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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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If I were a curator...these would be my picks from Jim B.'s extensive photolog,
shot with a mobile phone and, due to the fact that Jim knows his tech,
uploaded directly to the site.
check the comments below for bigger version
Canadian Art Quote #2
Andrew J. Paterson
From the preface of Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures, YYZ Books, Toronto, 2001.
If economic dependency on the United States was already a foregone conclusion by the beginning of the 1950s, then Canadian distinction from the expanding American empire had to be asserted in a different domain. The cultural realm provided an excellent opportunity. Beginning with the 1941 Artists' Conference in Kingston, Ontario, the Federation of Canadian Artists and other arts-funding advocates "invoked the national interest as the best strategy for defending and advancing the boundaries of what they understood as culture" *, perhaps with a utopian fervour and perhaps strategically. Indeed, coalitions of visual and performing artists of the time tended not to position themselves as autonomous modernist artists. Instead, they engaged in discourses concerning democracy, culture, nation building, and public space. They worked alongside agrarian and labour activists, proto-feminists, and even popular entertainers.
*Jody Berland, "Nationalism and the Modernist Legacy: Dialogues with Innis," in Capital Culture: A Reader on Modern Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art, Jody Berland and Shelly Hornstein, eds. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000): 27.
If you can stand to hear even more about Howard Dean's so-called "scream," there's an interesting thread going on here at dratfink, including this link to video of the speech shot by someone in the audience.
Art poll#1 is CLOSED
FINAL SCORE:
B: SARAH MILROY=8
A: SALLY MCKAY=4
(damn, I can't even win my own poll! Well you haven't heard the last of me....I'll be baaaaaack.)
Judy Radul's Empathy with the Victor, at Toronto's Power Plant:
A: a thrilling, chilling existential experience? (sally mckay)
or
B: one that makes you numb with boredom? (sarah milroy)
post your vote in the comments below. Explanations and elaborations welcome but not required. Anonymous posts and fake names a-okay, but you can only vote once.
| New page here for occasional posts about bicycle fun and transportation, as well as related topics such as social justice, police, and one day getting rid of boring old cars. |
Thanks to friend BSL for the following quotes from lefty cartoonist Ted Rall on Common Dreams
CARQUEFOU, FRANCE -- Why do they hate us? And where do they get their hatred from?
These questions haunted me and three other American visitors as we studied a huge display of cartoons drawn by local schoolchildren assigned to convey their impressions of the United States. Panel after grisly panel depicted the United States ... as murderous, predatory and gleefully vicious.
We repeatedly explained that there's more to the United States than George Bush. We pointed out that most voters supported Gore in the last election, that hundreds of thousands of Americans marched against the war. We argued that Americans are kind, big-hearted people. French attendees listened politely, and we were treated with the utmost kindness and hospitality, but their kids' cartoons screamed: we hate you. That hurt.
From Better to Have Loved, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, Between the Lines, Toronto, 2002. pp.208.
I did not want to be a Canadian nationalist, I did not even want to see nationalism increase in Canada. I feel that, to the extent that I am a Canadian nationalist, I am so because of my anti-American tendencies. Interestingly, that sentiment is the same one that keeps me from being a whole-hearted Canadian nationalist. When I left the United States, nationalism had reached the status of religion. I would even say nationalism had become the new American religion.
Canadian Art Quote #1
Dot Tuer
From Dot Tuer's essay, "Is it Still Priviledged Art? The Polictics of Class and Collaboration in the Art Practice of Carol Conde and Karl Beveridge" in the anthology But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.
Known as the Massey Report, this Royal Commission presented recommendations to the Parliament in 1957 that formalized a role for subsidized culture as the guardian angel of national identity and led to the founding of the federal funding agency for the arts, the
Canada Council. In the process, it also drew a dividing line between high art and popular culture - the former designated as Canadian and in need of state patronage, the latter as the vulgar materialism of an American consumerism in need of state regulation. Positioning state funding of the arts as simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-populist, this policy officially sanctioned distrust of mass culture and initiated a series of contradictions between elitism and democratization of the arts that deepened over time.*
* For further analysis see Dot Tuer, "The Art of Nation Building: Constructing a Cultural Identity for Post-War Canada," Parallélogramme, 17 #4, (Spring 1992): 24-36.
Here's a piece of Canadiana. My friend NSL and I are avid fans of the Canadian TV show Da Vinci's Inquest. Da Vinci, played by Nicholas Campbell (who played the corrupt, killer cop in Cronenburg's Dead Zone), is this Columbo-style coroner only he's hot, he's off the booze and he's got a big social conscience (his main platform is safe injection sites). The show is set in Vancouver and the stories are intricate, political, and complicated like a British cop-show. Not only that, the character of Da Vinci is modelled after the real-life, left-wing mayor of Vancouver, Larry Campbell (he used to be the coroner). How often do you get good fun drama based on contemporary, honest-to-god real life? Okay, so now I must admit that Da Vinci's Inquest is an acquired taste. The acting is really really mannered. There's this old-fashioned, stilted, CBC-drama, Candian-cliché style of acting that's terrible and that I think is caused by a sad and sorry lack of conviction. Da Vinci's Inquest sounds like that at first, but this mannered style, while initially unnerving, is clearly intentional. Da Vinici is pure conviction, rollicking fiction, based-on-real-life, leftwing suspense. A crazy hybrid, and I love it . Yet besides NSL (who got me hooked) I barely know anyone else who likes it even a little bit. The show's 9pm Sunday night time slot is apparently up for grabs, and Da Vinci gets pre-empted by everything from Christmas specials to professional figure skating. So... whence came this Queen West (hip downtown Toronto) poster campaign? I get that there's a cult following, but I thought there were only two of us...and we count as old ladies if you're invoking cults.
I am going to break my own NO POETRY rule because its January... and February is coming up...so freakish desperate acts are allowed, and even welcomed. I accidentally read this poem by Dylan Thomas a few years ago and have been re-reading it frequently ever since.
A PROCESS IN THE WEATHER OF THE HEART
A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.
A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.
A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.
A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.
A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.
After visiting the Sculpture Center in Queens this weekend, I see why Matt King picked Ross Knight in his 2003 top ten. These wonky, awkward, pretty things look more flimsy than they really are. My favourite was the ski hill-esque structure with the colourful sheen and raggedy robot-style window panel (detail below). Both works have lots of understated personality, holding their own nicely in the bleak midwinter concrete courtyard. (for a more informed review go here)
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My bro is cool. Link to his upcoming art show.
(UPDATE: Heisey is exonerated and smear campaign exposed. Phew.)
Disturbing news today about Toronto police. The Police Services Board is a group who meet to oversee police actions. There is a history of power struggles between the board and the cops, with uppity councillors being bullied into quitting, and scary gut-toting Norm Gardiner ruling the roost. Alan Heisey has been a brave voice for citizen oversight on this board. In his report of September 2003 to a citizens activist group called the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, he called for a "more civilian oriented and independent complaints [against police misconduct] system," a more specific policy against racial profiling, better civilian access to the police services board [ie: meetings not to be held at police stations], and an overall attention to the importance of independent, civilian oversight of the police. I have personally been at a community meeting where Heisey spoke out strongly that citizens with complaints or issues regarding the cops come to the Police Services Board, outreach to the community in other words, and a pretty lone voice. Good news: Heisey has been elected chair of the board. This implies a new attitude at the city, a put-your-money-where -your-mouth-is step towards reigning in rampant police [in]discretion. The Bad news: a 'memo' was just leaked in which refers to an alleged conversation in which Heisey allegedly made some offhand, yet incriminating comment about child pornography. DON'T BUY IT. This is so obviously a play for police power. Heisey has been a voice for citizens and now he's up against it and out on a limb. We gotta stick up for him.
Toronto Star Letters to the Editor
lettertoed@thestar.ca
fax: 416 869-4322
One Yonge Street
Toronto, ON
M5E 1E6
Toronto Police Services Board
40 College Street
Toronto
M5G 2J3
Fax: (416) 808-8082
image from Sergio Prego's intense video at PS1. Stolen from here.
Monster is a word we use to put distance between ourselves and something we don't like. It's a term that's invoked when people do bad things, a knee-jerk reaction to say: that's not part of me or my world, and absolutely not my responsibility. I have just finished reading two books about monsters by RM Vaughan. Spells is a coming-of-age story from the dark side. It's set in St. John, New Brunswick, a dark, conservative town that several of my close friends have had the misfortune to grow up in. Spells takes root in the most horrid pits of adolescent shame and self-loathing, and spills back and forth between witchcraft and neurotic delusion. I like it because it addresses head-on the presence of monstrosity in commonplace, everyday existence. I also like it because, while the main character is gay, it is not his homosexuality per se that offends and frightens him, but his whole entire, fetid, pubescent self.
The Monster Trilogy is a collection of three short plays, monologues, that starts with Susan Smith. Remember her? She pushed her car into the lake and drowned her kids, then fingered a fictional "black man with a toque." I remember the headline "MONSTER" when the truth came out about what she'd done, and I've been mildly obsessed* ever since. In "The Susan Smith Tapes", RM Vaughan puts words into her mouth: "Sometimes I get hungry, right after supper, right on a full stomach, unsensible hungry, and then I says a little prayer to my angels up on God's lap. Momma hears you, boys, Momma hears your tummies rumblin'. Now you ask God for your supper. Beans and weiners. White bread with brown sugar. And then I ain't hungry no more."
The second play, "A Visitation by Saint Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance" is the voice of a cop, who is shaken up because she's discovered that a gruesome murderer/rapist is a distant relative: "[What] if its a gene, right, like a genetic predispatation to kill and it runs in the family? I could pass it on to my boy, Bradley. Maybe I got a thread of this gene -- that's all it takes, one bad link in the chain -- say I'm in the middle of the hot and hornies and the gene kicks in, right, the Kill Gene, kicks right the fuck into my head and I gotta do a violence? I gotta cut off a pair of nuts or an arm or a whole head? Whaddya gonna do, you can't deny your genetic destiny. So, here's the finaly unholy question: am I guilty?"
"Dead Teenagers" is a smoking female Reverend who has recently behaved inappropriatly at a teenager's funeral: "What a mob scene at Kristi Kenner's service. Hundreds of girls from the high school, and each one brought her own candle, or a pink teddy bear, or the worst sort of handmade cards. All this trash piled a mile high on the church steps. The Kenner family did not spend three thousand dollars on quality floral arrangements to have them tarted up with gaudy pink carnations and green women's rights ribbons and plastic unicorns tied to yellow roses."
I like these grim, funny vignettes very much, and Spells is a trip. But my primary interest is RM Vaughan's point of view that monsters are us. I think we do ourselves and each other a disservice when we cast away the undesirable. Enough tossing out our babies with the dirty, stinkin' bathwater.
* far far too much to read about Susan Smith is available here.
According to my friends J&J, people in Pickering, Ontario used to do this to recreate "that puppet from The Dark Crystal." I thought I knew what puppet they meant until I went looking.
I just saw Elephant. ow ow ow. If you are feeling too chipper, this'll deflate the mood in no time. I like it a lot, though, as a document and a marker in time. I like that it is so clearly Columbine, but at the same time clearly fiction. This ain't no mock-u-mentary, but rather knock-down, drag 'em out, expressionistic narrative. The first part of the film, before the shooting started, hit me hard with all the bad, remembered pain and hopelessness of high school. By the time the violence kicked in I was tear-streaked and numb. My own indifference to the bloodshed was in itself the most bleak and, I think (hope), informative part of the experience. I felt similarly about Larry Clark's Kids: painful to sit through but important to see. Now, 9 years later, I am sick of Larry Clark and his self-indulgent, self-serving fetishization of adolescence. And I have felt similarly about Gus Van Sant in the past. But maybe it takes a salacious point of view to provide otherwise clear-eyed, judgement-free pictures of the dark interior of teenager-dom.
Bowling for Columbine is the only place where I've seen a direct connection made between the amorality of youth (which we distance our selves from) to the amorality of the military industrial complex (in which, as adults, we are complicit). While Elephant, is paralysing and despair-inducing, Bowling for Columbine, is a call to action. I'd suggest seeing both.
All that said, here's a good angry rant by Michael Niederman, who hated Elephant and does a very nice job of saying why .
From a 1998 article in transmissions by Judy Radul:
Distance is needed for analysis, too much closeness tends to produce immersive and manipulative scenarios. The twentieth century has been charted via the disappearance of distance (Jameson), similarly live "presence" in performance works against distance to provide a sense of immediacy, a tangible connection to the performer. Paradoxically, our present moment seems bereft of live performance - yet besieged by compulsory liveliness, presence and animation. Let me crassly overstate the point': we crave animation because we want to feel alive. We have a distrust of contemplation and things passive, and an overdeveloped belief in "action" and "dialog".
I really love Radul's Empathy With Victor which is currently showing (scroll down) at the Power Plant in Toronto. In the 3-screen video, an actor and a director are working together on developing a scene. This scenario is itself scripted. There are many levels of representation and they fold back in on themselves, as the scenes within scenes play out, and our attention shifts back and forth from a meta-appreciation of the construct, to engagement with the characters and content. Sounds dry and boring but nope, its not. It's a thrilling, chilling existential experience. The 'actor' is working himself into the character of a man (Victor) who is about to present a eulogy at his friend's funeral. He is practicing his talk, while ironing. The eulogoy itself is an abstracted exploration of mortality. What does it mean to be a person, and by extension to be dead? Victor ends up concluding that his friend's death is a sad occasion because, and only because, he was human. He concludes this many times, as the actor tries to get inside the character with helpful prods and suggestions from the actor playing the director.
Here are some more of Radul's words, from the article quoted above:
What can or should be considered "live" is a philosophical question but wittingly (or unwittingly) it is also a question which performance engages with. Is the live situation best defined in terms of humans, sentient organisms, matter, conjunctions of time and place or an intensity of lived experience? What we accept as "live" structures a hierarchy between the live and the inanimate. It also structures our understanding of time. The present is alive, and dies with each passing moment. The death of not only the mortal body but of experience is something capitalist society uses to trigger a panoply of consumptive responses through anxiety. But, if, like many other cultures, we broaden our understanding of what is "live" or "alive" we may be able to work in the interstices of these hierarchies for an oppositional effect.
Top ten art lists for 2003 are gathered together here. Thanks folks!