Belt-tightening at National Gallery: 27 laid off

A little under the radar last week, the National Gallery laid off 27 staff members, most of them in the gallery's education and foundation departments. 

It's always troubling to see our cultural institutions chopping staff and programs, not only because it throws people out of work, but it's an indication of a darker truth -- that either we have a government that doesn't see the value of investing in our institutions, or a public that doesn't care to patronize them; according to the NGC's numbers, about 900,000 bought tickets when it opened in 1998; in 2009, that number was less than 300,000.

Times are tough all over, and the reality is that museums and galleries are faced with making ends meet, either by program and staff reductions (here in Toronto, the AGO laid off 23 people, including several key staff from their curatorial department last year; not renewing contracts brought the total staff reduction to nearly 100), or goofy blockbuster shows aimed at drawing the broadest swatch of ticket-buyers possible. The AGO, of course, has Tut, and the National Gallery this summer has Pop Life, a layman-friendly omnibus of late-20th century greatest hits, from Warhol to Koons to Hirst.

Ticket sales aren't make-or-break for public institutions, but they aren't insignificant, either; of the NGC's annual $60 million budget, about $10 million is predicated on gate receipts. What this might mean in terms of programming isn't hard to guess -- more user-friendly shows like Pop Life, possibly fewer Canada-specific gems like last year's smart and timely Nomads, of the up-and-coming generation of Vancouver artists. Possibly. But let's hope not.

Unabashed excess: Dorian FitzGerald at Clint Roenisch

A few months ago, you'd probably never heard of Dorian FitzGerald. If you had, though, you wouldn't have forgotten. Aside from the name -- which, despite its theatricality, isn't a stage-name (I asked) -- the paintings he makes are the kind that burn themselves into your brain. Whether or not it's a good burn is a matter of opinion -- I'm still not sure myself -- but there's no arguing that they're completely arresting.

It's hard to remember the last time I came across paintings that had such remarkably worked surfaces: If Sol LeWitt's wall works, with their simple geometries and spatial concerns, epitomized Minimalism's treatment of a flat plane, then call FitzGerald's paintings Maximalism: Not only are the surfaces impossibly thick and gloopy (he renders his images in outline with caukling, then fills in the thousands of cavities with colour), their technique is matched in decadence with their subject matter; at the Clint Roenisch Gallery, three FitzGerlad pieces (the cap 'G' is insisted upon by his mother) depict abject opulence and excess -- a Faberge egg, a Cartier dragon bracelet, and the most remarkable work, the closet Sir Elton John has devoted to his sunglasses collection.  

The luxury objects, conceptually, are a bit one-note -- a decadent, over-worked technique mirroring the same excess represented by frivolously extravagant consumer goods (though as one friend pointed out to me, at $16,000, FitzGerald's painting of a Cartier dragon bracelet was by far the cheapest way to own one); but Sir Elton's closet (above) has a greater resonance, both in technique and idea -- for me, at least. One of the extraordinary things FitzGerald shows here is an uncanny ability to render a heavily worked surface, but at the same time conjure depth and perspective from it.

Abstractionists had it easy -- their work was about the material; the thick smears of a Riopelle or blobous splatters of a Pollock were only about the self-conscious experience of staring the paint itself straight in the face; there was nothing illusory about it (which was the entire Modern point, of course). FitzGerald, meanwhile, in the Sir Elton work, offers a similarly intoxicating surface from which he simultaneously conjures a remarkable representational depth; the painting changes depending on your proximity to it. 

Finally, it's worth noting that there are beautiful things, in their over-the-top, frighteningly decadent way; FitzGerald, in his 30s, who had only shown at the Art Fair, in October, and at MOCCA's launch of the Carte Blanche 2 book previous to that, has exceptional promise. I'm hesitant to call it more than that just yet -- beauty, on its own, isn't overly compelling -- but I'm almost sure FitzGerald has more to give. I'll be watching. 

Dust in the wind: Benoit Aquin at Stephen Bulger

Photographer Benoit Aquin won the Prix Pictet, an award for illuminating environmental and social disaster, for his images of the "Chinese dustbowl," as he calls it, and it's not hard to see why: His photographs, now on display at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, depict the Chinese interior as a land of fresh desert and a constant, muddy haze as winds whip the dessicated land airborne with a startling sense of permanence. And if anything, the problem is growing, as this report of a particularly brutal sandstorm season now in full force in Northern China shows.

The aestheticization of human suffering has long been the painfully self-conscious toggle of any documentary photographer, and Aquin is no exception; his images are both peopled with stolid Chinese for whom life is largely an endurance test, which they trudge through with stoic resignation, and are quietly spectacular, all awash with earthy browns and ochres.

But in a moment where we're inundated with images depicting the ecological costs of China's dizzying rush to modernity, Aquin's images approach an issue that is both less visible and more pervasive, and amid the constant churn of images of industrial devastation in the here and now, his results are rich with the dark suggestions of tragedies unfolding slowly, and perhaps without end, floating above the litany ground-level disaster with a transcendant permanence.

Marking time at Corkin in the Distillery

I stopped by the Jane Corkin gallery in the Distillery the other day to see what was new, and the answer was not a lot, in that Barbara Astman's lovely show, Wonderland, is still up in the main gallery space, placeholding for this weekend's opening of new paintings by Darryl Hughto and Susan Roth. 

But I was taken by the small rotation in the huge gallery space's margins, where works from Corkin's archive seem to circulate in and out on a regular basis. First, when you step through the monumental industiral doors, your greeted with an arresting photograph by Frank Madler, in which a clutch of birds keen furiously in every direction; coupling the acid-blue sky behind them and the frantic flurry they're in -- each is kinetic, blurred to indistinction -- the anxiety coming off the image is palpable.

Meanwhile, in the back, two small lightboxes by Iain Baxter& (his flourish, not mine) are perfectly placed in a low, shadow-shrouded chamber behind the stairs; the photographs of an after-dark strip mall parking lot shimmering in the glow of SS Kresge's red neon sign, and of a pile of tires in black and white, are small visual confections of delight.

But it was upstairs, where I happened on a couple of pieces by David Urban, that I had to pause. One, called "Amplifier" (that's it, at left, though a typically crappy iPhone shot of it), and another, "Offerary," from his 2006 Wyevale series, reminded me of Urban's quiet force as a painter. Simple formalist concerns with colour, material and space knit perfectly with a not-quite-foregrounded interest with representation that leave Urban in a captivating netherworld that is both completely contemporary and utterly timeless. Urban's work functions simultaneously as a catalogue of the practice of painting from the 20th century forward, while remaining entirely his own thing. It reminded me  that his last show, in 2007, was too long ago, and left me wondering when the next might be. Soon, I can only hope.

Talking about love and other things tonight

Lots of talking and not so much looking on the slate tonight, starting with a couple of events at the U of T campus. The first, at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, carries the unwieldy title "Two conversations on the intersections of love and politics in contemporary art practices;" it's the first of a two part series, bearing the subtitle "Love is the motive force of every emancipatory politics."

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but the series is organized by Toronto force Adrian Blackwell and Christine Shaw, and brings a lot of great people for the conversation; tonight's roster included Power Plant curator Helena Reckitt and Kika Thorne, among others; part two, next week, will put AGO curator Michelle Jacques with artists Luis Jacob and Mike Hoolboom (and others) to discuss the equally mysterious, not terribly emotionally resonant (given the subject) title "Love is an event ignited by the distance between two polarities." I can only guess it'll be better in execution. Tonight at the Reading Room in Hart House, 7 pm, where Blackwell's 1999 sculpture "Model for a Public Space [knot]" is installed to the end of the month (above), and might provide a minor clue as to the stymieing titles; Blackwell's piece, a concentric set of bleachers turning inward on themselves, are a cheeky metaphor for the circular route public discourse too often takes. Watch them try to intangle it.

Meanwhile, artist/architecture prof An Te Liu is delivering a lecture on campus tonight at 5.30 at 1 Spadina Crescent. That's all I know. If I can get some details, I'll be sure to let you know.

And finally, speaking of knots,  the Drake is having a reception for the Icelandic artist known as Shoplifter (though her real name, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, is way more fun, as Icelandic names tend to be); Arnadottir, who'll be entangling the joint with her creepily all-encompassing woven pieces that look disturbingly much like human hair. Which they can't be. Can they?

Oakville Galleries addendum

In my further efforts to be a reprint resource for our diminished page space, I wanted to include the full text of my review of "Silent as Glue" at the Oakville Galleries, which was cut short to wedge onto the page in the paper today. That'll teach me to try to review two shows at once (the main attraction, Betty Goodwin, survived largely intact.) Without further adieu, and with an image of Linda Gammon's Untitled 1, from 2005.

At Oakville Galleries’ downtown space, Toronto’s own Mr. Everything, Micah Lexier – he’s showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Bank of Montreal’s Project Room and Art Metropole, and probably a half-dozen other things I’m forgetting –  has curated a tidy little show called “Silent as Glue,” featuring work by Lynda Gammon, Matt Harle and Elspeth Pratt, three artists Lexier has long admired.  

Knowing Lexier’s own focus on material and form, it’s hardly a surprise to find each of these artists working with notably homespun stuff in counter-intuitive, often hilarious ways: One of Harle’s “Untitled” pieces – keeping with the modern tradition of minimalist sculpture, there are a lot of “untitleds” here – arranges thick lengths of rubber – I was reminded of bicycle tire inner-tubes – in a form suggesting a primitive, tribalist totem.  

In her piece “Lucy House,” 2007, Pratt uses the visual properties of exposed cardboard corrugation – all those rows of ridges – as a clever tool to set perspective askew, an engaging bit of formal trickery that draws your eye away from the crude material and into an Escher-like game of visual consternation.  

But for me, the real winner for me was Gammon’s “Studio Pictures,” a crude paste-up of various images of her Vancouver studio from 1985 to 1992. Gammon shifts in perspective and various piles of junk move in and out of the frame, but building features – a doorway, a window, a light switch – anchor the space as itself. It’s a nice little essay on impermanence and the passing of time, and maybe even this practice of object-making as a desperately imperfect way of marking it. But Gammon points out it’s a matter of degrees – a building’s a big object, a little more permanent, but in the grand scheme, not much. This business of being here is all about transforming, whether from quarry to skyscraper or the deliberately anti-monumental act of making cardboard, rubber and whatever else into art. But in the end, it’s all so much dust, isn’t it?

Tino Sehgal, my way

 In the introduction to his long feature on Tino Sehgal in the New York Times magazine, long-time dance critic Arthur Lubow describes his first experience of a Sehgal piece thusly: "I first encountered Tino Sehgal’s work under ideal conditions: total ignorance." 

I can relate. I had heard of Sehgal (left), knew he did something related to performance, but knew little more; so when I wandered into the AGO's 4th floor gallery during a media preview last week and found a young couple gamely making out in the middle of the room, I felt I had stumbled into a moment of impromptu intimacy, and spun awkwardly on my heel to go. A few steps out, and it hit me: This was, in fact, Sehgal's 2002 piece "Kiss," functioning perhaps exactly as it ought to -- as a stealthy interruption to the conventional museum-going experience. Aha.

There are certainly those who will choose to see Sehgal's work as a showy contrivance, to be sure; "Kiss" is mannered, structured and, quite apart from its cousin in public intervention, is built to function in an art-institutional context. All that being the case, I'm not one of them: Observing "Kiss" play out amid the throngs of AGO-goers over the weekend, it self-justified quite nicely as viewers stood puzzled at the threshold, or ignored it completely. The shudder of discomfort I witnessed as one of the performers, unprompted, locked eyes with the viewer, said a lot to me about our disjointed relationship with both intimacy and art-viewing itself. We don't live in a static world -- why should art be? 

In any case, a clipped version of these discussions appeared in the paper today, under my name, in the name of space (which, apparently, we have a serious dearth of these days). So I'm turn to a place where space isn't a limited commodity, the internet, to offer my full version. The photo below is of Ame Henderson and Mairead Filgate, Sehgal collaborators who I spoke to for the piece. 

MURRAY WHYTE

Visual Arts Critic

On a cold and blustery afternoon last weekend, Ame Henderson and Mairead Filgate sat at the Art Gallery of Ontario, watching intently as an enraptured couple groped, fondled and caressed each other, their faces drawing close now and again to share a long, tender kiss.

They were among the minority here who chose to watch the proceedings so closely. At the thresholds of the small side gallery where these delicate throes of publicly-displayed passion were taking place, small crowds gathered, daring to go no further, as if held back by an invisible rope.

“We saw a woman walk through with her five-year old, holding a coat in front of her face,” said Henderson. “It provokes a lot of confusion for people.”

What “it” is, exactly, can be a little mind-bending. Simply, the couple – one of seven, locked in embrace in rotating shifts from the moment the gallery opens to the time it closes, every day – is embodying Tino Sehgal’s aptly-named “Kiss,” a 2002 work of art donated to the AGO in 2008. Henderson performed the Sehgal piece here in 2006; she’s working as Sehgal’s overseer for this installation. Filgate is one of the seven performing it now, until August 1.

Just 33 years old, Sehgal, who was born in England but lives in Berlin, has struck a nerve in the art world. He’s been showing at significant museums in Europe for almost a decade, while a major survey of Sehgal’s work just closed at the Guggenheim in New York. The Museum of Modern Art owns “Kiss” as well (it exists in an edition of four).

At the AGO, Sehgal’s work shares space, if not sensibility, with a handful of tell-tale pieces: Constantin Brancusi’s stone-carved “The Kiss,” from 1908, and a bronze casting of Auguste Rodin’s 1889 sculpture of the same name. If you could stand to watch long enough, you’d see the couple ape the poses from both of them, among others, moving from one intimate entanglement to the next.

Even for those involved, it’s hard to put to words just what “Kiss” is, exactly. Don’t call it performance art, Sehgal says: Defying that tradition, he prohibits it from being photographed. No record exists – even the gallery’s ownership of it is an oral contract.  He demands the only thing left behind is the trace memory in the viewer’s mind.

While it appears gently spontaneous, it’s tightly planned. “Every single movement is choreographed,” Henderson said. But don’t call it dance (Sehgal doesn’t).  “It’s like the material to make this piece come to form is trained dancers, but it’s not anything like what we do, typically,” she said. “There’s no duration to the work – it’s all day, every day. It has no meaning in time – no dance is like that.”

Its challenges stretch beyond what to call it. Prior to this installation, Filgate performed “Kiss” as a one-day special for Valentine’s Day this year in the gallery’s main atrium. “People yelled things like “Get a room!’” she said. This time, in the galleries themselves, it’s been a little different.

“When people come in – if they come in – most act like we’re invisible,” she says.  The performers are instructed to occasionally make eye contact, but it’s tough going. “I crave that contact,” Filgate says, “but most people just look away.”

In a setting where most museum-goers are accustomed to and prepared for looking at inanimate objects hanging on the wall or poised inert on the floor, Sehgal’s work is a potent challenge to an art collection as the accumulation of tangible things. He insists the only trace his works leave behind are the memories in viewers’ minds. 

His works range from the jarringly silly – in 2001’s “This Is Good,” a museum guard would wave his arms and hop on one foot whenever someone entered the the room, saying “Tino Seghal. ‘This Is Good,’ 2001 – to the mildly confrontational: “This Situation,” his debut work in New York at the Marian Goodman Gallery in 2007, saw performers engage viewers in an intensely-scripted, platitude-laden conversation. “I often see shows I don’t like,” wrote New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz, “but this was the only show I’ve ever seen that didn’t like me.” He pegged it as the best of the year.

In the small gallery at the AGO, a few generations of a family – parents, grandparents, kids, young adults – unknowingly wandered as far as the Rodin and stopped dead. “Kiss” had reached the point in its circuit where the man lay prone on the floor, straddled by his partner, who looked up to catch the eye of the young man. A quick shrug, and they hurried along.

“It’s funny,” Henderson said. “It’s okay to look at all sorts of images that are sexually charged, even violent, but as soon as they’re not 2-D, it asks something so different. It’s so strange that real, gentle intimacy is so dangerous.”

 

 

 

Luminato comes of age? Art program includes mesmerizing Michael Snow piece, PLUS a new commission from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

The Luminato Festival announced its visual arts program for this year today, and to my minor shock, its only two pieces (so far) are likely to please both the masses and the cognoscenti: Ship O' Fools, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) by Canadian conceptual eminence grise Michael Snow (that's a not-very-good still from it, above). 

Luminato has taken a lot of flak in years past for its blithely simplistic approach to the visual arts -- last year, Kurt Perschke's big, red inflatable ball was the marquee piece, and while I liked its reactive quality, it was, at best, lovably dorky -- but these two installations promise a little more gravity while, I suspect, sacrificing nothing in audience engagement.

Cardiff and Miller are the dynamic husband and wife duo whose playful explorations into the formal constraints of film and sound and the relationship between their work and the audience have won them international accolades over the past decade -- including the top prize at the 2001 Venice Biennale for their film installation The Paradise Institute, making them the first-ever Canadians to take the prestigious prize.

Snow was the subject of a recent survey at the Power Plant in Toronto, but has made a decades-long habit of showing all over the world. Solar Breath, the installation of which is being curated by Atom Egoyan as a tribute to recently-deceased Luminato founder David Pecaut, is a gorgeously simple film work from 2002, of a curtain billowing from an open window, only to be sucked hard against the screen as the breeze changes direction.

I'm a little leery of Egoyan's addition of a musical composition, by Mani Manzanani -- Snow's piece is quietly mesmerizing, the only sound being the breeze through the fabric, and then its satisfying thwack as it hits the screen -- but a public installation seems like the perfect venue to fully appreciate its playful, hypnotic effect.

I haven't seen (or experienced, more rightly) Ship o' Fools, as it's a new piece commissioned by Luminato, but having seen a lot of their previous work -- Cardiff's mesmerizing audio walks, where you put on headphones and allow her to guide you through a landscape she haunts with a breathy insistence, are captivating; ditto 40 Part Motet, a mechanized choral piece that would melt the hardest heart -- I can say without hesitation that I can't wait. And that's the first time Luminato has ever made me say that.

Last days: Look, listen, enjoy

Back to that "things you might have seen" problem I mentioned, a couple of note, with a single day to catch them. First, Hadley + Maxwell, a Vancouver duo of conceptual pranskters (I think?) currently on display at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

The show is called Baroque Baroque (as in, overdoing the already overdone; get it?), and the installation stays true to its title; two text panels tangled in indecision -- the same phrases, rephrased over and over, make a huge knot of leadingly meaningless verbiage (but try to stop reading). A pile of old radios sit in an over-extended dresser drawer; a tiny carved figure has its shadow bounced from a mirror onto the ceiling. A few other things, but nevermind that for the moment; H+M don't make objects -- I think? -- so much as vibes, quizzically disordered environments that defy expectation and your own codified sense of how to behave within them. Feeling perpetually disarmed, you defer to habit -- regarding objects, trying to make sense of them, when in the end, you can't. This is about being dislocated in the experience, not looking at stuff (I think?)and if gleeful consternation is your bag, hurry on up over, why don't you?

Meanwhile, tomorrow marks the end of the run of Katie Bethune Leamen's Dazzle Shizzle at MKG127. There's a lovely little double-entendre to the title -- Leamen juxtaposes the idea of World War I's dazzle ships, camoflauged by gaudy geometric patterns to confuse attackers with the equally gaudy 80s album of the same name, by John Hughes' soundtrackists OMD  -- and the work does its best to mirror its namesake's subterfuge: Reflective meteorites are tactile and seductive baubles that defy deeper reading; a a selection of abstract paintings have both a friendly, cartoonish appeal and the sheen of pop ephemera -- they're re-treatments of the OMD album cover.

But who's the hairy dude in the parka? Oh, right -- Robert Peary, the arctic explorer, who Bethune-Leamen sites in the arctic, there to find the sparkly meteorites. Aha.

Urban abstraction: Denyse Thomasos at Olga Korper

Denyse Thomasos was born in Trinidad, raised in Mississauga, went to art school at Yale and lives in New York. All of this produces a hybrid sensibility that informs her work with a frantic, claustrophic sense that seems to toggle between explosive exuberance and outright dread. In her current show of paintings at Olga Korper, Thomasos plants a foot on either side of the border between representation and abstraction, conjuring colourful nightmarescapes of not-quite-readable urban forms -- oblique skyscrapers and railway tunnels seem to rear up and keel over as wildly colourful semi-schematics -- and ghostly-dark, grim figures, near lost in the wash.

Thomasos engages  a keen sense of both architectural form and post-colonial oppression, from slavery on through to the skin-tone skewed US prison population -- hint: it's not white -- which she's spent considerable time researching over the years. If it all sounds a tad grim, think again; Thomasos' current work at Olga Korper is magnetically engaging, near-kinetically ebullient. Call it a stretch, but one huge piece, "Arc" (above), has vague echoes for me of the more austere dynamism of Piet Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie Woogie," an abstracted urban grid brought to life by the painter's passion for jazz -- in spirit, at least; but Thomasos' work is at the same time more urgent, more menacing, and more joyful. That's a lot to pack into an abstract package, but it's all there -- and then some. Only until March 20.