The beginning, and The End, at the Power Plant tonight

Here's a cheery way to kick off your mid-week holiday: Check out the Power Plant's film series this evening. The first is the Andrei Ujica's Tarkovsky-worthy film (with a side of Woody Allen) Out of the Present -- except, unlike Tarkovsky's existential sci-fi dreamworlds, this is real.

Ujica's documentary, about Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev's 10 month experience on the Mir space station in 1991, is the stuff of Allen's iconic 1973 movie Sleeper, in which Allen's character goes to the hospital with a headache and wakes up 200 years later to a bizarro future world. Except when Krikalev returns to earth, he's not greeted with an orgasmatron, but rather, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the end of communism and a complete re-ordering of the global power dynamic. That'll teach you to go shooting off into space for months at a time.

Following Out of the Present is Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger's film The End, which is a credit roll of every name mentioned in the Bible -- yes, every single one of them; that's it, above -- set to probably the silliest waltz ever penned, Strauss's Blue Danube. Heathens rejoice. And be prepared to yawn.

But is it art? What Dan Graham, Mel Brooks, Sol Lewitt, Andy Kaufman and Bruno have in common

  

Kaufman, Brooks, Graham, Bruno -- A dream team.

Reading a piece in the New York Times on Dan Graham's much-deserved career survey that opened recently at the Whitney, I was reminded of something that Graham himself told me when I spoke to him a couple of years ago.

He was here to lecture at the Power Plant (which in itself was kind of odd, given that, while garrulous, Graham, who's a bit mumbly and tangentially-inclined, isn't really a natural orator). Whatever the case, Graham said to me then that he viewed Conceptualism as something as something of a colossal joke -- "anarchistic humour," he said -- played on the increasingly-academic art world of the time, in the 1960s.

He was speaking, I'm sure, of people like the critic Clement Greenberg, who was desperately trying to prolong the Modernist heyday he had helped usher in with the Abstract Expressionists, and most famously, Jackson Pollock. Greenberg was shilling for something he called color field art, more pure than pure, the absence of all but essence -- which, of course, was what Abstract Expressionism, and Modernism, for that matter, was all about. The color field notion was a further distillation of that purity, which to me has always seemed odd, and kind of a sad end to a brilliant critic. The AE's were deemed, by him, as the ne plus ultra of art, the end of the line. That he felt the urge to push past that, as their relevance started to fade, seems a desperate gesture of self-interest.

What does this have to do with Dan Graham, or Andy Kaufman, or Mel Brooks, or Sasha Baron Cohen (your Bruno), for that matter? Try this on for size, from the Times:

"Though many critics through the years have complained that Mr. Graham’s work can be hard to love and too dryly pedagogical, he said he sees himself as a Jewish comedian working firmly in the tradition of Jewish comedy greats like Mel Brooks and Andy Kaufman, whom he considers to be great conceptual artists."

Remember, now, that Graham wasn't just himself an artist, but was the original dealer for people like Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin, whose version of the Modernist experiment was in reviving ready-made notions and devaluing the object as art (Flavin's fluorescent tube sculptures, which he returned to the hardware store for a refund after the show; or Lewitt's pencil-on-the-wall markings, which he had no qualms about erasing).

For the inaugural generation of conceptualists, there was an intellectual challenge to the interwoven art world forces in academ-ese and the market that was pushing Pollocks and Rothkos into the hundreds of thousands (at the time); and no small degree of parodical humour in that challenge, either.

What came later got stranger, and more serious, as conceptualism morphed into performance, like Vito Acconci, who photographed himself stalking strangers, or Chris Burden, who crucified himself on the hood of a VW bug, to name but one self-mutiliating exercise.

But it's a small stretch to pair the innocent anarchy of Graham's generation with the performative impulses of the likes of Acconci and Burden and come up with Kaufman, Brooks and Cohen (and others, I guess, like Lenny Bruce, but he was in the 50s and therefore ruins my thesis. Damn him). Especially Cohen, it seems, who benefits most from all this history and understands that any great art stands as a challenge to the established order of things, and makes you see the world a little bit differently. If you damn near asphyxiate from laughing so hard while doing so (full disclosure -- I nearly passed out watching Borat), then more power to it.

Art, again, finally.

I went to MOCCA this morning to have a look at the summer show, Pulp Fiction; you'll see what I had to say in the paper on Sunday. But in short, I loved it; it's breezy, charming, accessible silliness, all the product of the homespun do-it-yourself aesthetic that has bubbled up from under in art scenes all over the continent in recent years. It's the work of collectives (like Vancouver's The Lions) and individuals, but there's a pervasive all-for-one sense to the show -- a band of outsiders, re-assuring each other that they're not working in a vaccuum. To that end, there's a ton of crossover -- collaborations, or just helping hands -- between the artists, suggesting a reassuring sense of community.

Not so long ago, in Officialdom, art of this kind would be quickly dismissed as so much juvenile noodling; and you know what? Much of it is. But I fail to see why that's a problem. Generations of politically-activated work, interwoven with academ-ese, intellectualism, critical theory, psychoanalysis and an attentuated lament for the failed utopias left in the wake of the Modernist experiment -- hey, great stuff. Many of my favourites are found in that dense field.

But I won't feel guilty about enjoying Peter Thompson's finely bizarre ink-on-paper drawings, or Marc Bell's, or Jason McLean's oven-baked black-laquered socks (hey, you had to be there); or, surely, the outstanding installation by James Kirkpatrick (that's part of it, up top). To quote a famous intellectual much synthesized in art, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. That was Freud. And he's right. Everything you need to know is right on the surface here. And that's a good thing.

For the last time ...

I finished the Richard Florida piece yesterday; you'll see it tomorrow. It comes with a wince-inducing headline, but my hope is that it sets up the prevailing critical reaction to his work well enough to start talking about it -- for everyone, Florida included.

The piece is set up as a litany, with a response; Florida gets a lot of air, which is only fair -- but it's also, I think, air-clearing in terms of extrapolation and interpretation. It also gives a hint, maybe, of where Florida's Toronto experience is taking him. Most importantly, I think it opens the floor for the polemic gap to be bridged. I know Florida's open to it; we all should be, too. 

NB. that, as a web extra, we've included the transcript of my entire conversation with Florida. It'll be linked in the story online. The old newspaper form can be mercilessly reductive, forcing scribes to pare down to the bare essentials; the web's a perfect forum for the full breadth of the discussion, which I think you'll find illuminating. I know I did.

Florida on Florida, in the office and soon, on the street

So I went to the Martin Prosperity Institute this morning to meet with Richard Florida, who (not surprisingly) had a great deal of thoughtful, nuanced responses to the polemic critiques of which he's been the subject, not only here, but for much of his very public career.

This isn't the place to explore them, but the casting of Florida as the great neo-liberal Satan, according to him, seems to be a problem of interpretation and application. Florida says he's neither an advocate nor a salesman of solutions, but rather, a quantitative analyser of some potent, widespread -- and worrying -- urban trends.

If that's the case, the trouble happens when these ideas become institutionalized as prescriptive -- which they have in a great many cities, including our own. Is there a way to unravel this? Given the pace of institutional change and adoption of policy, is it too late? I have no idea. But I'm going to try to figure it out. Check the paper on Saturday, where I hope my flailings will bear at least some fruit. A promising sign: I proposed to Florida that he enjoin his self-styled adversaries in Creative Class Struggle in a public forum, on their turf. He accepted, with enthusiasm; they're up for it as well. Now, we're trying to work out the details. Stay tuned.

Ian Wallace wins the big $50K Molson Prize

You're probably with me in not knowing what this Molson Prize is (turns out it's a Canada Council thing, for arts and humanities; Wayne Sumner, a philosophy prof at U of T, won the humanities side of things).

But you'll surely know who Ian Wallace is. You know that notion that Vancouver is at the very least the Canadian capitol of contemporary art, and among such cities on a global basis? It can trace that distinction back to Wallace, who, as both an artist and educator, helped seed that dynamic scene; his students include such international luminaries as Jeff Wall. As long ago as the 70s, Wallace was making large-scale conceptual photos -- the kind of work that has put the city on the global art map; he's moved through photography, collage, text, painting and film, seeing them as a holistic pictorial continuum. As builders of our contemporary art language go, Wallace is a titan -- and a vital one, too, still actively making new work. Congrats to him.

Celebrity Deathmatch (not) and the coming war

Getting around to this a moment or two late (and even later, in print this coming Saturday, I hope) but I wanted to offer a brief summary of impressions from the Town Hall held at the Toronto Free Gallery on Thursday.

You'll find an highly detailed summary of events from Leah Sandals on her blog; I'm not going to do that here. Rather, on the weekend, I intend to use some of these ideas as a jumping off point to examine the hucksterish rhetoric that Florida has sold so successfully, and widely, to a growing number of cities across the continent (not to mention the Globe and Mail, which breathlessly touts him on a bi-weekly basis (at right), despite the fact the column can be a patchwork presentation of other people's work).

I've been down this rabbit hole a few times in the past, in an exhaustive exploration of the class warfare implicit in the very term "gentrification," and a little more recently, in an attempt to gauge what Florida's "Creative Cities" pitch is actually about.

As panel moderator and organizer Heather McLean (and Creative Class Struggler) rightly said in her opening remarks on Thursday, it's mercurial, to say the least -- a loosely-held "philosophy" that seems to suggest anyone who works with their heads, not their hands -- professors, writers, computer programmers, artists, engineers, mathematicians, architects, name your intellectually-based pursuit -- are the proverbial golden geese, and failure to lure them to your city means certain doom in the coming economic re-ordering.

So why is he so popular, particularly in the dying civic economies of the American rust belt? Precisely because what he proposes is so simple; Florida offers a silver-bullet, a one-step cure all. The way he tells it, it's so easy. And this is the problem. Florida's ideas are simple, applied to a circumstance with a set of dynamics -- failing industrial economies, mass immigration, re-urbanization, and now, global economic upheaval -- that are anything but.

As one of the speakers on Thursday rightly pointed out (she called him "Richard," leading one spectator to muse his celebrity had reached the mono-name apex, like Bono or Madonna) Florida offers an incredibly seductive package, an apparent fix-all toolkit that he steadfastly asserts can be applied with equanimity. That's the pitch, anyway, and it doesn't take a member of the "Creative Class" to see that assertion as willfully naiver. But Florida's just the pitchman. Our civic governments -- including Toronto, in fact as well as practice, with various cultural fireworks displays like Luminato and Nuit Blanche, that leave nothing behind -- don't have to buy what he's selling.

But they do. Desperation, it seems, breeds imprudence. We can only blame Florida for opportunism -- I don't know what he charges for his various civic-lifesaving gigs, but he's the only U of T faculty who lives in Rosedale, on the ravine -- but we need to blame our civic leaders as well, for grabbing the rope he threw them. Do they really think it's that easy?

Thursday night was an opening salvo in what I think will become an increasingly public battle against the thin model Florida's selling. This is goign to get interesting, and soon.

More later.

Richard Florida vs. Creative Class Struggle Celebrity Deathmatch!

If only ... but in mere minutes (like, 30 -- gotta hurry) at the Toronto Free Gallery, a panel convenes about the sad mythologies and (hopefully unintended) class warfare fallout of the Creative Class line that has given Richard Florida (that's Mr. Happy himself, at right) a living far beyond the means of most of his academic colleagues at the University of Toronto.

I have to run, or I'll be late; but the town hall discussion, organized by the ever-active Toronto Free director Heather Haynes, takes on the Florida-proposed cure-all for urban decay that it's the culture, stupid; expect a lively discussion on the heavy collateral damage of gentrification and the worrying class warfare that such single-mindedness is fostering before our very eyes.

And while you're at it, read this, the website tossed up into the ether by the provocative group Creative Class Struggle, who will be represented tonight. It doesn't get near enough attention, and it ought to.

As to the deathmatch, we'll see; Haynes told me he was invited. Think he'll show?

See you there.

Heffel, Part 2

Recession? What recession? Heffel's second phase, wrapping up at about 1 am EST, beat all expectations, cashing out $11.3 million in sales. And that Emily Carr we talked about? It sold for $2.164 million -- more than a million more than the previous record for the BC painter's work. Let the good times roll?

Heffel auction, Part 1

As is my duty, I can tell you the first phase of Heffel Brothers auction out in Vancouver is done, and things seem pretty rosey. Phase one landed at about $4.7 million, besting the pre-auction estimate of $3.5 million, including $1.1 million for Jean Paul Riopelle's Jouet (above).

This is good news if you're an art dealer, or happen to be holding some such works; even better if you believe the theory that the art market is an important bellwether of general economic confidence. Between this and real estate bidding wars returnng to the fore, you'd think we could all start to party like it's 2007 again. But wait a few hours (or until morning, out here in the eastern time zone) to see how Heffel's top-notch Emily Carr does; pegged at $1.2 million, Heffel says there are "heavy phone bidders lined up to bid on it." Not to count the chickens before they hatch, but iit would constitute a new record -- and maybe signal the arrival of a new age of excess? Nah, maybe not. But it's good sport. Stay tuned.