Tonight: Basquiat at RAFF

Something else you might like to know about tonight is the Canadian premiere of Tamra Davis's film Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Golden Child, by most accounts an unflinching -- though undoubtedly warm -- portrait of the artist by a director who knew him as a friend. (scroll down to read a squib by NY Times critic Manohla Dargis here).

The short form of the story is how Basquiat, a street-art naif, rocketed to fame and wealth in a staggeringly short period in the late 70s and 80s, before he died of a heroin overdose in 1988, when he was 28. Lumped into the market-spectacle "Neo-Realist" painting movement, alongside such artists as Julian Schnabel, Basquiat's work, raw and gutsy, had an intense magnetic pull for an art world desperate for a visceral thrill, after a couple of decades of heady, sterile conceptualism. It made him an instant millionaire; it also cost him his life.

I'd like to tell you more about the film, and Davis; but I'm not allowed to see it in advance, and was denied an interview with her -- something about the distributors being leery of anything resembling a review being in print before its official release.

It's a curious marketing strategy -- don't let anyone see it, so they can't tell others about it. Brilliant. In any case, Davis will be in conversation with former Globe critic Sarah Milroy tonight, prior to the film's screening as part of the Real Artists Film Festival. No idea if there are any tickets left, but a click on that link should tell you what you need to know.

Unmasked!

I'd be highly remiss not to mention tonight's throwdown at Wrongbar, where the city's most notoriously catty, utterly anonymous art critic, the Art Fag (seen here in trademark balaclava, but in apparent tribute to the dearly departed Zza Zsa Gallery) comes out in public for the first time in an interview with ArtStars* host Nadja Sayej. (doors at 7 pm)

You might have read his rants on his site, or in the little pink staple-copied leaflets he left in Toronto galleries over the past five years, and you could always rest assured it was never dull. It woudl be impossible to offer snippets of all my favourites, so let me quote this one lengthy section, from an interview with a hapless Ryerson student AF posted on his blog (and it's worth reading the whole thing, believe me):

"One does not give criticism because someone wants it. One gives criticism because, first and foremost, it is in our animal natures. There is not one creature on this earth that does not distinguish between good and bad. The animal that has no sense of discernment dies off, because it cannot tell for itself the food that is poisonous. So: we criticize because we are creatures of discernment.

Second of all, we give criticism because someone needs it. If one is never told that one is doing something wrong, one will never correct that wrong behaviour. This is not the act of the saboteur. That is the attitude of someone who doesn't understand what criticism is for. Post-WWII North American social culture, especially since the 1960s, has been propelled by a therapeutic ideal of the promotion of self-esteem and mental and emotional health and well-being. This pervasive idea has wrought much good, and also much bad; in the context of our discussion, it has birthed this idea (and you can see it everywhere, from art criticism to American Idol) that criticism is an assault upon selfesteem and self-actualization. People who value discourse and the free exchange of ideas realize that criticism is always an act of caring, for it is borne of the desire to see things done successfully. Those who believe that criticism is an act of sabotage simply do not value the free exchange of ideas. We're afraid it's as simple as that."

Amen. See you there.

Speaking of Will Gorlitz ...

Given the breadth of forms and experiences in the art world, painting is rarely my first choice; that said, I can be moved by it -- and was, in fact, with Will Gorlitz's current survey at MOCCA, which was in the paper last week. I get a little eye-rolly at the artist's penchant for painfully obvious formal commentary -- overlapping diptychs, hanging askew, feel more like lesson than innovation, not subtle enough by half to offer insight -- but when Gorlitz is good, he's awesome: I was particularly taken with his 1995 work, Axis Mundi, a forest landscape as viewed flat on your back on the forest floor.

Gorlitz is playing the same toggle here, formally, as with his wonky diptychs -- taking a painting convention and defying its nature -- but the experience is visceral, not preachy; you feel pinned, breathless, menaced by the sublime. It's surely not landscape painting as the romantics might have pictured it, and here, Gorlitz's medicine vanishes in a spoonful of sugar that provides a rush so pure you're not sure what you've swallowed. Which is just how I like it.

Where was I?

Or more to the point, where have I been? In the paper a little bit lately, with a review of Will Gorlitz at MOCCA, and in a west end cafe, observing an informal memorial to a personal favourite, Greg Curnoe, in the form of his old track bike hung to the wall. Oh, and then there's a little Q+A with Ed Burtynsky, who's turned his attention from industrial incursion to a growing water crisis caused by our reckless consumption.

It's no leap from Burtynsky, the elder, to Boles, the younger, as in Jesse, whose show of current work is on at Edward Day right now.

Like Burtynsky, Boles works with a large format camera, capturing contemplative images of industrial ravages. There's something different, though, about Boles' current work, more mannered and formally aware than before; the hallmarks of his work with the Albertan oil landscape -- eerily abandoned-seeming  upgraders and storage tanks, for example -- are still present, but take a back seat here to a handful of pictures where Boles' eye focuses on small, potent detail.

 
There's a heap of jointed metal, dull grey and foregrounded in the frame so as to all but block out a similarly-toned sky; it's tangled and knotted in extraordinary sharp focus, almost hyper-real, a graphic study in proportion and tone as much as an image of industrial waste. A personal favourite, above, is a mound of mechanical odds and ends, framed by a muddy crossroads under an unforgivingly bleak, gauzy high cloud ceiling. Amid the pallor and muck, the jumbled forms seem to defy any sense of scale, a visually irreconcilable tangle of colour and shape.

Like the other, it's vaguely abstract, but at the same time, so not -- a confounding delight that I can still see sharply in my minds eye, days later. Which says something, doesn't it?

Les Automatistes, comme j'ai voulu

As happens a bit too often for my liking, reasons of space resulted in my story today, (loosely) on Francoise Sullivan, shedding its final couple of paragraphs, thus dangling in the air, un-ended -- or at least how I might have liked.

Enter the  boundless realm of the internet, where I can issue my own corrective; below is the story as I hope it might have appeared, for those interested. And note: I'm gearing up to get this blog back in shape. Keep your eyes open; coming soon -- now with new content! MW

MURRAY WHYTE
Visual Art Critic 

In 1946, Claude Gavreau surely ruffled some feathers in strait-laced Anglo society when he declared, without a hint of irony, that he and his Montreal confreres in the Automatiste movement had finally given birth to Canadian painting. It had been some decades since the woodsy, staunchly Upper Canadian Group of Seven had been canonized as the first great movement in Canadian art, after all, and excusez-moi, M. Gavreau, but who the hell are you, anyway? 

Sixty years on, too many English Canadians might still be asking that question, but thanks to a couple of long-overdue exhibitions on view in the Toronto area, there are finally some answers. At the Varley Art Centre in Unionville, "The Automatiste Revolution," the outstandingly comprehensive exhibition of the group's artistic output from 1941 to 1960, runs to February 28, while at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a show of work by one of its seminal members, Francoise Sullivan, opened last week. About time, too, considering the Automatistes represent quite likely the one and only bona-fide social and cultural revolution this country has ever seen.  

Who, indeed? Sullivan, now 84, was a young choreographer when she, Gavreau and Bruno Cormier paid a visit to Paul Emile Borduas in his studio. It was November, 1941. Borduas, well-established as a painter in Quebec, was already linked to a growing international movement in art and intellectual circles that meant to shake polite cultural discourse to its foundations.  

In France, Borduas was allied with Andre Breton, whose Surrealist movement was gaining social traction as the very modern expression of a generation hungry for change. It celebrated the primal, the unconscious, the visceral over bloodless expressions of the sublime. 

Gavreau's proclamation had served notice that the international wave of Modern abstraction had finally reached our parochial shores., but for the Automatistes, though, art was only its starting point: they described their movement as a social revolution aimed at toppling the repressive social strictures of polite, Catholic Quebecois society. In Marcel Duplessis' Quebec of the time, such notions were nothing less than sacrilege. Still, the Automatistes pressed on. 

"We were very passionate, very engaged in this," Sullivan recalled last week. "It was very dangerous for Borduas. And he anticipated difficulties. But we were all willing to take the risk."  

In a small room on the fourth floor, the AGO is showing a small selection of her paintings, a medium she grew into alongside fellow Automatistes as Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle. They are huge, abstract canvases, embodying a paradox of austere warmth, which is surely the product of feminine inflection in a form that more typical emanates a robust machismo. 

Just outside, a selection of photographs, taken in 1948 at the country home of fellow Automatiste Jean-Paul Riopelle, show Sullivan performing her Danse de la Neige,  a work she choreographed in 1948 as an elemental movement piece to match the Automatiste's primal mission.  It's part of the AGO's ongoing commitment to exhibitions by winners of the $50,000 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, and post-transformation, the gallery is just catching up. Sullivan won in 2008; Mark Lewis, 2007's winner, had his show in the fall, while 2009 winner Shary Boyle will show late his year. 

It may be a happy accident, but the Sullivan show is timely, indeed, with the Automatiste show still on in Unionville, and set to travel south of the border for the first time, to Buffalo's Albright-Knox museum next month.  For Sullivan herself, the confluence of things casts her mind back to a time when it seemed revolution was possible: The Automatistes' defining gesture was a manifesto that it distributed publically, challenging moribund Quebecois society to its core.

That document, Le Refus Global, or Total Refusal, was drafted by Borduas in 1948 and signed by all members (Sullivan's contribution was a seminal text on the power of modern dance, "Dance and Hope"). Its demands were not modest: calling for "an untamed need for liberation," and attacking the "cassocks that have remained the sole repositories of faith, knowledge, truth, and national wealth" in French Canada.  Borduas paid dearly for the affront, losing his teaching job, most of his professional relationships and ultimately, his marriage. Lost in the provocation, it seems, was the earnest, hopeful root of the gesture: "Make way for magic!" Borduas wrote. "Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for love! Make way for necessities!" 

History, though, remembers differently. Le Refus Global is now cited as one of the seeds of the Quiet Revolution, which in the 60s saw social upheaval in Catholic-dominated Quebec as mass-secularization tore through the province.

Art's memory is being jogged now, too: For the first time at the Albright-Know, Automatiste works will hang next to their much more famous, spiritual and aesthetic kin - paintings by Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.  

Sullivan, though, never forgot. "Even though I have worked in many different directions, there is something that remains, something very strong," she says quietly. "It was so intense, it leaves you with something that is there forever."   

-- The Automatiste Revolution runs to February 28 at the Varley Art Gallery in Unionville, and from March 19 to May 30 at the Albright Knox in Buffalo. Francoise Sullivan: Inner Force runs to May 30 at the AGO. 

Les Automatistes live on: Francoise Sullivan at the AGO

Completing my triumvirate of AGO posts this morning -- no-one's more surprised than I am, believe me -- is something that is entirely not a surprise, which is a reminder of Francoise Sullivan's performance tomorrow night at Walker Court. Sullivan was a member of the Automatistes, the radical Quebec artists' collective that, from 1941 to 1960, sought nothing less than creative and social revolution (a survey of their collective activity is still on at the Varley Art Gallery in Markham).

Along with Paul-Emile Borduas, Magdeleine Arbour, Marcel Barbeau, Bruno Cormier, Claude Gavreau,  Fernand Leduc and Marcelle Ferron, Sullivan helped push the boundaries of polite Catholic Quebecois society; with their 1948 manifesto, Le Refus Global, or Total Refusal, they called for "an untamed need for liberation," attacking the "cassocks that have remained the sole repositories of faith, knowledge , truth, and national wealth."

At the time, it was stirring stuff; its spirit still is today. Sullivan, who was primarily a dancer, has criss-crossed media over the years, into painting, photography and sculpture; tomorrow night, the AGO presents one of her dance works in conjunction with an exhibition of her abstract paintings -- each one a tribute to her fellow Automatistes who have died -- as well as her photography. Tickets are free with gallery admission; tomorrow night at 7.

Speaking of dropping out of the sky ...

The AGO was at it again this morning, sending out notice that none other than Thomas Ruff would be dropping by the gallery school for a talk about his work Saturday. Ruff, a member of the Dusseldorf cohort of conceptual photographers -- it loosely associates him, Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, among others -- had a handful of photographs in the gallery's recent "Beautiful Fictions" show, and he appears to be dropping in almost unnannounced. In a modest understatement, "it happened rather quickly," according to gallery staff.

One can only imagine what Ruff might be doing in Toronto in Febraury on an apparrent whim -- taking in the sub-zero sights? Enjoying the deadly high-ceiling of grey cloud? Trying to provoke S.A.D. for some kind of personal project? -- but whatever the case, it's an opportunity for photography afficionados not to miss.

Where the hell have I been?

Far, far away, it seems, in that yesterday's announcement, that the AGO was bringing in a massive Anselm Kiefer installation -- and in a few weeks, no less -- took me completely by surprise. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone on this one; it kind of dropped out of the sky for everyone.

AGO communications staff told me that it was something that director Matthew Teitelbaum and contemporary curator David Moos had been working on for some time; still, the suddenness is kind of jarring. Kiefer's installation, a slight variation on a piece called "Palmsonntag" (Palm Sunday") which he first made in 2006, and has exhibiterd in various places around the world, is huge -- a 60-foot plaster cast of a palm tree surrounded by 44 10-foot high panels. This is not the kind of thing that travels spur-of-the-moment, so there has to be something else going on here. 

As to the actual work, it's typical Kiefer, in that it's brash, visceral, iconoclastic and jarring; the Catholic reference -- Palm Sunday is the last day of self-depriving Lent -- is as clear as it is subordinated. Kiefer's work, extremely raw, provocative and subtle as a sledgehammer, deprives itself nothing; the panels, a handful of which were made specifically for the AGO installation, are composed of mud, fronds, plaster, human hair and used chastity belts, among other materials. However it got here, it'll surely be something to see. Opening March 3.

So sad

"The things that once so defined him — shag carpeting, Room & Board sofas, monogamy — now suffocated him."

(with thanks to Unhappy Hipsters)

I try very hard not to make this space a clearing house for my favourite cultural curious, but here's one that must be shared. It's a new blog called "Unhappy Hipsters," which nabs photos of chilly ultra-modern spaces from Dwell magazine --which, by the way, I loathe for its falsely-modest treatment of moderne luxe house porn, but buy regularly all the same -- and applies sadly imagineable narratives to them. 

God, I love it.

Greetings from sunny Montreal ...

 ... where I've been the last 24 hours or so to see the array of new openings at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art.

My ostensible task was to come here to speak with Marcel Dzama, for whom the museum is putting on the largest exhibtion of his work, ever (not surprisingly, it's amazing; kind of overwhelming, really), but I'd be remiss not to mention the fantastic work the museum is doign simultaneously, which is putting on large surveys of Victoria-based artist Luanne Martineau and Montrealer Etienne Zack.

Frankly, a major survey of any one of these artists would be noteworthy; all are at the forefront of their generation's various practices. But the fact that the MMCA is able to mount all three at once is kind of incredible. For those who mistakenly think that the MMCA is overly Quebec-centric think again: At the moment, at least, it's a pan-Canadian contemporary art wonderland.

It's the kind of institutional support for Canadian artists that we see all too rarely. Last night in Montreal, the ridiculously weak argument that audiences won't come out for Canadian art was blown out of the water; the opening was utterly packed, a giant, shoulder-to-shoulder art party I haven't seen at a museum since I lived in New York. For a Torontonian, it was a revelation, -- and what a shame that that's the case.