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- VB 8-21-2011 3:31 pm [link] [add a comment]


"Did you see the MOCCA show?" and "What did you think?" are the two questions that Toronto art denizens have been asking one another over coffee and pints all summer. This is Paradise | Place as state of mind: The Cameron Public House and 1980’s, curated by Rae Johnson and Herb Tookey, is a loaded exhibition that has triggered all kinds of local conversations, opinions and debates. (Tomorrow, August 21st, is the last day).

Fran Schechter, reviewing the exhibition for NOW Magazine, complained that the curators' were insiders in the scene they were representing. "Maybe someone with more objective distance would have brought a more critical eye to this material."

Bryne McLaughlin, writing for Canadian art, makes a similar observation,"...there’s a heavy emphasis on insider anecdotes of the Cameron House’s importance to the artists of the day, but little in the way of critical grounding."

Leah Sandals wrote in the National Post, "It seems uncouth for co-curator Rae Johnson to include two of her own (energetic but not so well painted) triptychs, as well as multiple paintings by other artists that are based on her. The wall and brochure texts are also heavy on gush, short on explanation." But she went on to say, "Overall, though, this is a welcome attempt at capturing a largely undocumented local history. It also, unexpectedly, has a strange kind of currency; the twentysomething boho life it pays homage to — one of partying, late nights, revolutionary ideas and, most importantly, the certainty one will never grow old — offers much for anyone who is young, or who’s been young, to relate to."

Christopher Jones, writing for TO Live With Culture says, "For anyone who lived through it, the time and place evoked by This Is Paradise ... is palpable."

Christopher Hume, for the Toronto Star, wrote, "...the advent of This Is Paradise ... comes as a welcome break from the cultural amnesia in which we float."

Andrew Harwood, in the Akimbo Hit List, says, "Wonderfully curated by Rae Johnson and Herb Tookey, This is Paradise | Place as state of mind: The Cameron Public House and 1980’s Toronto at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art made me feel nostalgic for an era that was never mine. It was refreshing to see all of the emerging artists of the time making their stance by embracing the return of representational, figurative, and portrait painting."

So, yeah sure, another curator would have done a different kind of job, but they didn't, did they? The only reason the exhibition exists at all is because Rae Johnson took it upon herself to make it happen. It's not an exhibition with a detached and theoretically honed curatorial premise. This is Paradise is passionate and rife with conflicting emotions. For many, it's deeply sad — there are a lot of dead artists represented. For me, as for so many others who came to the exhibition, these deaths represent a cultural loss, but also losses that are intimate and personally painful. Add to this sadness the fact that for many of the living artists represented, the work on display connects them to past moments that they have digested and moved beyond in their current practice — what you have, for a large portion of the audience, is a show that evokes a pardoxical nest of charged and unresolved tensions.

As Leah Sandals pointed out in her review, the show divides viewers into two camps, those who were "there" in the 80s Cameron scene and those who weren't. Of course the division is actually a bit more blurry. I wasn't there, for example, but many of my nearest and dearest were. I get the emotional charge, despite the fact that it is not my own history that is represented. Bryne McLaughlin's main complaint is that for people who weren't there, the show falls short as an archival/historic document. This is not surprising, given that the curators themselves are deeply and personally involved. But the show is too bittersweet to really come of as a narcissistic celebration of carefree times gone by. It's more sad than heroic, more blatant than nostalgic.

There are lots of different ways to curate, just as there are lots of different ways to engage with history. Methodological purists want to see a critical agenda laid out, they want to be able to parse the exhibition legibly, like a set of artifacts in a museum with didactic tags that explicitly state the works' continued relevance to culture in the present day. This show is much messier, more conflicted, more annoying, more implicated, more vulnerable and more alive than that. It's still history, however — an open-ended, resonant, recent history that manifests in the lives of the people who live it and those they continue to influence.


- sally mckay 8-20-2011 9:37 pm [link] [1 comment]