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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Later this afternoon Ann MacDonald and I are co-guest-lecturing about art writing in a class at OCAD. I've made my notes available online here, and I welcome all comments and complaints. As a special bonus, the charming and selfless RM Vaughan has agreed to let me post his prose poem, 7 Steps To a Better Artist Statement here.
Bits excerpted from Julian Stallabrass taking on Dave Hickey in his book Art Incorporated, published by Oxford University Press, 2004
Hickey's well-honed rhetoric is used to bolster the notion that 'democracy' is embodied in market mechanisms, so that the laws of supply and demand set the hierarchy of prices which really does reflect what people want from art. This view is loosely associated with the standard line of liberal thinking that says that you cannot have democracy without the market. It is another matter, though, to say that the market can act as a subsitute for democracy. If that is a very doubtful claim even when applied to free markets, when applied to the art market—which, as we have seen, is highly archaic, controlled, and restricted—its foolishness is crystal clear.
(pg.169)
Bits excerpted from Julian Stallabrass taking on relational aesthetics in his book Art Incorporated, published by Oxford University Press, 2004
A good example of the type of art that [Nicholas] Bourriaud recommends is Gavin Turk's The Che Gavara Story. This event followed a series of works made by Turk in which he had inserted his own face into well-known images of Che in black-on-red hoardings and in a waxwork mock-up of the famous photograph taken to prove that the revolutionary was dead. In 2001, in an ambitious departure from this previous line of work, Turk staged a series of meetings and discussion sessions about Che's life and legacy in a squatted room in Shoreditch. Political strategy meetings were followed by sessions in which activists would organize a demonstration that was to be the culmination of the series. The idea of this work, said Turk, was to use his status as a newsworthy artist to set up a space for discussion and action that would have a chance of breaking into the mass media. (pg.179)
[...]
The discussion I attended had many points of interest but felt aimless and unfocused, and others I spoke to who had attended the sessions felt similarly. Bizarrely, the final manifestation was dominated by nudists arguing about their right to go naked in public.
The Che Gavara Story demonstrated a number of key features of socially interactive works. Firstly, there is a trade-off between the number of participants and their diversity and the likely discourse. Active paritcipants tend to be few, elite, and self-selecting. Secondly, in these temporary utopian bubbles, no substantial politics can be arrived at, not least because even among those who do attend, real differences and conflicts of interest are momentarily denied or forgotten. A merely gestural politics is the likely result. If, following Bourriaud, one's primary interest in such manifestations is aesthetic, this hardly matters. (pg.181)
[...]
If all this seems a self-consciously futile and token activity, then the rise of this art may be less positive than Bourriaud thinks. Coupled with thinking about the hollowing out of democratic politics...what Bourriaud describes is merely another art-world assimilation of the dead or the junked, the re-presentation as aesthetics of what was once social interaction, political discourse, and even ordinary human relations. If democracy is found only in art works, it is in a good deal of trouble. (pg.182)
Mnobody's art top ten 2005 (in no particular order)
1. Robert Crumb at the 2005 Carnegie international, Pittsburgh I was glad Crumb got over his distaste for institutions of higher art and became the highlight of this years Carnegie International. A truly awesome collection of original covers for Zap, Weird comics, along side hundreds of sketches and drawings spanning his entire career. I particularly enjoyed the bitter diary entries from his early years.
http://www.cmoa.org/international/the_exhibition/artist.asp?crumb#void
2. Katarzyna Kozyra's 'The Rite of Spring' at the 2005 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh Inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's extraordinary choreography for the composition by Igor Stravinsky.*also wins my special award for best animation of naked old people.
http://www.cmoa.org/international/the_exhibition/artist.asp?kozyra#void
3. Paul Chan's 'Happiness (finally) after 35,000 Years of Civilization—after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier', at the 2005 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh This very cool digital animation combines the utopian visions of 19th-century social theorist Fourier with those of the 20th-century reclusive self-taught artist Darger. A surprisingly tactile and deceivingly low tech computer animation, sort of like if Henry Darger had a computer.
http://www.cmoa.org/international/the_exhibition/artist.asp?chan
4. Libby Hague, 'Everything Needs Everything'. I saw this at Open Studio (Toronto) and Loop (Toronto) last year. Each time this piece is shown it just gets better. Absolutely wonderful installation of woodcuts made into an immersive, painterly environment. A touch of whimsy and dread. Libby Hague is the future of printmaking.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/libbylibby/loop.html
5. Ed Pien at Mocca (toronto), part of 'Just My Imagination' drawing show. I can't remember the name of this piece,....anyone, anyone? this vast blue watercolour was like a dip in a cool stream on a hot day, or maybe like getting sucked into a whirlpool, or maybe like...aw you get the idea.
6. Andy Fabo at Mocca. This exhibit featured Fabo's painting, drawing, video works from the 1970's until now. I loved his series of ink washes portraying a likeness of a man which appears to slowly dissolve into abstraction.
7. Jason Van Horne, 'Nuclear Winter Wonderland' at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art (Toronto). forget going to see the new 'King Kong' movie, just take a walk around van Horne's devastated miniature city. a kind of vertigo of scale occurred while i was viewing this, i felt omnipresent and utterly insignificant at the same time. Made me want to learn how to pronounce 'nuclear' properly. *best use of old kraft dinner boxes and flour.
http://www.kmartprojects.com/">http://www.kmartprojects.com/">http://www.kmartprojects.com/
8. James Turrell, Pleiades, 1983 at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (ya i know it's 1983 but i just saw it this year). The Mattress Factory has a few great early works by this artist in their permanent exhibits. Pleiades was my favorite. Reminded me of the part in the Sudbury Big Nickel Mine tour when they turned out the lights.
http://www.mattress.org/index.cfm?event=ShowArtist&eid=45&id=216&c=Permanent
9. Sarah Peebles and Robert Cruickshank, MUSIC FOR INCANDESCENT EVENTS; SUNSET at Deleon white Gallery (toronto). well technically this was 2004, but i didn't make a list last year so there!
http://www.sarahpeebles.net/sunset.htm
10. Katamari Damacy. This isn't exactly art but its as close as you can get in a video game if you ask me. I spent the last part of 2005 obsessively rolling things up in this game. fun, fun, fun! If only i could clean my house this way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy
L.M.'s Top Ten art stuff of 2005 (from my shadow Office of the Governor General in my shadow government, in a tiny perfect universe)
The list and images are in the comments.
Election time: VB is starting to get a bee in his bonnet reading about all this Sam Bulte STuff on the BoingBoing and AccordianGuy blogs.
remember: "Home taping is killing the music Industry... and its about time".
(posted by Von Bark)