Favourites: The Albright Knox

Working on a story about the effort sparked by David Liss and Gregory Burke to bring a bonafide Toronto Biennial to fruition, I took the opportunity to drive down to Buffalo to visit the Albright Knox, which, it so happens, is the force beyond Western New York's own biennial event, "Beyond/In WNY," which opens in September.

It's comprised of about 30% Toronto artists, but nevermind that for the moment; part and parcel of my meeting with the Albright's director Louis Grachos and Hallwalls director John Massier was a lovely tour of the Albright. I hadn't been there in ages, and had forgotten what a truly inspiring small museum it was. Wander in off the street and your (or my) gaze is immediately caught by an extraodinary large canvas by Clifford Still, of which the gallery has the largest collection the world. (the Albright is doing a big Still show starting June 25, which for me is a must).

He's surrounded by a who's who of American pop, minimalist and abstract greatest hits -- Pollock, Rothko, Jasper Johns, Carl Andre, the list goes on -- but intermingled brilliantly with some amazing recent contemporary acquistions.  One of my two favourites was a thick stack of papers with linked gold circles printed on them. 

It was Felix Gonzalez-Torres' "Untitled" (Double Portrait), from 1991, and the piece is what happens next: The stack is an invitation to take one with you as you go (which I did, of course). In keeping with the Albright's enviable international status, it was a joint acquistion between them and the Tate in London. My two-year old got her hands on it (the tabletop no longer a tall enough refuge for her sticky little fingers, alas), but I can take comfort it's not the only Gonzalez-Torres I'll ever own; next time I'm in Buffalo, I'll grab another one. 

But my favourite moment was Vik Muniz's "Verso (Nighthawks)," a 2008 piece. Wandering along the long hallway of storied moments in American painting, I came across one leaning against the wall, face down. The wooden back of the frame was weathered and rough; a tag read "Nighthawks," which would logically lead anyone to believe this was the famous Edward Hopper painting, waiting either to be installed or moved elsewhere.

The truth was, neither. The back is the front of Muniz's piece, an exactign recreation of Nighthawks from behind. It was a cheeky little injection of interventionist good humour amid the sacrosanct world of museums and painting, and the fact the Albright owns the piece proves what I had hoped and expected: That this is a museum that truly grasps the importance of the mix, and has clarity on its mission.  Would that they all could.

Toronto Now, Pt. 2

 The Art Gallery of Ontario just announced its second in the series of Toronto Now exhibitions, which will be a group/collaborative effort by Sebastian Butt, Janis Demkiw, Olia Mishchenko, Sandy Plotnikoff and Christine Swintak. I don't know much about it yet, but it's called 11:11. According to the gallery, "11:11 explores a set of ideas and images from different viewpoints and in different media," which, to my eye, is another way of saying "we didn't have a specific project ready for this slot, so here's some work we were able to put together on the fly." The drawing above, Olia Mishchenko's No Can Pop Machine (2010) seems to confirm as much, as it's billed as a "preliminary sketch for 11:11," just a few days before opening. 

Dean Baldwin, whose "Dork Porch" kicked off Toronto Now in April, mentioned as much as we chowed down in his wonderfully ramshackle installational in April; phase 3 was already booked (Allyson Mitchell, the AGO says, but I could have sworn it was Diane Borsato; I could also be losing my mind) but phase 2 was TBD, which didn't surprise Baldwin, as the Dork Porch came together on very short notice as well. Whatever the case, I'll get a good look at it in the next week or so and tell you all about it.

The artist will leave the building, finally: Marina Abromovich wraps up at MoMA

All good things come to an end, and today, one of the best in recent memory wraps up at the end of the day when Marina Abromovich takes her leave of her months-long performance piece, "The Artist Is Present," at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The piece, which gives a four-decade retrospective of Abromovich's work its name, is an abject lesson in the power of economy: Since March, Abromovich has spent 7 hours each day -- all the museum's opening hours -- sitting in a chair in Moma's atrium, silently staring at a chair across from her. By the end of it, she'll have spent nearly 720 hours doing no more than that.

Museum visitors were welcomed to take the empty seat for as long as they liked. Abromovich neither spoke nor acknowledged them; she simply continued her silent vigil. You can watch a live video feed here.

However sparse, the performance has been nonetheless been the most potent of the entire show, owing in no small part to the presence of Abromovich herself (her work being almost entirely performance based, she's hired others to re-enact other pieces at MoMA.) Visitors have described the experience as incredibly moving, a silent communion with a deeply committed artist for whom both physical and psychological sacrifice are elemental to her work.

For me, this piece strips away some of the ungainly gaudiness her work took on in recent years -- Abromovich could be as showy and near-camp as she was spare and visceral, incorporating hokey props and iconography at times that moved her work closer to sideshow -- and distills it down to an emotional core -- a simple invitation in which resides such disarming intimacy to be almost unbearable.

She's drawn a long list of luminaries to the seat, including Lou Reed, Isabella Rossellini and Bjork, to name a handful. If the list -- about 1500 in total -- didn't happen to include you, more's the bad: "The Artist is Present" will not be traveling. Alas.

Weekend notes: Luis Jacob's "Album IV" launch at Art Metropole

It's a reasonably quiet weekend in the city as most of the Contact shows come off the walls in prep for whatever's next, but one event I'm hoping to make is the launch of Luis Jacob's book "Album IV" at Art Metropole. Jacob, a Toronto artist with a burgeoning international reputation ("Album III" showed at Documenta in 2007, to raves) recently had the honour of "Album IV" being acquired by the Guggenheim in New York following its inclusion in its show "Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance" (the book was published by Art Met in an edition of 1000 after it was chosen for the exhibition, which runs to September of this year).

In any case, it's a de-personlaized scrapbook comprised of found images from books, magazines and wherever else that cobbles together a surprisingly coherent record of a life lived, from birth through infancy and childhood and on to adolescence and adulthood, all underlied with a quiet suggestion of norms, structures and social codes. It's being launched alongside a new edition of photographs by Jacob, called "Coalescent One." The launch is Saturday, May 29 at 3 pm, Art Metropole, 788 King Street West, 2nd floor.

Contact 2010 Photo-a-Day: Silver Ghost, at Jane Corkin Gallery

  

At the Jane Corkin Gallery, Thaddeus Holownia offers a gentle elegy for — and quiet warning of — the fate of the Atlantic salmon with a suite of haunting, oblique images as chilling as they are seductive, in luminously cool black and white.Until May 31

Grange Prize finalists announced

Last year, I groused about the Grange Prize's arbitrary-seeming bi-national field of nominees, in which the Art Gallery of Ontario chooses two Canadians and two from another national government  -- last year, Mexico, this year, the U.S. -- for their field of four finalists.

I said then -- and maintain now -- that singling out specific nations from which to draw nominees alongside the Canadians seems mildly random. AGO curator Sophie Hackett has her own explanation: which is coming to this space soon. "(O)ne of the main goals here is international exchange," she wrote to me. "And so, we opt to partner with countries that have vibrant photography scenes, to foster dialogue about contemporary photography in each place, to do artist residency exchanges and to present exhibitions.  This close partnership creates a stronger platform for the nominated artists to gain exposure in other countries, and in particular the partner country."

Whatever the case, it's hard to argue with the cash -- $50,000 for the winner, $5,000 for each runner-up -- and any art prize with a purse like this is welcome, however oddly-chosen the field may seem to be. I don't know, maybe it's me ...

In any case, the nominees for this year came out this morning, and among them are Toronto favourite (of mine, at least) Kristan Horton, New York-based Canadian Moyra Davey, and Americans Josh Brand and Leslie Hewitt.

The prize is chosen not by judges but, American Idol-style, by online votes. You can cast yours eventually through the Grange Prize site. 

Image from Kristan Horton's Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Strangelove, 2003-2006

Blink, and I missed: Dave Dyment at MKG127

One of the things that drives me a little nuts about Contact is its tendency to overshadow the fact that there is, in fact, art to be seen all over the city that has nothing to do with the festival. That doesn't mean I don't go see it; it just means it takes me a while to get around to writing about it, which was the case with Dave Dyment's now-closed show at MKG127, 'Between the Click of the Light and the Start of the Dream."

For those who know him, Dyment's clever, playful, pop-culture inflected conceptualism can be like Marshall McLuhan's proverbial warm bath -- an art experience that challenges the mind while warming that place in the heart where unbridled teen angst, buried under years of cynicism, still lives in full force.

Dyment's favourite tropes, like popular music, were fully evident here, in several pieces that embraced  genuine adolescent devotion to Pink Floyd, inflected with the popular -- ahem, stoner -- myth that, when watching the original Judy Garland Wizard of Oz film with the sound turned off, and Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" as the soundtrack, it creates an eerily synchronous unity (Turner Classic Movies liked the idea enough that it actually broadcast the film with the Floyd album in 2000).

Psychologists call the phenomenon in which the human brain gropes for synchronous moments in the absence of rationale or fact apophenia -- which, in no coincidence, is the title of Dyment's piece (above) in which he takes a white pressing of Dark Side and splices it in a psychedelic swirl with the soundtrack from Oz -- together at last, never to be heard from again.

Little touches of literality like this both take the idea of obsessive fandom to an irrational extreme, but also highlight the absurdity of emotional connection to pop ephemera. Dyment, with a deliberate ham-fisted glee, is able to point out both but avoid the trap of smugness; you get the sense he's right there with you, not above it at all.

Another great piece that struck me was Addendum to the Tommy Westfall Universe, a pencil-on-paper schematic drawing (left) that linked St. Elsewhere -- which, for those who didn't know, was an insanely popular, critically-acclaimed 1980s hospital drama that ran for five years, only to reveal, in its finale, that the entire storyline took place in the mind of Westphall, an autistic boy -- to hundreds of popular TV shows.

This is not merely Dyment's invention: The Tommy Westphall Universe  is a full-fledged -- if tongue and cheek -- conspiracy theory, suggesting that the Westphall dreamscape encompasses multiple other shows; as St. Elsewhere cast members crossed over into other shows -- Homicide, for one, and Law & Order, for another -- the theory grew, to the point where Tom Fontana, St. Elsewhere's creator, said in 2003 that "someone did the math once... and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall's mind. God love him."

What Dyment does here in embody conspiracy-minded fandom in the vein of a true obsessive, trying to map the connections that would prove the theory right; that the form closely mimics the work of a truly conspiracy-minded artist, Mark Lombardi, whose schematics weren't mapping popular culture but dark connections in international military and political manipulations, is no coincidence, I'm sure. But Dyment's choice of Lombardi's form underscores that, for legions of fans, the connection is no less potent, or serious.

Finally, I want to finish by pointing out that, for all the heady play Dyment indulges in, his eye is equally clever. Apophenia, is one example; Calendar (for Jack Goldstein) (right) is another. You may not know that Goldstein was a Canadian who grew up in Los Angeles, and came to study art under John Baldessari, or that his work was rooted in Minimalism and performance, and that he would become a seminal film and sound artist, transferring the audio to vinyl records, or that he would turn to painting in the 80s and cash in a little, or that he killed himself in 2003. 

You don't need to know any of that, really, to appreciate the black-and-white lunar phases, played out in gentle shifts of vinyl in its sleeve, that the piece comprises. The elegy is clear, spare and beautiful, and it does what all good art does: Holds you tight, and tells you nothing until you ask. And you do.

Heffel auction tonight

 It's spring, and one of the things that means is a big offload of "important" Canadian art at the big three auction houses here -- Joyner's, on June 1, Sotheby's, on June 2, and Heffel's, which kicks things off tonight. 

While it's fair to guess that results won't set any records, amid this, the most recent financial crisis, this time in Europe, it's worth noting that in the fall, Heffel, on the strength of paintings by Tom Thomson and Emily Carr, and two sketches by Lawren Harris, turned in the second-highest total of all time, at $20.8 million -- though, notably, no new records for individual works. A Harris sketch that was a study for his famous "North Shore, Lake Superior," which many believed would knock off the all-time Canadian record of $5.1 million paid for a Paul Kane portrait in 2002, fell well short, selling for $3.5 million. 

There's no such record-breaking speculation this time around, but the marquee piece is an oil by Harris; his "Bylot Island 1" is estimated to go for between $1.5 - $2.5 million.  

Contact 2010 Photo a Day: Subjective at O'Born Contemoporary

 

Six young photographers under 30, some thriving on the the adrenal surge of conflict, others more interested in the revelations of the everyday, are showing this month at O'Born. There's a broad range of work here, sharing only a documentary thread; Simon Hayter's images of the conflict that arose around First Nations' land claims in Caledonia a few years ago shoulder up against Ryan Carter's pictures of the thriving UAE boomtowns; Eamon McMahon captures the day-to-day grind of workers in northern Alberta's oil sands, while Liz Rubincam shoots female truck drivers in South Africa. But the real eye-catcher in this field is the work of Dominic Nahr, one of those adrenal types, whose work in Kenya, Congo and Somalia for publications like the New York Times, contains that chilly sense of dread -- of disaster just waiting to happen. Here, he shows photos from the Haitian earthquake, a field so plentiful, in this jump-to-it news cycle, that the danger of minimizing serious tragedy into the churn of news-cycle cliche is ever-present; Nahr evades that trap completely with pictures that are at once human, tragic, unique and hopeful. The image above, submitted for the Contact site, bizarrely -- and the only one I have access to -- is perhaps the least exemplary of his work, so you'll just have to trust me. It's good. 

Contact 2010 (not really a) Photo today so much as an event: Suburban Beast presents Julian Montague at the Drake

Tomorrow night, my old pal Julian Montague, an ingenious artist from Buffalo, presents his Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America project at the Drake Hotel as part of Contact. 

Montague has committed several years to photographing and classifying errant shopping carts abandoned in various locations -- parking lots, dumpsters, and, weather permitting, the salt-caked snowbanks of his home town. The result, a taxonomy of abandoned carts, executed with deadpan authority, is a hilarious insight into the utilitarian objects we surround ourselves with. Thursday, May 27, 7 pm, at the Drake. 

Presented by Suburban Beast.