The Power Plant has a new publication, a magazine called SWITCH that will come out twice a year. The first issue is pretty interesting. It's comprised of essays about the current state of the global art market and issues facing art institutions, as well as essays that reflect on past Power Plant programming. Its self-serving to spend so much time on PP shows, but heck, why not? I have always been a big fan of critical rumination on past art exhibitions. SWITCH makes no bones about being a PP organ, and why shouldn't they reflect on their own work? It opens up a bit of space for further dialogue and gives the ideas raised in the institution a life beyond the schedule of events. Given that the organisation is already publishing a members newsletter, promotional and exhibition material, I think this new magazine format is a pretty smart addition. Also, it's free. And whoever is doing the design has done a great job of making colour pictures look really good in digital printing. Quote from the editorial by Gregory Burke:
Conditions affecting the making and presentation of contemporary art have shifted dramatically in the twenty-one years since The Power Plant opened. The terms for public funding have changed at the same time that the market for contemporary art has mushroomed, as has the number of biennales, art fairs, private foundations, and museums. Significant too is the proliferation of building programs resulting in new or extended institutions for contemporary art. Over the last eighteen months we have promoted discussion on these changes, their effects on contemporary art at a grass-roots level and — importantly — their implications for the future of The Power Plant. ... This discussion provides a context for the birth of SWITCH and thereby the focus of the first issue...
Really, I don't know why we make art or write poetry or blog or work for a
living. We could just put monkeys in chaps and tie them to dogs and be
happy, totally happy.
HUNTER AND COOK, a gorgeous art magazine produced by Tony Romano and Jay Isaac has their first issue online, which I am happy about because I am allergic to paper.
...and you get to see jpeg versions of the drawings by David Armstrong Six that were in the print edition.
...and I get to lift one for this page because that's how the works: I take what I want and the hell with you.
(b/t/w guys, a few links on the pages need attending to)
Some of you, like me, might choose to skip the occasional episode of the sassy-but-self-effacing-art-dudes-in-Chicago podacst, Bad At Sports. But here are two 2008 episodes that I very much enjoyed...when I listened to them for the first time yesterday.
Episode 167: Art Fag City is Paddy Johnson
Paddy Johnson, of course, writes a brilliant blog in NYC. Duncan does a good long interview with her, mulling over the ins and outs of her impressively committed blog practice and the pros and cons of online art criticism. I had to laugh when she said she edits non-sequitors from her comment threads. Over here things work more like word association football.
Episode 160: The All Canada Show
Duncan goes to Calgary and interviews MN Hutchinson who, in about 40 minutes, gives the most coherent and up-to-date account of the history of Artist-Run Centres and their impact that I've ever heard. Here's a bit where they are both discussing Duncan's earlier question, "Going forward, who do the Artist-Run Centres serve, what community are they serving, what does the future look like for Artist-Run Centres?"
[...]
Duncan: There is always a class of artists that exist in every city and every country that don't ever professionalize. They make a decision that they don't want to teach, and they don't want to be a gallery stable artist. They just want to do what they do, and they would rather work as a tech in an AV department, or they would rather sell stocks in their daytime, or they would rather sell shoes, or be a dentist and still make really interesting, really viable contributions.
HN: Yeah, that's exactly my point. [The Artist-Run Centres] build a kind of community, something that's really vibrant, and feeds back into those people that do choose to make it a career. I think its important for that stuff to get out there so that they don't think that there's only six people making art in Canada, and are only judging themselves against that. There is a kind of competition factor. How do you compete with somebody that can afford to not have to make a certain body of work on a regular basis, but can really just do something out of left field? And that influences the conceptual structure of the work that's being done everywhere. And what is that? That's really going back to the roots of the Artist-Run Centre beginnings.
Now that's what I call display! I love this documentation of one of Tom Moody's animated gif installations put on by Telic Arts Exchange in LA. The multivalent bric-a-brac makes a great analog to the A.D.D.-ish attention span environment of looking at art online.
(yes I said 'multivalent'. suck it up. Any griping and I'll start throwing 'heterogeneity' around.)
Lately I have been tangentially dealing with my distress over the miserable shit happening in Gaza by watching online vids about Jewish queer theorist/philosopher Judith Butler. Butler is famous for her work on gender and identity, but her stuff on Israel and war is also great. She's tough as nails. In one candid profile documentary, Butler talked about learning the importance of public mourning from the AIDs crisis, which she now applies to war, asking "who we can grieve and who we cannot grieve, what is a grievable life?"
Public mourning is not something we do just because we have personal needs to grieve. We do have those, I'm sure, but I think public mourning gives value to lives, bring us into a kind of heightened awareness of the precariousness of lives and the necessity to protect them, and also to understand that that precariousness is shared across national borders. There's no possibility of overcoming our precariousness, there's no possibility of becoming invulnerable, there's no possibility of evading death. It's just not going to happen. So to accept that kind of precariousness, even finitude, as a condition of human life is maybe a different basis for a certain politics. It's the one that the US foreclosed quite quickly ten days after 9-11. And its the one that they do not permit by putting a stranglehold on the media, so that we can't understand the precariousness of those lives, or the value of those lives that we've damaged or destroyed.
I suppose that's my link. It seems AIDS activism did make public mourning very important. Las Madres in Argentina have done the same. Where are the disappeared? It seems crucial to make a lot of noise about those who have disappeared without a trace. It seems important to mark that, to make a trace, to make a sound. To disrupt that notion of the public sphere that would make certain kinds of images unseeable, make certain kinds of noises inaudible, make certain kinds of words unsayable. That's a kind of censorship that not only restricts what we can know, but also hampers our capacity to understand who has been lost, what violence has wrought and the value of human lives.
There is also an excellent short speech from a Berkely teach-in on the Israeli bombing of Lebannon
And a really good long lecture on Primo Levy and Israel
1. Mrs. L is 89. She lives alone in her 7th-floor apartment. She doesn't see. She remembers this view from the time when she was sighted. She refers to it as "When I had my eyes on." But back then these foreground trees were only saplings.
2. Michel Tremblay
I've loved his writing ever since I read The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, the first in his series of autobiographical fiction. In December I read The First Quarter of the Moon, which picks up the same characters ten years later. It's so clear, so nuanced. So full of heartache without sentimentality.

3. Greyhound
I went to Vancouver on the bus, about a week after the horrible beheading. Right after I took this big-sky picture, we passed the little mound of flowers on the roadside, just west of Portage la Prairie. We were having our own drama; a marriage was coming apart in a spectacular fashion. So spectacular that the driver threatened to put them out on the road. Is this area some kind of wick for emotional extremity?
4. James Reaney, 1926 - 2008
He began teaching himself how to paint at his Stratford farmhouse when he was 16. A few months before he died, the McMichael mounted a show of his work. He was too ill to go and see it, but his son said to him, "Not bad for a little farm boy, ey"? And he said, "Yes," with a great deal of satisfaction. The show included several watercolour sketches he made while on a couple of trips across the country, and he was particularly proud of them. That he made art at all was a surprise to most of the literary community, who know him through his poetry and plays. The McMichael show has now moved to London, Ontario, where he lived and taught at Western, and is on at Museum London until mid-February.
James Reaney, Maclean Township
5. Metropolitan Opera at Silver City
I saw La Boheme, one of my favourites. (Everybody's favourite.) But I must say I hated it in the cinema. Who needs to count nose-hairs, to experience a catharsis of pity and fear? Not me. I won't do my rant. I got so out of control at the performance that Sally had to get quite stern with me. But here's what I loved. In Intermission (live, real time), before the camera took us backstage, I watched a guy in the front row of one of the balconies get up and stretch. He was wearing a white dress shirt. It was graceful and stunning.
Who were you, anonymous beauful man? Will our paths ever cross again?
6. Kathie reads Alice Munro
A friend of mind, a longtime fan of Alice Munro's writing, set herself this summer to re-read all of her work. And she did it. Took her a bit longer than the summer. I like that. No government grants, no publicity, a genuine private cultural act. Nothing in it for her except pure pleasure.

7. Refurbished AGO
I went to public school in Toronto so it was one of our yearly field trip destinations, and that's probably when I learned to hate going in there. Since then I've ducked in and out, shuddering, for specific things I wanted or needed to see. The atmosphere always felt weighty and grimy and stuffy. So I was knocked right out by what they've done to it. It feels cleaner, and lighter, and fer gawd's sake, welcoming. And that's still downstairs, before you get up to the amazing windowed hallway at the back.
[apologies to M.Jean, but according to house rules all images of the new AGO must pass through blingee - SM]

8. Calgary, Alberta
When I was five years old I lay down in the grass of Balmoral Junior High (my brother's school) and looked up to see my first airplane. My mom said there were people sitting in it. I didn't believe her. Sixty years later I lay down in the same grass, and looked up, and saw a jumbo jet. Imagine the same grass still there, after all those years.
And then I walked across the Centre St. Bridge, and discovered the source of my recurrent nightmares about lions. And found some great wheat-pasting.

9. Diorama Extravaganza
At the Landon Branch of the London Public Library System. This warms my heart every year. We're gearing up now for the 4th annual one. Everybody in the neighbourhood is welcome to enter. The youngest participant to date was three years old; the oldest, eight-seven.

10. Bill Richardson
With the rest of CBC Radio 2 down the toilet, he's got it right. Saturday afternoon at the Opera, and Sunday Afternoon in Concert. It's his narrative tone that's so dead on. He's neither sycophantic nor apologetic. He takes it for granted that classical music matters, and goes from there. Serious, funny, informative, amiable. His interviewing technique is brilliant.
Rob Cruickshank has curated an interesting collection of Device Art for the net journal Vague Terrain with artists Brad Borevitz, Jessica Field, Peter Flemming, Erin Gee, Ken Gregory, Darsha Hewitt, iriXx, Nicholas Stedman and Martin Wisniowski. The image above is a video still from documentation of one of the pieces that I liked best. Here's an excerpt from Rob's essay:
Ken Gregory's Sun Suckers exist as individual machines, which absorb the rays of the sun, and convert them to insect-like chirps. However, like insects, they are listening to each other as we are listening to them, and the strength of the work comes from the listener's realization that these devices are not simply individuals, but members of a community.
Cruickshank knows electronic art issues inside and out, and his choices reflect a thoughtful investigation that ranges from dynamics of old/new history&nostalgia tech to the manufacture of embodied emotional relations between humans and machines.
The Essential Works Show IV: Multiples. The fourth installment of Birch Libralato's annual exhibition of important works. The 2009 edition of Essential Works presents multiples by artists such as Julie Voyce, Christian Marclay, Luis Jacob, Micah Lexier, Euan Macdonald and Mitch Robertson, along with important and essential works selected by Ann Dean from the Art Metropole collection.
129 Tecumseth Street Toronto from Jan. 10th – Feb. 7th 2009
Chris Ashley's Top Ten for 2008 [mailed to me pre-formatted with all the html - L.M.]
[that was my header, and those are still my line breaks, two more line breaks after this and then you get Chris's guaranteed genuine HTML, so wait for it! - L.M.]
**************[OK, these asteriks are mine too, his html is next, ...after two more line breaks. - L.M.]**************
I've never made a Top Ten list before. I barely went to galleries or museums in 2008. I rarely went to the movies. I am having a hardtime remembering this year. In April, Ann and I were in Germany, France, and Belgium. It seems like I walked my dog a lot, I was pretty occupied with making work for a couple of shows, and there's the day job. Here are a few things I can think of:
Notre-Dame-la-Grande, Poitiers, France, inside and out.. It is the oldest romanesque architecture church in Europe.
Cable TV on-demand finally offered the great film "Slaptshot." I watched it three times. Speaking of Paul Newman (RIP), I can't remember watching "Cool Hand Luke" this year; if I didn't, then I broke a streak running several years.
Cable TV on-demand finally offered "Breaking Away." I watched it twice.
I watched "Casablanca" twice. Again.
I watched the "Wizard of Oz." Again.
Free Muntadhar al-Zaidi! I wished he'd just shouted, "I throw my shoe at you! Phooey!" and then left the room.
**************[Hello. my asteriks again, so that you know we're at the end of Chris Ashley's HTML - L.M.]**************
4) Patrick Bernatchez - Chrysalide Emperuer & David Armstrong Six - drawing for look into the light, light, light, light the Québec Triennial at Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal.
David Armstrong Six
5) Simon Starling, Cuttings (Supplement) at The Power Plant, Toronto.
6) Arni Sala - Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2) & Omar Fast - A Tank Translated from In The Dark - Art In The Shadow Of War at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto and Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga.
Omar fast - A Tank Translated
7) Omar Fast - The Casting, The Whitney Biennial at The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York.
The Boots! The Riding Crops! The Red Serge! The Jodhpurs! Bossy Men Yelling! Hierarchy! A ten hour marathon of marching and prancing with three costume changes, lunch, signing ceremonies, more prancing, a dinner banquet, speeches, toasts, more prancing, a cool drinking game I invented, photos, video, and then more ceremonies where I sort of lost track what they were doing exactly. I felt like my family was the most Canadian family that ever was, on a higher plain of hyper-Canadianess, making me totally untouchable in my über Inner Canadian state, that was until it was announced this past week that Sally's dad, the poet Don McKay, will awarded the Order of Canada, so now I welcome her and joester up onto my Himalayan Heights of Personal Canadian Evolution.
This is now the most Canadian art blog in the universe.
The only Conservative politician in this country that will not be insulted or slandered on this blog ...for now. Over a hundred years ago the Crown leased water and forestry rights in Newfoundland-Labrador to a then British company who would run a lumber mill in exchange. The ownership of the mill and resource rights eventually came to AbitibiBowater Inc., who shut down the mill this year. Shockingly, a Canadian Politician grew a spine, and effectively returned the water, timber and lucrative hydroelectric rights into public hands.
Some observers warn that under the rules of NAFTA, Newfoundland will be sent to prison. And furthermore, no corporations will ever invest in Newfoundland ever again because their money is safer in Somalia. (They especially won't want their dumb old conveniently located off-shore oil). Danny gets a blingee.
3) Wil Kucey at LE Gallery - who looks at about 2000 submissions a year from young artists with small C/V's and few reviews, and is actually capable of figuring out who is really good and giving them shows. That's just not done, Wil, how the hell would you know good art without the supporting critical texts and sales to the Tate Modern. You aren't going to get on a Sobey Award jury just using your eyes and your brain.
Steven Cohen with Nomsa Dhlamini and Ann Cohen (a nice family picture I found)
I'll just copy and paste my earlier comments on the work:
Keeping in mind that I get embarrassed at re-runs of "I love Lucy" (it always made me squirmy and slightly sick and I'm not the only one), I was expecting to be cringing my way through this work when I went to see it.
First of all, Cohen's timing and edits were impeccable, he starts by leading us down the garden path with such a sweet elderly shuffling woman, slowly showing us brief glimpses of images and objects in her world that indicate the struggle against apartheid. The tenderness of that sequence, Nomsa's frailty and the subtle indication of the historical events she has lived through made me cry. Of course he's set me up for the cleaning-stripper sequence.
When Sally writes that he "is merciless to his audience, and delivers the debasement of this woman he cares about with unrelenting shots of her cleaning the filthy toilet, crawling on the carpet to sweep up cigarette butts". I can only partially agree with that, I thought he showed incredible restraint, this wasn't twisted cruel granny porn that he was producing. Each shot and angle went just far enough to torment the audience, make us fear what may be exposed next, but he's too much of an artist to debase her as a performer.
I saw the stripper sequence with the disco fuck me soundtrack as defiant, yet that defiance was oddly contradicted by her slow purposeful cleaning activities. She floated above Cohen's art video set-up, and he knows it. Defiant, as well, in the context of a national domestic economy that takes a huge servant class for granted, rendering them invisible, inconsequential and even despised. (That's before you even take into account the national legacy of slavery and abuse.)
I also had less of a problem with the sight of an almost nude 84 year old woman, in fact I was reminded of an early work by Lisa Steele, Birthday Suit - with scars and defects from 1974. She'd probably agree that eventually getting outfitted with an old body is a major sign of success.
I wish there had been a transcript of the phone interview between Steele and Cohen because I had a hard time understanding his accent so I know I missed a lot of additional information, but there were a few things he said that were very powerful. Several times he described her actions as "cleaning the uncleanable" --a brilliant metaphor for the larger political conditions of South Africa-- "with optimism and commitment".
There's one other thing that came to mind with Cohen's statement that the piece is truly a South African work. Participation in a international art scene does not have to simply translate to star-fucking festivals, V-tape has all my admiration for programming an artwork that purposely contains the peculiarities of a specific place, and I am so glad that I saw this video because I left the screening thrilled and moved.
2008 was the year YouTube melted my brain. Late in 2007, I met one of the founders - a nice, unprepossessing young man with floppy blonde hair. He didn't seem like a mad, brain-sucking genius. Then I started spending more time on the site. And even more time. Banal but true: there is an infinite variety of creative endeavour captured there. Here's my top 3 of the year:
1. Marvin Gaye sings the star-spangled banner : Best performance of any nation's anthem ever, delivered at a 1983 all-star basketball game. I wonder, is there anyone who could deliver the Canadian anthem with this kind of panache? Buffy Sainte Marie, maybe?
2. Riding a bike with Lucas Brunelle: Lucas Brunelle straps a camera to his head and races in alley cats across the world. His work is thrilling and the music always rawks. This one is from NYC.
3. Diva wars: There is a corner of YouTube where it really matters that Whitney kicks Mariah's ass. Or vice versa. A lot of sincere time and effort appears to be spent on this question and the posts are deeply infused with passion. I like that.
Sally McKay's top ten online things to do that don't involve reading (+friends&family links)
1. Most of the items below on this list are podcasts. Listening to lectures online goes down real good with puzzle flash eye/finger game candy: Bunch is truly mindless and looks like smarties; Desktop Tower Defense is actually kind of a good game; Bear and Cat Marine Balls is very very cute.
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I highly recommend loading up one of these brain cell destroying little gem-of-a-games if you are planning to tuck into any heavy duty online listening. Everyone knows the human brain takes in audio information much better when the eyes are distracted by blinking blobs of saturated colour and the small motor control neural centres are busy pushing switches...right?
2. CBC Idea's "How to Think about Science" series
One of the things that has occasionally bugged me about some of the various art & science hybrid events I've participated in is the way that artists can sometimes get all on their high horse about how they (we) can be critical of science as if scientists weren't subject to ethical reviews up the ya-ya, and aren't held socially accountable to their own work through professional rigamaroles that would send most of us artists running back to the garret. I'm not saying that the ethics of science are by any means transparent, but the most thoughtful and thought provoking critiques of scientific ideology tend to emerge from the scientific community itself.
In this series every person interviewed is deeply invested in science while at the same time challenging fundamental assumptions about their own discipline. I enjoyed each episode, but I think my favourite was quantum physicist Arthur Zajonc, who has a great take on the ubiquitous practice of modeling (modeling abstracted principles of nature as opposed to experiential observation of nature) as a kind of narcissistic human self-idolotry.
3. The Brain Science Podcast with Dr. Ginger Campbell
Dr. Ginger Campbell is my hero. Her generous, open-minded journalism is fueled by the kind of nerdish enthusiasm for her subject that reminds me how happy I am to live in the online age of niche disseminations. Campbell knows a lot about brain science, and she does much more prep work for her interviews than most journalists, reading carefully the books that her subjects have written, drawing connections between issues that arise in different episodes and always putting her listeners first. She is charming and disarming and creates such an atmosphere of comraderie that the really tough questions just roll off her tongue and her interviewees are happy to take them up. Pick and choose the topics that interest you. Three of my favourite episodes are:
4. Emergent Podcast: 2007 Theological, Philosophical Conversation- Session 1 part 1 and part 2, Session 2 and Session 3 with Richard Kearney and Jack Caputo
If you really want to get a grip on postmodernism, ask a Christian philosopher theologian! Caputo and Kearney are both serious intellectual philosopher dudes who got invited by a group of hard thinking, questioning young American Christians to discuss their work in a two-day symposium about the social benefits of ambiguity and doubt. There are really funny personal anecdotes about Lacan and Derrida thrown in for comic relief. If you (like me) have been harbouring a spidey-sense that Jacques Lacan was maybe a great big dick-head, this is the podcast for you.
5. Philosophy 185 Heidegger with Instructor Hubert Dreyfus
Many thanks to Be Smiley for turning me onto Hubert Dreyfus. He is like a professor from a movie about a professor. He dodders and fusses and gets his podcast microphone messed up. But he's right on top of the ideas and the best thing is that he rethinks his own philosophical positions as he goes along, so you can hear this big mind working and grinding and falling into pits of self-doubt and climbing out again while he talks. Also, at some point he goes on a hilarious tangent about how he took on the artificial intelligence dudes while he was at MIT, claiming — based solely on his reading of Heidegger — that they would never succeed, and he wins!
Trying to read Heidegger is kind of like trying to dig your way up out of a six-foot deep earthen grave, but this isn't reading, it's listening (don't forget the pretty colours puzzle games) and Dreyfus makes it fun. (Bonus: Dreyfus also taught a podcast course on Man, God, and Society in Western Literature which is just as good and you don't have to deal with Heidegger)
6. This American Life
USA voted Barack Obama for president because the country is not entirely composed of crazed and inbred republicans. In fact, if the only thing you ever heard from contemporary USA was This American Life, you'd think the country was overrun with humane and thoughtful Jewish intellectuals with a self-deprecating sense of humour and a gift for narrative that draws from the best depth and breadth of American literary tradition from William Faulkner to Hunter S. Thompson (passing through the East Village). It's feelgood bed time stories for lefty Western adults and ranks second only to Coronation Street on my list of entertainment vices. Two of my favourite episodes are:
7. The Moth
The Moth has rules: New Yorkers get onstage and tell a true story that happened to them without notes. Each one takes about 20 minutes. Some people are famous, most are not. All the stories are good because this is New York where there are lots and lots and lots of competitive people and the ones who manage to claw their way into a public forum of any kind usually have something going for them.
8. Practice of Art 23AC - Foundations of American Cyber-Culture with Instructor Joseph Donald McKay
Did someone say nepotism? Full disclosure: Instructor Joseph Donald McKay is a family member. Ever get frustrated because you wish you knew what your sibling knows? I did, and then I listened to these podcasts. Now I know what Joester knows, plus I know what I know ...bwa-ha-ha-ha! This course provides solid foundational info if you are into net art; lots of juicy history about Turing and Charles Babbage and Donna Haraway and the Whole Earth Catalogue plus good contemporary digital artist links and pertinent political reminders about the digital divide.
9. SART:3480 - Dynamic Web Content with Instructor Lorna Mills Okay, technically there is reading on this site. But mostly I just look at all the pretty flashing scrolling spinning shiny thingies. Lorna is my dear friend and the defacto boss of this blog. She's an excellent teacher and almost makes me want to relive my undergrad so I could take her course. But not really, because I'd rather enjoy other people's messed up youtube hacks than do any coding myself. Lorna's class and Joester's class did a cross-border blog collaboration but I've lost the link. Little help?
10. OVVLvverk
I live with Von Bark, the brain behind the owls. I look at OVVLvverk every week because it always surprises me. This website began as a sort of spoof of the infamous VVork but has swollen way past any kind of gag into an online image collection that makes excellent use of self-imposed restrictions, bending and stretching categories like a good collection should. Each day's post is the best one yet.
works: I take what I want and the hell with you. 
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