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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Gene Threndyle's piece for the weekend long WADE show (performances and installations in wading pools in Toronto's parks, curated by Christine Pearson and Sandra Rechico) was one damn fine work of public art. He filled the pool at Trinity Bellwoods Park with inflatable killer whales, each painted with an excerpt from Dante's Inferno. The kids loved it, taking to the whales instantly without a care for the strange dark poetics beneath their bellies. The parents loved it. The art audience loved it. All afternoon we sat around in the sun and shade. Egon Von Bark played old 78s his victrola and they sounded good to us eventhough the needles were dull and scoured threads of vinyl up off the disks.
thanks to Tanya Read for this excellent photo!
There was also a reading from the Inferno. Von Bark stood in the pool and delivered some lovely elocution while the children bumped their whales around his shins. Mark Hazen and Anne-Marie Hood administered a long and challenging test to guage your level of hell (I got 7, which was disconcerting but seemed par for the course).
David Hoffos' piece for WADE at Bellevue Square Park. Photo by Justin Waddell
Another WADE installation I really liked was by David Hoffos in Bellevue Park. It's a night piece, a video projection of a little boy standing in the edge of the pool, his toy boat a little distance out into the water. It's sad and quite creepy. The ghostlike child is life-size, almost part of the crowd, but hopelessly remote, isolated and from us flesh and blood folks by the fact of being a mere video projection. These are the only two WADE pieces I've seen so far, and they've both been excellent. Maybe I'll see some more of them later today.
Any reports on other WADE performances are very welcome in the comments section below. If you want to send me jpegs at smblog@sympatico.ca, I'll post em with your comment.
what is an art blog?
Jeffrey Matt and I performed on Tuesday evening at 40 Tiny Queer Performances Under a Pink Light curated by RM Vaughan. It was a fun, fast evening with a great lineup. The deal was that you had one single minute to perform before the lights went down. The acts charged along and the whole darn thing took exactly an hour. I was pretty pleased with our performance, although the rehearsals were better (more physics, less mouse). Jeffrey played the spry jumping-lesson-teacher with knowledge of physics. I played Miss Mouse, the lumpen-yet-game student of jumping. Maybe I'll get some quicktime up one of these days. Pete Dako made a nice post about the evening, and there's a pic of us. (Thanks for the link, Pete!)
Interesting survey on art blogging here at MTAA [via Tom Moody]. Tom Moody's answers are here.
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Catherine Osborne just posted a nice piece on Eddo Stern's show at AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). She's into the work, but not so keen on the sculptures, and I agree that of his ouevre to date, they are also my least favourite pieces. However they functioned quite differently in the context of this exhibition than when I saw them at Postmasters. At AGO, Stern's art is all together in one room. This is a bit distracting, but in other ways cramming the sculptures up against the videos is good for both bodies of work. The didacticism of the videos plays off against the nerdy medieval festish humour of the sculptures, connecting one kind of harmless recreation (ie: dressing up like knights and elves and throwing tinfoil balls around in the woods) with another (playing video games in which you re-live the brotherhood-and-lightning-reflexes-and-suchlike-juicey-tropes of Vietnam and other fun wars). Both together make a tidy picture of a violent culture that just so happens to be killing and torturing a lot of people in the middle east. There are sublteties to this work that are a bit obscured in this noisey installation, but I don't think contemporary events are really calling for nuance right now.
There is a new sculpture, two Hulk-like fists of beige, pseudo-stone pounding a keyboard, shooting off red, white and blue stars on a monitor, and playing bellicose favourites such as Queen's "We are the Champions." I'm guessing it reads as subversive in the states, whereas here it falls a little flat as over-obvious humour. It's silly but kind of satisfying nonetheless. The new video is more troublesome and more interesting. It's a montage of internet Flash games in which you kill (mutilate, humiliate, and sexually violate) Osama Bin Laden; cropped so the gory pixelated details are blown up huge. This all to tunes from big Jesus movies like Last Temptation of Christ and Passion. Normally I think I'd find this all a bit heavy-handed. Right now, however, when war fetish and violence are anything but abstract, driving home the political points in a major art museum feels appropriate to me (as the Whitney Biennial, with its pretty pastels and tender touches did not). I've heard Eddo talk in public twice, and he's ambitious, earnest and smart about the implications and narratives of technology. "Vietnam Romance" is still one of my favourite artworks, and I'm very curious about the ongoing game development and community hub activities of C-Level in LA. For more writing on C-Level, see Tom Moody's review of the Waco game .
Note: Mark Allen of C-Level is no longer working on the Waco game, but he's started a gallery called machine project. The current show is Jessica Z Hutchins, also a C-Level member, artist and writer. She came to Toronto for Eddo Stern's AGO opening, and meeting her was, for me, a high point of the evening. Her new book, Pastoral, is available online here.
In May I went on a rant about nature/culture and driving cars to lakes. Just spent pretty much the whole weekend, in the city, looking at water, birds, plants and the odd nature/culture hybrid objects that make up the basis of Leslie Spit - a park, in the lake, on an ever-morphing pile of "clean fill." (I guess toilets, tiles, bricks, glass, rebar and all the other various industrial urban bits and pieces get pretty clean once you wash them off in a great big lake).
Just found out that one of my favourite books, Laddders by Albert Pope, has a great website with diagrams and animation.
cyborg notes:
I've been reading a collection of essays by Critical Art Ensemble called Flesh Machine (available here in PDF format). The essay titled "Posthuman Development in the Age of Pancapitalism" is pretty useful for thinking about cyborgs and the horrible paradoxes between utopic/dystopic versions of where we might be headed with this whole cerebral web-based interconnectedness thing. The essay was written in 1998 (I think, have to check because it could be earlier) and talks about Virtual Reality (VR). Remember when goggle headsets seemed exotic and full of promise? (goggle => => => google {heh heh...don't mind me}) CAE has this to say:
VR’s primary value to the ISA [Ideological State Apparatus] is not as a technology at all, but as a myth. VR functions as a technology that is out on the horizon, promising that one day members of the public will be empowered by rendering capabilities which will allow them to create multisensual experiences to satisfy their own particular desires. The mysterious aura constructed around this technology associates it with the exotic, the erotic, and potentially, with the ethereal. By perpetuating the myth of a wish machine that is always about to arrive, the pancapitalist ISA builds in the population a desire to be close to image technology, to own it. Unfortunately, most technology is being designed for precisely the opposite purpose from that of a wish machine, that is, to make possible better control of the material world and its populations. This combination of myth and hardware sets the foundation for the material posthuman world of the cyborg.It's a good idea to remember that the promise of populist egalitarian empowerment is an early symptom of ultimately oppressive technological developments. Ursula Franklin had some good stuff to say on this relating the advent of cars to the advent of computers, and as soon as I find the book (too many piles) I'll post some of it. In the meantime, CAE* is sounding pretty grim on the topic of the future.
The current spectacle of technology is having an effect on the civilian population of the appropriate classes, although cyborg development in this sector is a little more subtle than in the military. Most people have seen the first phases of the civilian cyborg, which is typically an information cyborg. They are usually equipped with lap-top computers and cellular phones. Everywhere they go, their technology goes with them. They are always prepared to work, and even in their leisure hours they can be activated for duty. Basically, these beings are intelligent, autonomous workstations that are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and at the same time can be transformed into electronic consumers, whenever necessary. In this phase of posthuman development, the will to purity, explicit in the spectacle of anxiety, manifests itself in two significant forms: First is the purification of the pancapitalist cycle of waking everyday life.* in case you hadn't noticed these guys are currently stuck deep in patriot-act-style doo-doo and need some help.
Cyborgs are reduced to acting out rational, pragmatic, instrumental behaviors, and in so doing, the cycles of production (work) and consumption (leisure) are purified of those elements deemed nonrational and useless (by the pancapitalist system). It seems reasonable to expect that attempts will be made to reduce or eliminate regenerative, nonproductive processes like sleeping through the use of both technological and biological enhancement. The second is a manifestation of ideological purity which persuades the cyborg to obsessively value that which perpetuates and maintains the system, and to act accordingly. The prime disrupter of this manifestation of purity is the body itself with its endlessly disruptive physical functions, and the libidinal motivations inherent in human psychology. Hence technological advancement alone will not create the best posthuman; it must be supported by developments in rationalized body design.
Despite my generalised crankiness about Superbuild (wacks of provinicial dough handed over to Toronto's biggest cultural institutions to hire architects and make some buildings), Will Alsop's art-school-in-the-sky has won me over. I'm slow to take to trends, and the Cindy Lauper-look revival intially struck me as a bad idea. Today, however, it's looking fine. You'd never guess it from the drawings, but the street presence of this thing is unostentatious and charming. Many many thanks to Selma for pointing me to this essay by Hugh Pearman in which (among many other things) he praises Torontonians for our friendliness. Hah. But he was hanging out under this building which does have an infectious friendly presence; just dorky enough that you let down your guard, solid enough that you don't feel threatened, graceful enough that you concede a modicum of respect. Earlier today I snuck inside for a look.
Pearman complains:
The two floors in that pixilated tabletop are carved up into cellular spaces - a college requirement, diametrically opposed to Alsop's own preference for something more akin to a giant open-plan creative playpen. So there is no great internal view.Ouch - as someone who attended an art school and retained a shred of dignity, I object to that 'playpen' comment. Part of the reason I first objected to this building was it's message of "hey art is kooky" when there's many other things I hope for art to be besides wacky and fun, and many such critical and rigorous aspirations that I would hope be imparted to art students, even if they are ensconced in checkerboards in the sky. Thank goodness the big block is functional, and as I crept around today with my camera I passed lots of open classroom doors with lectures going on inside, lockers, storage, places to sit and work, etc. No playpens in sight thank goodness.
There are big panels of solid colour here and there, doors, window frames, etc., that are assertive but not wacky. The windows are really lovely and the view is pretty nice if you care for that sort of thing (Toronto from above). My favourite/least favourite element was "Stairway #1: Yellow Stairway" which is painted in unrelenting cadmium yellow floor-to-ceiling the whole way down the elevator shaft. I thought I'd walk it, for an adventure, but only made it down two flights before I got too spooked and ran back up. It was extreme in a fun way, a very unusual, immersive, trippy stairwell that reminded me of playing Splintercell.
On the downside, the doors to the angled stairway (that red, penile rhomboid you see from the outside) were closed and blocked off with caution tape. Also, the door on one of the elevators was broken and it wouldn't run. These two things made me a bit nervous and I was glad, when I got back to street level, that I don't work in there, despite the elegance, functionality, and lovely colours. Also I glimpsed one of my friends talking in front of a class - strEssful. Much more so than creeping around with a digital camera and writing posts for blogs.
Modified owl for Egon Von Bark, who has a nice owl fact list.
Tanya Mars' Tyranny of Bliss: envy
Tanya Mars' Tyranny of Bliss: courage
Tanya Mars' Tyranny of Bliss: greed
Just got this great image and message from friends via email...thanks for the permission to post here! - sm
[My friend] sent me this wonderful collage that her brother made of the Transit of Venus. I just love how such an abstract and unearthly event is rendered tangible and familiar. The projection of the sun (inverted!), and being held by [the girl] between her hands reminds me of that famous Blake engraving where Uriel (?) is measuring the cosmos with calipers. Here it's a young girl and her dad grasping the same thing.
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The Transit of Venus has a special place in the history of science. Timing the passage of our second planet across the the sun gave up the first big yardstick for measuring the cosmos. It was the stuff of high adventure and scientific prowess - sailing to Tahiti and crossing deserts with astonomical instruments, funded by kings and states. I saw the transit too, sitting on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield having waited for the sun to climb above the morning mist. I used a few layers of silvered mylar from an emergency blanket to cover the objective lenses of a pair of binoculars and so protect my eyes (not a recommended technique!) This allowed me to look directly at the Sun and Venus. There were a few fleeting moments where I swear I actually felt myself to be sitting on one planet and watching another cross in front of the huge sun ... meaning, it wasn't a mental or conceptual thought, instead it was a direct experience - as solid as watching someone walk past on the street. written by guest poster: Gordon Hicks |
Infrasense by Robert Saucier and the collective Kit is on at Interaccess (in conjunction with Subtle Technologies). Horse-shaped machines lumber along tracks. Blob-shaped machines with miscellaneous pieces of obsolete computer equipment stuck all over them lumber around hither and yon. There is some kind of technical interrelationship between the two types of machine involving sounds that are broadcast from the horses. These are "Trojan Horses" and "Bugs". The pun is somewhat compelling: to manifest in clunky, clumsy three dimensions an image of computer viruses that normally have no corporal reality. But it's not working very well. Hardly any of the machines were moving. There was a hand-held controller console with levers to push that appeared to produce zero results. There is supposedly a web component to the project where you can input directives to the "bugs" but the terminal in the gallery was A: confusing in the extreme and B: offline and disfunctional. I can't find a link to the web part of the project anywhere (not on the Interaccess site nor the Subtle Technologies site). To be fair, the installation is complicated, and I think this is the first time it's been installed. For robot-art afficianados there may be some interesting tech going on. I do, however, find this kind of object-oriented technology art pretty tedious. Is it R&D? if so, to what end and in whose service? If its all for the fun of puttering/tinkering invention, then please let go of the forced, tacked-on content and just give us some cool machines (that hopefully function) to interact with (or maybe we can just go watch Junkyard Wars on TV).
 digital mock up of Infrasense taken from Subtle Technologies |  installation shot of Eddo Stern's GodsEye View taken from Postmasters |
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I am looking forward to this video screening on Thursday night for several reasons:
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Where: Cinecyle, 129 Spadina Ave (down the alley)
Who: Trinity Square Video presents Lukas Blakk + Tracy Tidgwell, Heather Keung, Allyson Mitchell, Andrew J. Paterson, Yura Yurinskiy, and Karim Zouak. Conceived and initiated by Day Millman.
Of all the paintings in Matt Bahen's current show at A Space, this one (the PR flagship image, nabbed from the A Space website) is my least favourite because it's the only one with eye contact. This painting has an iconic presence, a valorous, masculine, Harlequin Romance mystique that the others do not share. The formula, however, is pretty much the same throughout; each canvas is divided into two panels,* with a thick-paint-renedered sniper on one, and a series of thermograms on the other. The snipers are wearing ghillies, a term that describes this kind of ribbony, raggedy, flora-esque camo. In most of the paintings the snipers look un-human, like threatening-yet-familiar animalistic blobs of malicious nature. The heavily mediated human forms represented by the thermograms (re-renedered here in pixilated paint chunks) provide a contrast that emphasises a chilling objectification of everyone involved in war. Says Bahen in his artists' statement:
"The target for the sniper is free of context."
...and...
"It is important to pay attention to ongoing world affairs as we are both victor and victim in the same breath"
*Remember 20 years ago when abutting figurative painted images from radically different sources was supposed to mean a negation of content? Hah...thank goodness that's over and done with. I prefer this ernest, perhaps heavy-handed, over-abundance of narrative resonance any day.
Update: my posts in the comments section below much better articulate my interest in the this work than this original post. Thinking out loud.
Just got in from a very fun (last minute plan) weekend in Montreal riding bikes at Un Tour La Nuit (8000 people), Le Tour De L'Ile (20,000-30,000 people), and our own self-directed jaunts around town (6-7 people). Lots of cycling combined with sitting in the park. Perfect in every respect. Montreal has no right turn on red which lowers the stress level considerably. It also has lots of accessible public space and a culture that accomodates 'hanging out' with gusto. The top image is the intersection where Maison des Cyclists is located, a bike community centre/store/cafe that functions as a hub for both activism and recreation (everyone that you can see in the picture is on a bike except the guy on the steps who's bike is parked in the huge, 1/2 block-long bike racks).
A friend of mine has been feeding me Lawrence Lessig media. I know this is old hat for most of you, but anyone wanting a refresher, reminder, or (as in my case) introduction to his lucid inspiration on free culture should take time for this graphically-enhanced lecture. Lessig's book is available here in PDF. Below is an excerpt from a section on blogs and democracy (pg. 42).
[For] most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for “democratic deliberation” to occur. More bizarrely, there is generally not even permission for it to occur. We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It’s fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.
Enter the blog.The blog’s very architecture solves one part of this problem. People post when they want to post, and people read when they want to read.The most difficult time is synchronous time.Technologies that enable asynchronous communication, such as e-mail, increase the opportunity for communication. Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever needing to gather in a single public place.
But beyond architecture, blogs also have solved the problem of norms. There’s no norm (yet) in blog space not to talk about politics. Indeed, the space is filled with political speech, on both the right and the left. Some of the most popular sites are conservative or libertarian, but there are many of all political stripes.And even blogs that are not political cover political issues when the occasion merits.
The significance of these blogs is tiny now, though not so tiny.The name Howard Dean may well have faded from the 2004 presidential race but for blogs.Yet even if the number of readers is small, the reading is having an effect.
I used to be quite involved in a zine called Chicks United for Nonnoxious Transportation which a bunch of other girl cyclists in Toronto. I did most of the cover art, and wrote something for almost every issue. I was excited to discover that my piece "Cyclists Need Education" is online in the zine archives at messengers.com. It's wrongly attributed to Be Smiley who actually did draw the cartoon illustration that you see below. I am re-posting the piece here because, while it is undoubtedly the cruellest thing I ever wrote, it just might also be the best thing I ever wrote.
Cyclists Need Education
(written for C.U.N.T.zine, summer 1996)
To be perfectly frank, I don't like most cyclists. I'd rather hang out with respectable car drivers. Guys who know what they want and know how to get it - adult men, y'know what I mean? Guys like my Dad. What a great guy ol' Dad was - always taking us kids for rides in his Buick. Dad never liked cyclists either, said they belonged to the 'lunatic fringe'. Well, Dad, not all of us do! Some of us are respectable men like yourself, guys with a firm hand-shake who obey the law and proceed in an orderly, vehicular fashion.
Some cyclists want to change everything. They have silly ideas about making roads safer for cyclists by getting politicians and planners to take space away from cars. This proves that they belong on the lunatic fringe. They have to grow up and face the fact that cars and air pollution are here to stay. We aren't ever going to get respect from car drivers if cyclists keep acting anti-car. What driver would respect someone who said he was creating pollution? These issues are really very complex, a little difficult for emotional people (like women) to understand. The best thing for cyclists to do is get educated about how to behave in a vehicular fashion. That way they will win respect from car drivers.
All cyclists need to get educated about John Forrester. He wrote a book called Effective Cycling. John Forrester is a great, great guy. My Dad would've liked John Forrester. They'd have been friends. If my Dad knew John Forrester he'd have invited him over to dinner and they'd have played squash together. John Forrester knows that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. He knows that certain cyclists, like me, know how to behave and get respect. Other cyclists need to get educated and stop acting stupid and doing wrong things.
When I'm riding I try to set a good example for other cyclists. Sometimes I see foreign cyclists and they don't know the right way to ride. Often women cyclists don't know how to ride because they're too scared. This kind of cyclist just needs to get educated by someone like me who knows the proper way to do things. Then drivers will stop hating cyclists and treat us all with respect.
If I ruled the world I'd make all cyclists ride like me - that way no one would ever get hurt. I'm never going to get hurt. I ride in a predictable manner that commands respect. As cars whizz by me I know that each and every driver is tipping his cap my way, "Now there's a fine cyclist," they think to themselves, "why, that fellow must have spent as much money on his shorts, fanny pack, whistle, helmet, cycling shoes, jersey, air horn, and handlebar pack as I spent on my car! And look at the fine vehicular way he rides. Such a respectable cyclist, not like those other scofflaws I see with long hair, dirty clothes, groceries and big butts.
When a car passes too close to me I know its a sign of respect. The driver can tell that I'm a very experienced cyclist and I can handle it. One time I met a driver who was really great and treated me with lots of respect. He didn't see me, poor guy, and hit me from behind when I was making a left turn in a vehicular fashion. He was really embarrassed when he saw how expensive my bike was. He told me that I looked like a really serious cyclist, not like those other scofflaws he's seen riding through stop signs and wearing dirty, old clothes. He was a great guy. He had a firm handshake like my Dad's. It was a pleasure to meet him, eventhough I did sustain a head injury.
I have one more thing to say, stay off the sidewalks! I spent a lot of money on my bike and my gear so people would take me seriously and treat me with respect. All you cyclists acting stupid are making me look bad.
On Saturday night, a big bunch of Toronto cyclists watched The Triplets of Belleville under the moon and stars in Trinity Bellwoods Park (a Bike Week screening by CBN). Because of the bikes-and-film connection, it was good to see Cinecycle's Martin Heath and bike courier/filmmaker extraordinaire John Porter in the audience. It was chilly, but most of us had blankets and beer. People sitting nearby made popcorn on a parafin stove.
My favourite image in the film is this strange machine, a sort of pedal operated mini-cinema projecting film of the road, with three cyclists staring into it, pedalling furiously and thereby powering the image that captivates them. At the climax of the film the whole contraption takes off and a car chase ensues, but the cyclists remain oblivious to anything but the film in front of their noses. This weird hybrid sailboat/bed/platform trundles along the city streets, glowing in the night. It's a very unusual yet oddly familiar image. There are certainly a lot of resonant connections between bicycles and film. I often think about this odd passage by Marshall MacLuhan from Understanding Media, the chapter titled, "Wheel, Bicycle and Airplane":
"...the movie camera rollsup the real world on a spool, to be unrolled and translated later onto the screen. [...] ...the airplane rolls up the highway into itself. The road disappears into the plane at take-off and the plane becomes a missile, a self-contained transportation system. At this point the wheel is reabsorbed into the form of a bird or fish that the plane becomes as it takes into the air. [...] Unlike wing or fin, the wheel is lineal and requires the road for its completion. [...] The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane."