Like you (I hope) I've been taking some quiet time this week. Best wishes for the holidays, and we'll catch up next week.
Work by John Baldessari.
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Like you (I hope) I've been taking some quiet time this week. Best wishes for the holidays, and we'll catch up next week.
Work by John Baldessari.
A little Saturday morning institutional intrigue: You may have heard about the big stink that erupted when The Smithsonian, in Washington, immediately caved to pressures from the Catholic league, as well as a handful of Republican congressman, to remove an AIDS-themed video piece by David Wojnarowicz from its current show at the National Portrait Gallery.
Not surprisingly, museums like the Tate have lined up in support of Wojnarowicz's artistic freedom, offering to show the piece at earliest opportunity. But that's not all. In a show of solidarity, artists like AA Bronson, of General Idea, have asked pulled their own work from the show, called "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture."
The Smithsonian issued a release last week saying it stands "firmly behind" the show. Except for that troubling Wojnarowicz, I guess. The piece, which shows, among other things, ants skittering all over a crucifix, "was perceived by some to be anti-Christian," the Smithsonian said. It was removed "because the attention it was receiving distracted from the overall exhibition."
Meanwhile, the museum has said that Bronson's piece, above, a large photograph of General Idea mate Felix Partz's withered corpse, dressed and tucked into bed, shortly after his death from AIDS ("Felix, June 5, 1994," above) will not be returned, according to the museum, as it wishes to "keep the exhibition intact," according to a spokesperson. "Felix" is on loan from our National Gallery in Ottawa.
Anyway, the fallout continues. Both the Warhol Foundation and the Mapplethorpe Foundation have pulled all further funding of the Smithsonian until the Wojnarowicz is re-installed in the exhibition -- an obvious no-brainer for the Mapplethorpe organization, who have had their run-ins with conservatism in Washington before. Stay tuned ...
Some exctiing news out of the AGO this morning, that MoMA's astonishingly good Abstract Expressionist New York will be coming here immediately after it closes in New York in April. I saw the show in New York a little while ago, and as you might expect, its depth is remarkable; after all, the MoMA's very existence was predicated on this very moment in art history, and the entire exhibition is drawn from its collection.
What you might not be prepared for are the endless revelations to be foudn as the show traces the arc of abstraction in America from its most nascent moments -- that's Jackson Pollock's decidedly cubist work, Stenographic Figure, painted a few moments before he got into his splatters and drips, in 1942 -- through its eventual dissolution in the 70s. I was personally chuffed to see so many works by Harry Callahan, a personal favourite who doesn't get as much due as his much more famous cohorts.
Whatever the case, this is a blockbuster, true enough, but one with weight, depth and endless revelatory pleasures -- and, frankly, a major coup for the AGO -- and for us, who get to enjoy it all next summer. It's slightly scaled down -- 100 works, versus 130 at MoMA -- but still a great representation. It opens May 28, runnign to Sept.4, 2011.
... was spent in Detroit, with several artists and a community looking to, as they say, make things better. It seems to be working: There's a whole lot of grassroots goodness going on here in the art community that's slowly turning the notion of Detroit as metaphor for blight into one of creative possibility. Let's face it: They have great material; an empire was built here in short order in the early part of the 20th century, and its ruins are no less spectacular -- and much more profound, for their close-to-the bone-ness in our lurching post-industrial economy -- than anything in Rome.
On the advice of Scott Hocking, I ducked a few loose security measures and slipped inside a couple of iconic ruins, Fisher Auto Body (above) and the old Packard Factory, both of which Hocking has used to make site specific installations. They're extraodinary places, foreboding, but peaceful, too (Hocking describes them as "My walk in the woods;" he's been trekking their innards since he was a kid.
In any case, the scale of these sites is astonishing, as is their decrepitude. Is it politically correct to call failure on so grand a scale inspiring? For artists like Hocking, no such distinction is necessary; they're part of his life, and vital to his work. And, frankly, spectacular.
Image: Me.
What seems like 10 minutes ago, I wrote about Amanda Nedham's rough, menacing installation at Whippersnapper on College Street. Double-checking to make sure my brain hadn't blown a fuse, I was shocked to learn that it was almost a year ago -- last January, in fact -- and that time is moving even faster than I had feared. In any case, on both fronts, much has changed: In that time, Whippersnapper has gained bonafide Artist-Run Centre status, filling a gap in that landscape for fresh-out-of-school eager beavers, and Nedham has been hard at work on a new suite of her exhaustingly, painfully fine graphite drawings, now showing at Le Gallery.
Those who know her work won't be surprised to find it once again locked in visceral critique with the human impulse for forced servitude to our animal-world workhorses -- dogs, of course, and, well, horses. Nedham's primary concern is a conceptual taxonomy of the man-beast relationship, and it isn't always so bleak, but its undercurrent is: How animals are yoked into function by we nature-dissociated humans for various reasons, be it to till fields, ride into battle, herd sheep, or make nice between superpowers (a dismally rabid panda bear appears here, cuddling a puppy, reminding us, or me, of China's gift of Ling-Ling to the U.S. National Zoo in Washington in the 70s).
The results, buy and large, are primal fantasy-nightmares, all carcasses and bones and slathering jaws, knitting together dark childhood visions of fantastical beasts and a creepy, manipulated future of purpose built hybrids. It's not hard grasp which of these is bleaker -- or, with our unbridled cloning and genetic modification zeal, closer to reality.
Amanda Nedham, Like Milk & Blood, closes Dec. 22.
In this month of slowdown -- mostly closings, few openings, as we drift towards holiday quietude -- a word, to take a moment to see the current show at Diaz Contemporary. WIth Thomas Chisholm's textured monochrome grids -- aptly titled "White Paintings" -- set against the primal, totem-like forms of Robin Peck, the gallery is the tonal equivalent to waves lapping a beach -- still but not quite, warmingly cool in its unrelenting peace. The pairing is of rookie -- Chisholm -- and Peck, who has been making sculpture for more than 30 years; as the snow descends this week, both provide simple, timely pleasures of materiality and form, in very different packages, and ample contemplative space for these dreary, washed-out days of early winter. Until Dec. 22.
Image: Robin Peck at Diaz Contemporary
My colleague Peter Goddard writes today that Ojibway artist Carl Beam "deserves a wider spotlight," lamenting the fact, I suppose, that the current National Gallery retrospective isn't touring to the major centres in central Canada, ours among them (the Beam show will travel widely, though, to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology and, impressively, the National Museum of the American Indian in New York).
I agree that it's somewhat confounding that Beam, from Manitoulin Island and always with a presence in the Toronto art scene, won't be seen here in what might be the most comprehensive institutional survey of his work ever mounted. However, I don't think its myopia on the part of the major centres so much as institutional pride getting in the way.
The Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery seem to rarely share exhibitions (the last one, I think, was Ed Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes, way back in 2004). I don't know for certain, but I assume the museums in Montreal behave in much the same way.
However unfortunate this may be for viewers -- and it absolutely is -- you can see their point, to some degree: For any of these institutions, simply receiving a National Gallery show becomes a tacit admission they aren't on the same playing field. For the WAG, the Glenbow in Calgary, or even the fancy new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, this is perfectly acceptable: In terms of collecting and scholarship, they aren't.
But for the AGO in particular, this is not the image they want to project. Ideally, their in-house productions would match anything the NGC does. It seems they're not content to be a receptor for a federal power, which is in some ways admirable; but it does occasionally deny this audience access to relevant programming -- not to mention the deepest collections in the country, bar none -- which is a shame.
Meanwhile, Beam: I first saw his work when he was still alive -- he died in 2005 at 62 -- at the defunct DeLeon-White Gallery on West Queen West; it's hard to believe he had been at it for more than 20 years by then already. Whatever you might think of his collagist, multi-media work -- my sense was a mixed bag of gutsy viscerality and pedantic hokeyness; when it worked, though, did it ever -- it's beyond reproach to call him a pioneer in establishign First Nations art in a critical, contemporary context. You should see it. And you should be able to right here.
This and that, lately, including a couple of short pieces on Kai Chan at the Textile Museum, Robert Mapplethorpe at Olga Korper, Bill Burns at MKG127, and the excellent It Is What It Is at the National Gallery, for which I will not apologize for overtly gushing.
Right this very second, I'm using Via Rail's handy on-board Wifi to post this, on my way to Detroit to meet up with Scott Hocking -- the guy who made the above installation, in Detroit's decades-since-destroyed Packard factory -- to see what he does with the latter-day equivalent of Roman ruins: A fallen empire, with seeds sprouting in the undergrowth. Should be fun ...
Image: Scott Hocking, Garden of the Gods, 2009-10.
Sometimes -- or always, depending on how you feel about my ilk -- art is best seen and not much talked about, which is how I felt seeing Barbara Balfour's quietly profound exhibition Living & Dying at YYZ. Sadly, it close this past weekend, but it was a subtle essay on the quotidienne rituals that we use to mark our painfully limited time on this earth. Balfour simply printed multiples of her hand-written rendering those two simple words, in varying weight and colour of ink, suggesting, perhaps, the largely invarying routines that make up the majority of each of our lives. Depending on your point of view, you can take this as troubling or quietly comforting. I lean towards the latter. I left, oddly, reassured about my own impermanence. That's something, I think.
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