AA Bronson resigns from Printed Matter

I'm totally not blogging while I'm on holiday, but wanted to pass along the tidbit that AA Bronson, the surviving member of General Idea, has resigned as chief executive of Printed Matter in New York. He's been stewarding the venerable not-for-profit art institution (we don't say "artist run centre" in America) for six years, following an intitial six-month commitment to help right the organization, which he found in financial and mission turmoil.

That achieved, he's refocusing on "Haute Culture," the huge General Idea retrospective openining at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in February 2011. Oh, and he's finishing his Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, where he's artistic director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice. 

Nice career.

In case you missed it ...

And you might have, given the embarassing sporadic-ness (is that a word?) of my online ramblings lately, but I'm off for a while. See you in November, when, hopefully, something resembling normalcy will return.

Vote for Kristan!! Grange Prize 2010

Last night, I was invited by the AGO to speak at one of their Next events -- nominally, their quasi-young patrons circle, where under-40s gather monthly for cultural edification and, just as importantly, free booze -- centred on the $50,000 Grange Prize for photography.

The idea was this: Four photographers in competition, four speakers stumping for their assigned candidate, and a roomful of potential votes (the Grange Prize is decided not by an esteemed jury, but American Idol style -- by y-o-u through online voting.)

In any case, my artist was Kristan Horton, who I was lucky enough to be able to choose, having had first crack (Greg Seale, advocating for Leslie Hewitt, had Kristan listed as his first choice as well). My only worry was whether or not, given a 5-minute time limit,I coud possibly do justive to the dizzying complexities of Kristan's work.

The answer: Of course not. Rattled by the ticking clock with 90 seconds remaining, I found myself rapidly babbling to wedge in all the stuff I wanted to say, forgot half of it, and went way, way over time anyway. As I sat and listened to the other candidates, I realized something, not just about the process, but about Kristan's work: Conceptually complex as it is, there's always a dizzying gut-check moment when you stand in front of one of his intensely constructed images, or equally manic-obsessive stop-motion videos.

For all the easy gropes to art history -- surrealism, abstraction -- and pop culture -- Kubrick, Poltergeist -- Kristan works at a deeply committed intuitive level that does nothign so much as tilt vainly at rendering order from the image-laden chaos of our current culture. His intensely constructed images are simultaneously being dismantled in front of your eyes, forcing you to question the veracity of what you're seeing, and,by extension, the truthfulness of any image. Kristan takes things apart in a quest to unearth the truth of the image, and finding none, re-assembles the component parts into something no less real, but entirely new. It's a hectic, satisfying confusion, brimming with intense commitment and leavened with good humour. Importantly, as I said last night, while his techniques may be in wide use, nobody does what Kristan does. He is mesmerizingly original. So go here, and vote for him.

http://thegrangeprize.com/vote-2010

It's the right thing to do.

 

More AGO: Gerald McMaster appointed as co-director of Sydney Biennial

Some happier news out of ye olde AGO is that the museum's Canadian art curator Gerald McMaster -- he of Nuit Blanche's Zone A this year, among countless other things -- will be co-creative director of the Sydney Biennial on 2012. This is likely good news for McMaster favourites like Kent Monkman, who may well be in line for a trip down under in two years time. It could also be helpful in getting our own stop/start efforts to establish a biennial here off the ground; McMaster will return with a wealth of knowledge on how these things come together. The AGO has, in general, been indifferent to those efforts, but McMaster obviously has interest in such things. Here's hoping it helps spark a broader institutional interest as well. 

This just in: The Drama and Desire disaster

It gives me precisely zero pleasure to pass on the shocking news break that my colleague, Martin Knelman, has in the paper tomorrow. In a nutshell, he reports that Drama and Desire, the hokey art/theatre exhibition the museum had hoped would be a summer blockbuster, failed to attract crowds and left it with a $3 million shortfall.

What this means, I would guess, is a dent in the AGO's already-limited future ambitions, putting a damper on new exhibtions and acquistions in the short term. This is good news to no-one already feeling underserved by its programming; lean times are about to get a little leaner. Here's hoping staffing, already at a notable low, doesn't take a hit because of it.

Above: Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii, a 1786 oil on canvas from the Toledo Museum of Art's collection is part of the AGO's exhibit Drama and Desire: Artists and the Theatre.