So, yeah: Nuit Blanche endeth the nightmare

How many times can someone preview several hundred art projects one has never seen? Apparently, the magic number is four, because that's how many times I've been called to the carpet to blather on about stuff I won't even get a look at until tomorrow night. You have to hand it to Nuit Blanche -- sorry, SCOTIABANK Nuit Blanche (rtm) -- they certainly know how to kick the hype machine into full gear and get all the lowly arts journalists high on the fumes. Don't get me wrong: There are a good many installations and performances I'll be keen to see -- just not with 314,000 other people at the same time all frantically trying to have an "experience" before the clock runs down.

In any case, I'm looking forward to putting this one (and myself) to bed so I can get back to normal. I'm almost -- almost -- done with all the mega museum shows (all by itself, the AGO, by its own count, had the most packed September in its history) and I'm dying (almost literally) to get back to intimate spaces and solo shows, of which there are too many to count. On my list are Scott McFarland, Iain Baxter& (above), Christopher Pratt, Christine Davis, Eric Glavin, Eric Fischl, and ... the list goes on. See you soon, I hope -- even sooner if you make it to the Brendan Fernandes catalogue launch tonight.

 

Terra Cotta Warrriors pulled from Western Canadian tour

I just received notice that the Chinese government has rescinded its promise to allow the current Terra Cotta Warriors exhibition at the ROM to continue its tour into Western Canada. Its concern, the ROM says, is the preservation of the artifacts, meaning it will limit future international exhibitions to one year.

What that means is the Montreal Beaux Arts will get the show next year as planned, but the Glenbow in Calgary and the Royal BC in Victoria lose out. Given how long in advance such things are planned, it could leave them scrambling.

More Nuit Blanche -- new and improved with more me!

**SEE BELOW FOR UPDATED SCHEDULE INFO!!!

Ahem. I forgot to mention -- which is fine, because I'll be mentioning it a lot this week -- that me and a gang of art critic types will be pulling a 12-hour stint of mano-a-mano art criticism for the full freakin' 12 hours of Nuit Blanche in Parkdale. The deal is this: Bring your work, or just bring your beefs (because nobody's expecting flowers, believe me) and we'll talk. 15 minutes per person to solve all the art world's problems. Sounds do-able, right?

Anyway, it's a great line-up with many of my esteemed colleagues pitching in to help out (see the flyer for all of us; I think I'll be the earlier part of the evening, wrapping up around 11:30 or so). Then, the very next day, I have to drag my bedraggled self down to the Drake for a panel discussion ominously titled "When Critics Speak" (is it me, or does that remind you of those low-rent wildlife TV shows: "When Animals Attack!").

Aaaaanyway, it's me, Leah Sandals (who writes about art for the National Post, Now and Canadian Art, among others), novelist Russell Smith, James Bradshaw of the Globe and Mail, and Peggy Gale, in whose presence I will likely quiver and die. Anyway, we're being moderated by Francisco Alvarez of the ROM's Institute for Contemporary Culture.

It's a lot of bodies, true, which makes discussion a little unwieldy -- especially seeing as we'll either be blind from exhaustion or vibrating from over-caffeination -- but hopefully we can hold it together to provide some insight. Or, you could just come down for the train-wreck spectacle of watching us drool on ourselves in public. Could happen.

Happy weekend.

 

THIS JUST IN: CONFIRMED CRITICS' SCHEDULE

I'm designated as a "floater" due to some uncontrollable circumstances (those being my wife being 8.96 months pregnant and liable to birth any second) but barring that, I'll be there early-ish.

Schedule:

7-10pm: Dan Adler (Artforum) and
David Balzer (Artforum, Canadian Art, EYE WEEKLY)
10pm-1am: Otino Corsano (artUS, otinocorsano.blogspot.com)  and
Sarah Milroy (The Globe and Mail, Canadian Art)
1-4am: Amish Morrell (C Magazine) and
Elena Potter (planforamiracle.wordpress .com)
1-7am: Bill Clarke (Modern Painters, ARTnews, Border Crossings, Magenta) and
Leah Sandals (National Post, Canadian Art, NOW)

FLOATER (likely earlier): Murray Whyte (The Toronto Star, Canadian Art, ARTnews, The New York Times)

 

New York Times/Canadian Art/ARTNews

Out of Site: A Nuit Blanche counter-program

It had to happen (or has it already?): A direct response to Nuit Blanche's forced 12-hour takeover of the downtown core. Earl Miller, a local curator and critic, has assembled some well-known artists (that's a mock-up for a piece by An Te Liu, for example) for some parallel programming on the same overnighter as the big event. 

It's called Out of Site, and the aim is to excavate the cultural history of Queen Street West, which -- Parkdale notwithstanding -- has been all but taken over by trendy retail and places to east and drink and splashy tourist events -- like, ahem, Nuit Blanche -- which have mostly served to obscure its rich past as the city's art-world centre of gravity. 

Liu's piece notwithstanding, will we be able to tell the difference between Nuit Blanche itself and Miller's commissions, which include personal favourites such as Roula Partheniou and Ulysses Castellanos?We'll have to wait and see. But in a town where fireworks displays are embraced over the more challenging -- and rewarding -- business of real explorations, in theory, this is a needed foil. Stay tuned.

Tonight: Eric Fischl at Barbara Edwards

In the maddening swirl of September, it's impossible to get to everything, but something I wish I could is tonight's opening of Eric Fischl's work at Barbara Edwards Contemporary. Edwards, who worked with Jared Sable for years, has taken a page from his book, funneling art-world luminaries into her tiny space for intimate solo shows (the last one, Jessica Stockholder, was a knockout). This one's beautifully timed, given the gross excess of Fischl's fellow so-called neo-expressionist Julian Schanbel, currently on display at the AGO; Fischl was always a better painter with both focus and finely-wrought ideas, and these intimate watercolours show are exemplary of the thoughtful arc his robust figuration has undergone over the years. The opening's tonight at 6; if you cant' make that, Fischl is in conversation with Sarah Milroy at 2 pm tomorrow at the gallery as part of the Canadian Art Gallery Hop.

Nuit Blanche-d

Nuit Blanche staged a press event yesterday with precisely no news whatsover,  to tell us what we already know -- the program, that is -- and to launch its notably flimsy "5 year retrospective," Some Enchanted Evenings. I told you all about it in the paper today -- or at least I tried to, but a good half of the story I wrote didn't end up making the print edition. Interesting.

In any case, I'm more than happy to reprise it: My view was that the city never lets an opportunity to trumpet the greatness of Nuit Blanche pass unnoticed -- and not having such an opportunity, is happy to create one, like yesterday. Meanwhile, the retrospective was an unintended monument to NB's maddening impermanence; printed on flimsy vinyl sheafs and draped on oversize clothes hangers scattered throughout the lobby of an office tower, the installation had all the charm of an ad campaign for dental floss.

That said, the content -- for which Fern Bayer, a longtime champion of Nuit Blanche, not to mention its potential as an event that lasts more than 12 hours, is responsible --  is great; it was like visiting old friends, like Jon Sasaki's brilliantly futile mascots from Lamport Stadium in 2008 (above), or Michael Snow's video loop of grazing sheep, projected on the outside of the ROM's planetarium dome in 2006. But it also reminded me that these things deserve a longer life, and that Nuit Blanche's main function -- as a fireworks display for tourists -- isn't much more than a splashy civic branding campaign, piggybacked on artists' efforts. And that ain't right. As ever, I love the spirit of the thing, but its momentum can be used to greater benefit to everyone, can't it?

Rebecca Belmore quits?

It's hard to imagine that Rebecca Belmore, a celebrated Canadian First Nations artist whose visceral responses to the post-colonial condition -- remember Fountain, her 2005 piece that was Canada's official entry to the 2005 Venice Biennale? -- would be giving up for good, but that was the message she sent earlier this week when she performed outside the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Belmore, as some know, is locked in a legal dispute with her former gallerist in Toronto, Pari Nadimi, which filed suit against her in Ontario court, after Belmore decided to seek representation elsewhere leave the gallery four years ago. The suit seeks significant financial damages -- suggested by Belmore above -- as compensation for what the gallery alleges to have invested in the development of her career.

Whether Belmore's actually quitting or not -- which would make her Vancouver performance, called "Worth," her last -- remains to be seen; but the precedent such a suit could set would shake the art world to its foundations. Artists move galleries all the time, though typically not without pain; these relationships are close, emotional things, and such moves are rarely made easily. To introduce punitive legal consequences would alter than dynamic entirely. Stay tuned.

By the by, check out the Facebook group on this issue here.

Caught in Traffic

Hi there. It's been a while. Sorry about that. September is the full-on silly season around here, and I've had my hands full, plowing through pieces on David Hoffos, Shary Boyle and TIFF, among others.

This week is no less busy, starting with the full freeway tour of Traffic (pardon the pun), the sprawling survey of the history of Canadian conceptualism that opened Friday.

First, though, I started my suburban tour at the AGYU to chat with Terence Houle, who's GIVN'R opens there this week; not part of the survey, of course, the only traffic I encountered there was on Black Creek Drive, which inched along at a crawl on the way up.

From there, I embarked on my Traffic tour, cruising out to the Blackwood Gallery, which is mostly a survey of NASCAD's emergence as a conceptual hub in the late 60s (that's one of John Baldessari's projects there, "I will not make any more boring art," above) on to the Doris McCarthy Gallery at U of T Scarborough, which hosts the Southern Ontario portion of the show.

Not surprisingly, that was my day -- 3 galleries, 164 km, 7 hours. I'll be heading to the downtown portion of Traffic soon, but my initial impressions are both overwhelmed and impressed. How to digest it all? No idea. But I was reminded, gleefully, of the innocent, pioneering spirit of exploration of discovery and defiance of convention, that conceptualism was all about. It kind of made me giddy. More later. 

It begins.

So here we are, TIFF again, bigfooting the city's cultural scene (and most of its media). Not a bad thing; lots of fun stuff goes down, and TIFF has expanded its reach into the art world as well, throwing cash at places like Gallery TPW and MOCCA to mount exhibitions that don't put them out of pocket one penny (always a boon in the ever-fraught world of art funding.)

Anyway, the opening gala is tonight, but you can't get into that, so why not go check the openings of TIFF-tangentials you can see? TPW has a sweet minor work by William Kentridge that riffs off the Melies' masterpiece Journey to the Moon, open now, while MOCCA hosts a side project to its main event -- David Hoffos mesmerising "Scenes from the House Dream" -- called HEAVENHELL, a redux of a notorious Kurosawa scene on multiple screens. Opens tomorrow night; see you there. 

Oh, and hey, Douglas Gordon goes one better and is actually coming into town next week after his double-up of his near-static 24-Hour Psycho (literally, the Hitchcock classic slowed down to a full day's length) is installed in the Bell Lightbox. Funny to think that was made in 1993, and I've seen it here in Toronto twice already. Gordon's more recent work -- involving multiple screens and, in some cases, elephants -- is more enthralling, partly because it's actually dynamic (not, ahem, static) but his "Psycho's" a milestone worth seeing. For a few minutes, anyway.

Oh, and apropos of nothing (mostly): 24-second Psycho, a goofy (and mercifully brief) response

Well, this is awkward: Snow warning at TIFF?

This could get ugly. My colleague Martin Knelman reported last week that Michael Snow, Canada's eminence grise of conceptual film, had sued the developers behind the construction of TIFF's Lightbox (and, ahem, condo tower) for breach of contract over a work he says was commissioned for the building. The developers, Daniels Corp., have replied they have no such contract with Snow (Snow's lawyer acknowledges there's nothing in writing, though he argues an "exchange of considerations" is legally binding.")

Slightly old news, perhaps, but when you think about it, it's a wily bit of PR on the part of the Snow Camp. Here on the eve of TIFF -- whatever the truth of the dispute -- it's fantastically bad timing to have quite possibly Canada's best-known international artist -- and one revered by much of the global film community set to descend on the brand-new Lightbox next week -- in a very public row over potential mistreatment of his iconic work.

Add in that the skirmish is stationed on the doorstep of our very own, brand-new temple of film -- Snow's piece, "Tower of Film," was intended as a monument to a medium rapidly being replaced by digital technology -- and it gets uglier still.  TIFF is unfortunately caught in the middle of this -- they have nothing to do with the dispute -- but it's hard to imagine Snow feeling much like hanging out in a building that symbolizes a monumental snub. That might make October's scheduled showing of a new print of his iconic film, Wavelength, at the Lightbox a little awkward, though TIFF confirms Snow will honour the commitment.