin that even a schoolboy would identify as "art".)

Think of the stink over Tracey Emin's slovenly bed, complete with stained sheets and strewn with cigarette butts and condom wrappers, or Martin Creed's winning piece, "Lights Going On and Off," which was exactly that -- an empty room in which Creed flicked the switch at whim (Madonna presented Creed with the prize; she was famously non-plussed). Last year, winner Mark Leckey's piece centred around a video of him discussing cartoon characters like Homer Simpson and Felix the Cat. 

For a general public who still equate "art" largely with aesthetic history's canonized greatest hits -- Impressionists, certainly, or post-Renaissance history painters like Velazquez and Rembrandt; and finally, maybe, Abstract Expressionism, though there's still a large degree of "I don't get it" on that front -- the Turner represents an absolute gauntlet thrown down. Over its 25 years, it's been the subject of public outrage, scorn, and maybe even worse -- conservative politicians declaring its GBP 25,000 purse, administered by the Tate, to be a waste of taxpayer money. 

In fact, if there's a prototype for the current Harper government's declaration that regular folk just don't get art-type stuff, it's probably the annual Turner flap, which never fails to produce at least a modicum of mainstream disgust, and usually much more than that (amid the painters, this year's conceptual installationist sacrificial lamb is Roger Hiorns, whose piece, at left, is an abandoned flat, the walls of which are encrusted with sparkly blue crystals, like some sort of cartoon underwater paradise). 

But disgust is a great conversation-starter, and for a few months every year, the UK -- and really the world at large -- wallow in it, dissecting in a very mainstream, public way what constitutes art, and what does not. In so doing, it vaults the admittedly often-insular realm of contemporary art into the full glow of the mainstream spotlight. When and where else on earth does that ever happen in the art world, ever? 

In and of itself, the Turner's unerring ability to start a widespread conversation about contemporary art most of us have little interest or inclination to ever have is a triumph all on its own; the fact that it actually processes, in a very public way, fundamental questions about art, and human expression in general, is an accomplishment no other institution has ever been able to achieve, or at the very least, sustain. 

So here's hoping somthing as simple as a surfeit of painters vying for Turner this year isn't an indication that the prize has lost its mojo. Frankly, I doubt it. The Turner jury is just giving us something new to talk about, like they do every year, without fail. I have no doubt we'll keep talking, every year, for many years to come. 

Chris Cran's Bright Spiral Standard at Clint Roenisch

The first time I saw Chris Cran's work up close and personal was in, of all places, Owen Sound, at the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in 1999. Cran's touring retrospective, Surveying the Damage, 1977-1997, was orbiting the city of Toronto proper (the closest it got to downtown was at MOCCA, back when it was in North York), and the Thomson gallery was a curious fit -- or so it seemed: Cran's a painter, of course, but the closest thing to landscape I saw in that show was one of Cran's elaborately popist, cartoony self-portraits, in which the artist, decked out in trademark fedora and blazer, his face turned from view, wallowed in a waist-deep in a swamp, armed with a wooden rifle. Alongside him, a troop of Amazonian women wearing only ammo belts laid waste to an army advancing from a nearby village, shooting from the hip with their AK-47s.

He called it "Self-Portrait with Combat Nymphos of Saigon;" it was equal parts 70s-era Nick Fury comics and Russ Meyer movies (and no parts Group of 7), and as instructive an entry to Cran's oeuvre as any. Over a quarter century, Cran, a Calgarian, has been a veritable genre mixmaster, playfully mixing elements of pop art with some clever deconstuctions of the form itself. 

For a show of new work at the Clint Roenisch Gallery, which opened last week, Cran offers some new twists on some old tricks. Amazons aside, the show features several portraits that would be familiar to anyone who knows his work: Rough, photographic-seeming portraits, often dot-matrix style, like a newsprint blow-up, tracked with bright vertical lines.

There's an obvious formal conceit here, of course, as Cran processes photography through painting, giving it an indistinctness alien to the notion of the form; at the same time, he's exploding painting's myth of perspective, offering it in the image, then taking it away again with the vertical bars that completely flatten perspective back down to the plane of the canvas. In true trickster form, Cran puts a fine point on it in Awake (2009), at right, skewing a crude line-drawn portrait overtop the traditional rendering; so withdrawn from the surface, it seems almost underwater.

Cran can be heady, questioning the very nature of the medium he's devoted his practice to; at his best, he's a polemicist, tackling the aesthetic debate about representation, and the Classical/Modern/Postmodern rifts all at once; but none of this would mean a thing if his work wasn't so darn engaging. Staring a Cran portrait in the face can be a dizzying, almost Escher-esque experience, as your brain tries to square the competing perspectives your eyes are delivering to it for processing. Cran presents a multi-layered practice in theory, but the fact he can put it all together, right in front of your bewildered and bemused eyes, is what makes him great.

And, but ...

A little coda to last night's Matthew Teitelbaum love-in. In today's Star, my colleague Martin Knelman reports that the AGO will be the only Canadian institution to host "Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs," an exhibition of ancient artifacts either from or tangentially relating to the Egyptian boy king.

"It's definitely the right show at the right time for us," Knelman quotes Teitelbaum as saying. Oh? And here I was thinking that the new AGO, opening with such promise, was an art museum, not a spectacle centre for ancient aesthetic history's greatest hits. Nothing against the exhibition; I'm down with the ancients as much as anyone, and I'm sure it's fascinating. But when I mentioned, just last post, that the summer's shows would bear out how much about the "new" AGO is really new, well, I'm afraid we've just been told. And it's not the news I was hoping for -- nor would anyone with a senibility of and sensitivity towards current, trenchant, relevant art.

King Tut will fetch good gate, and in these belt-tightening times, I can certainly respect that. But the reinvention of the gallery, at least in my view, was the perfect opportunity to sharpen its hazy priorities. Given the opportunity to declare itself and make a statement about what it will be going forward, this -- an import, somebody else's idea -- being chosen as its first big summer show leaves it in as dense a fog as ever, in my mind.

Teitelbaum honoured at MOCCA tonight

There's a little bit of old-meets-new going down tonight at MOCCA on Queen St. Matthew Teitelbaum, the long-time director of the AGO, is set to be this year's recipient of the biennial $20,000 MOCCA Award, given "to honour a Canadian active in the field of contemporary art. It is awarded for innovation, accomplishment or contribution over time, or for a specific project that has national or international significance." Teitelbaum is the second ever winner; Michael Snow was the inaugural winner in 2007.

Teitelbaum's got the "contribution over time" part down pat, to be sure; he's been chief of the AGO for as long as I can remember. And whatever your quibbles with the gallery's programming (and my God, there are many) you can't help but salute the man for unifying an un-unifiable agglomeration of board members, patrons, corporate sponsors, politicos (and half the people in the city, it sometimes seems) and giving the AGO its Gehry-built home, which puts it on the international map arguably for the first time.

There's still a ton of negotiating to be done as to what actually goes inside it, of course; this summer will be a good indication, as it's when most of the gate gets earned. But let the man savour the moment. The building itself is a contribution to this city that will outlast us all -- and hopefully, the endless quibbles as well.

Emily Gove at Board of Directors

Also opening this weekend was Emily Gove at Katherin Mulherin's somewhat-new/rebranded space at Queen and Dovercourt, Board of Directors. Gove's subject matter is the desperate awkardness of barely post-adolescent high school years, that moment between childhood ambitions -- like, say, perfect attendance -- and the darker, hormonally-driven cravings that surge forth physically before we're emotionally equipped to deal with them. Gove's assemblage of gilded plastic trophies that accompany her photos, which she has placed in the gallery window and in a cluster around an ancient TV set inside, seems like a bit of gilding on the lily -- we get it, already -- but the pictures are strong: Part Martin Parr, part Film Stills-era Cindy Sherman, (Gove's images are staged, with a penchant towards self-portraiture), Gove is still finding a voice; consider these the early years. But quietly perceptive and full of promise, the later years will be something to look forward to.

Melancholy, Melodrama: Karin Bubas at Monte Clark

In a sort-of-somewhat busy weekend in the city, I have to say my favourite of the handful of shows opening in the last few days has to be Karin Bubas's at Monte Clark in the Distillery district. Bubas is among that second generation of Vancouver photoconceptualists (her cohort would include Stephen Waddell and Scott McFarland, among others), and in my humble opinion, less clinical and more engaged than most of her peers.

She takes a page from the reluctant Godfather of the scene, Jeff Wall, both in general but certainly for this work, which bears the rather self-conscious title Mystery and Melancholy in the Park (Bubas is surely evoking heavy-handed, classic melodrama, like the kind practiced by Douglas Sirk in 50s Hollywood); the images embrace the language of cinema whole-heartedly, heavy with implied narrative and highly manipulated (and frankly gorgeous) colour and light.

Wall, of course, was among the creators of "the new photography" (an outdated term meant to describe an impulse in art to push back against the still camera's assumed exclusivity as a documentary tool); he directed his photographs as a director might shape a film -- with actors, mise-en-scene and, completely opposite to the decades of documentary work that denied anything but a passive presence (however false that may have been), a deliberate unreality to make clear his authorial eye. 

Bubas, too, makes explicit the artifice in the work (the cinematic reference is made utterly plain in form, with the panoramic shape inferring a movie screen; Bubas turns it up on its end, to great effect.) At this stage, a couple of generations down the road, embracing this as convention, not challenge, is a liberating thing. Like we might regard the history paintings of old, concern for circumstance defers to the pictureness (a word I'm borrowing from Wall) of the work -- the light, the colour, the composition of what's in the frame -- and consequently, what's not.

This is not to say circumstance, in the form of implied narrative, is absent. Bubas's images range from quiet implication to ominous urgency; their seductive glow propels the imagination into a contemporary mythscape equal parts Hollywood and art history: A woman in a white gown gazes across a mist-shrouded lake, so Lord of the Rings-ish you can almost make out the arriving Hobbits; another sits on the slope of a burnt-out forest, utterly exposed and alone in what my eye reads as a nod to Hitchcock, North by Northwest-era.

It's a language anyone born in the 20th century knows thoroughly; Bubas, choosing to for her subjects to not address the camera, applies deliberate, intimate ambiguity and mystery to her otherworldly mise-en-scenes. It's a perfect pairing; the pictureness draws you into the images, but, as with anything else in life, it's the humanity that keeps you there.  

Vancouver ever-rising: Nomads opens at NGC this weekend

It just doesn't get any easier for Toronto artists, does it? Montreal has its fancy Trienniale last year, and the whole world comes; and Vancouver takes over the National Gallery for the summer. Toronto can't even get traction on its own turf, with the Power Plant surrendered to American conceptual giant Lawrence Weiner, and Brit Carey Young. And the AGO? Remix, which I wrote about last week, has some Toronto-con in the trickster-ish work of Kent Monkman, but otherwise runs the North American gamut, from Mexico on up.

So it always hurts -- or hurts me, at least -- to see Vancouver one-upping us at every turn. It has a brilliant tradition, to be sure; but in recent years, it's had something more important, that Toronto's art scene lacks: Sincere, local institutional support.

But this is all background to the point, which is, Vancouver artists are front and centre on the national agenda again with Nomads, which opens today in Ottawa. Geoffrey Farmer, Hadley+Maxwell, Myfanwy MacLeod (that's her The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, above, from 2008), Gareth Moore, and Althea Thauberger take over the gallery until Aug. 30 with their ruminations on impermanence and itinerance. Meanwhile, as I mentioned a little while ago, the NGC's Centre for Contemporary Photography is hosting a show of Vancouver artist Scott McFarland's work.

Significantly, these are the first openings on the watch of Marc Mayer, the gallery's new director, coming from Montreal, and before that, the Power Plant, where he was director for several years.

So where's the Toronto survey, Marc? Aren't we good enough for you? Throw us a bone, would you? No-one here is.

Chewing on the carcass: Brendan Fernandes at Diaz Contemporary

The first thing that strikes you when you walk into the darkened cinder-block bunker that is the Diaz Contemporary gallery on Niagara Street (bunker in the nicest sense; it's a lovely space) is the sound: Clipped, manic high-pitched shrieking, somewhere between hysterics and pain.

Wander into the main space, and you'll find its source: A cluster of TV sets, arrayed at varying heights, random-seeming, but oddly ordered. Fold in the fact that each of them is playing, in varying loops, the same darkness-shrouded film of a pack of hyenas feeding on a kill, and the arrangement starts to make sense, the cold technology giving way to the primal logic of ordering the pack.

The work is by Brendan Fernandes, whose body of work often works on the compare-and-contrast theme of the schism -- or, more accurately, maybe, the too-close-for-comfort proximity -- between civilized humanity and more primal systems; at Diaz, the unnerving hyena chatter is paired with a monologuist narrative of a monarch being plotted against by a younger sibling to gain her throne.

Superficially, the juxtaposition Fernandes offers is blatantly stark, setting brutal, beastly scavenging against human ambition, and the pregnant blatency of the question -- are we really so terribly different? -- is an ultimately unsatisfying oversimplification.

But this is where you really need to go see for yourself. Parse Fernandes' notion however you like, as I have, and resolve it for yourself as you will; but I defy you to walk into that gallery without a nerve-rattling chill running up your spine. Fernandes works from the right end of things; the anxiety that seizes you as the rabid yelps and wails bounce off the gallery walls in the near darkness, screens flashing, is an undeniably visceral moment, and the potent invitation that work of this sort needs to draw you deeper, even as it repulses you.

The ideas could be more complex, surely. But they don't have to be, if you believe, like I do, that the experience -- that moment of seeing, or feeling, something you never expected (or didn't want to) -- is more important than the explanation. Fernandes tranforms the shopworn concept of the untameable primacy of the human animal into something unsettlingly urgent. All this to say, of course, that all these words can't give you an ounce of what you feel in its presence; that's a success in itself.