Nuit Blah? There's always hope.

Here we go again: It's Nuit Blanche time, and I can't tell you how thrilled I'll be to be riding around the entire city on my bike in the freezing cold, battling crowds, dodging vomit, avoiding rampant product promotion and generally searching for somethign to justify the entire experience. Inevitably, there's something out there that perks up my spirits, but at this end of the 12-hour tunnel with no light in sight, it's a little hard to see just now. 

Anyway, my usual game of darts in choosing worthwhile experiences at Nuit Blanche without having had any opportunity to see them first (of course) is in the paper today, with a little companion piece about what I've learned in my many multiple overnighters of the past few years. As ever, I'll be tapping away at the keyboard, bleary-eyed, on Sunday, to tell you what I saw. I'm sure you can't wait. 

If you're out there in the early part of the evening (8 - 10 or so), drop by Queen and Gladstone, where I'll be partnering with my TAAC pals for a reprise of our event of last year, Speed Art Criticism. Bring some stuff, we'll talk. Or don't bring anything. We can still talk. It'd be nice to see you. Most of you, at least. 

And above all, stay warm. The night can be a cold, cold place. 

 

Art and Drinks? Sounds good to me

A little while back, fashion photographer George Whiteside was running the 1-800 Gallery on the corner of Dundas West and Palmerston. When he shut that down -- the fourth gallery, by my count, to expire in that very space, it seemed destined for something a little more commercially viable, cueing the collective anxieties of an ever-in-flux stretch of street that the inevitable arrival of an all-night Falafel King outlet had crept that much closer.

Not so fast.Eminent media artist and general living legend John Oswald has taken over the space for a venture he calls, in suitably direct fashion, Art + Drinks. Inside, a simpel bar doles out cocktails while the walls are lined with film and video art -- Oswald's media of choice -- including works by David Rokeby, Bettina Hoffman, long-time Oswald confrere Michael Snow, and, of course, Oswald himself.

Oswald's on the road at the moment, but once he gets back, I'll stop in for a chat. And a drink. Perfect.

I swear to God

I neither asked nor intended for the kind of mega-exposure today's Thrush Holmes piece got in the paper today. Slow day, I guess, and if you throw enough pictures their way, anything can happen.

Now watch Paul Butler get shoved to page 23 when I'd really like to see the piece jump off the front of the section. Sigh. And you thought the internet was incoherent.

I swear to God

I neither asked nor intended for the kind of mega-exposure today's Thrush Holmes piece got in the paper today. Slow day, I guess, and if you throw enough pictures their way, anything can happen.

Now watch Paul Butler get shoved to page 23 when I'd really like to see the piece jump off the front of the section. Sigh. And you thought the internet was incoherent.

This week ...

I'll be catching up with Thrush Holmes, v. 2.0 (his opening on Saturday was like old times -- a madhouse -- but for the first time, not at his own personal gargantuan gallery, but Neubacher Shor; more on that later), as well as Paul Butler (look a couple of posts down), notable leftovers from TIFF like Ben Rivers' Slow Action at TPW , and the Grange Prize.

And I haven't even mentioned MOCCA, the Power Plant, and a bunch of other biggies yet. Ah, September. It's love-hate. My fingers hurt already.

High score: Marina Abramovich, the video game

Good fun this morning comes from ArtInfo, where I learned that Danish Denmark-based game designer and scholar Pippin Barr has created a low-fi, early-Nintendo-esque version of Marina Abramovich's movingly spare performance "The Artist Is Present," which Abramovich created for MoMA last year as part of an important retrospective of her career. 

Not surprisingly, the game's main feature is waiting, as many hundreds of New Yorkers did to sit across the table from a mute Abramovich for the duration of their choosing. Gamers shouldn't be surprised that the game takes upwards of 5 mostly action-free hours to complete -- or that communing with a tiny, pixellated Abramovic avatar doesn't offer quite the same emotional satisfaction, which is surely part of Barr's point in choosing such a necessarily physical experience to transcribe to his low-fi virtuality. (As Barr himself points out on this very blog, there is a more-defined portion of the game where a less-pixellated-but-still-dot-matrixy Abramovich appears on screen face-on). 

Nonetheless, conceptually, Barr's game seems to underscore the absolute truth that the real experience of presence and humanity can't be virtually recreated, regardless of technology. Still, funny, isn't it?

Curnoe rides again: Paul Butler, in residence at the AGO

 
(Above: One of Greg Curnoe's many renderings of his beloved Mariposa)

I spent some time yesterday with Paul Butler, who officially becomes the AGO's first-ever artist-in-residence with the opening of his Toronto Now show Saturday. Butler's up to all sorts of things over his two-month stay, but the first and most readily-viewable is the Toronto Now show, which reflects the relationally-inclined artists' personal communion with the spirit of Canadian art icon Greg Curnoe.

Curnoe was, nearly equally famously, a cyclist, and Butler chose that fascination of his as an entry point of engagement; a particularly moving moment came for me when I happened upon the show, still in various stages of installation, and found an exact replica of Curnoe's famous Mariposa bike leaning casually against the wall.

It was one of Curnoe's significant expressions of self, as the bold-red letraset slogan emblazoned on the crossbar attests ("CLOSE THE 49th PARALLEL ETC" it reads, a reflection of the artist's political activism.) It was also the bike Curnoe was riding when he was killed on a beautifully clear, sun-filled morning in 1992 when he was plowed into by a truck driver cruising the country side roads near London, On., without his full attention on what was in front of him.  

A loaded symbol, to say the least, and an emotional one that Butler took as guide to his own explorations. We'll talk about that in the paper soon, but in the meantime, the opening is Saturday night. Check it out. 

Art meets fashion, Canadian-style

Art and fashion have always seemed like strange kin -- both being obsessive hobbies of the rich and/or famous, for one, though art has ever been the poor cousin -- so it's a moderate no-brainer that one of Canada's top young designers might cross-fertilize his own aesthetic with that of a rising young Canadian artist. Enter Jeremy Laing, whose show in New York last weekend featured diaphynous shifts and naughty see-through dresses printed with the rough geometries of Niall McLelland.

A little over a year ago, McLelland became that rarest of Canadian art phenomena, the overnight sensation, when his sharp, cleverly austere, process-based works touched a nerve in the market. His photocopy works -- large sheafs of paper rendered flat blackin the copier, then folded and carried in his pocket for a few weeks to create an lived-in pattern of creasing -- flew off the walls at the Clint Roenisch Gallery. Then, last fall, frantic bidding for a piece at a silent auction nearly devolved into a fist-fight.

And now? Laing's  a budding fashion-world bona-fide, adored by an increasing number of a moneyed, exclusive set. If they hadn't heard of Niall McLelland before, they have now. Which means getting your hands on one of his pieces just got that much harder. Curse you, Laing! And congrats. 

Wonder of wonders: TIFF freebies, in the name of art

 

(Video: Nick and Sheila Pye's "The Flower Eaters," courtesy the artists and Birch Libralato Gallery)

So anyway, here it is: TIFF. Things got going officially on Thursday night, but not everything festival-related requires painful line-ups and crushing disappointment (to the poor, sad folks stuck 17-deep in the crush surrounding George Clooney's red carpet appearance: Better luck next year).

I'm not much for the hype that surrounds the annual celebrity frenzy, but it's hard not to like what the festival does with its Future Projections program, which, namely, is spread some of its wealth out and around to the local art scene, helping to fund and present festival-related exhibtions that might be prohibitively costly otherwise.

Exhibit A for me is the return of Nick and Shelia Pye to Toronto with their show of 4 video works, "Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board," at Birch Libralato. I liked it lots, and said so. Today and tomorrow I'll be visiting some other TIFF FP shows, like Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky's Road Movie at 51 Wolsely Ave, and Ben Rivers' "Slow Action" at Galllery TPW on Ossington, though a word of warning: The piece's specialized projector is causing some issues, which means it's out of commission for today (Tuesday) at least. I'll update when I know more. 

And there's that movie star guy who fancies himself an artist these days; what's his name again? Oh, right, James Franco, whose collaborative installation with director Gus van Sant, called "Memories of Idaho," is installed in the atrium of the Lightbox on King Street, a free public space amid the din.

The list goes on: David Rokeby's Plot Against Time at the Drake Hotel, Gregory Crewdson's Sanctuary, at the Contact Gallery on Spadina, Peter Lynch's Buffalo Days at the ROM's Thorsell Spirit House (just inside the main entracne, and a bunch more. Check it out.

 

Brainwashed? Pas moi, merci quand-meme

(Photo: Mr. Brainwash at Roy Thomson Hall today. Photo by Steve Russell, Toronto Star)

So I'm back from holidays for 22 hours or so when I find myself face to face with the hero of Banksy's first foray into filmmaking, Mr. Brainwash, aka Thierry Guetta. Like everybody slightly famous who wants to be more so, Guetta is here for TIFF, though there's no star-making silver screen turn for the feckless videographer, whose opportune bumbling lead to his creating perhaps the greatest video archive of seminal street art imagineable. No, he's here in his incarnation as an artist himself, at the festival's behest. 

Even after speaking with him, I'm not exactly sure what he's doing here, though he spent today installing a bunch of life-sized Mountie mannequins along Roy Thomson Hall's red carpet. With them, Guetta's seven 8-foot tall spray cans, each representing a different film genre, line the carpet as well. 

Anyway. I'm not the first to suggest the entire Mr. Brainwash persona is a ruse by none other than Banksy himself, but having seen him up close and in person, I'm convinced of it. What I'm not entirely convinced of, though, is that Guetta is in on the joke. He's utterly guileless and remarkably, sincerely sweet-seeming, in that way that only the French can be (he moved to LA from Paris when he was 15, but still has a thick-as-moloasses Parisian accent.) 

Mr. Brainwash may have been created by the Banksy hype machine for his own sociological pranksterish purposes -- and I have no doubt he was -- but like Frankenstein's monster, the creation has broken free from its creator's intent and is now running amok in the real world. There's a reason so many believe that the art career of Mr. Brainwash is pure contrivance,  and if you go to see Brainwash's show at Gallery One in Yorkville, you'll see what I mean.

To my eye, Banksy's gone a little too far for anyone to reasonably believe Brainwash's facile, banal oeuvre -- cringe-inducing Warhol knock-offs, sunny, uninflected Banksy copies -- could be a sincere project. Then again, Guetta certainly seems to, and stalwart commitment coupled with childlike enthusiasm can be very convincing -- and, for those who have spent millons on Brainwash works, really is -- even set against a complete and utter void of talent. But like Brainwash says, "What it is to us to judge, what is art and what is not art? " Ah, right. Pardon me.