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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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I rarely go to About.com, the info site owned by the New York Times, there's something about the page layout and the logo that I can't stand. (except I went there for tips on pumpkin carving prior to creating last year's non-award winning masterpiece ) But I will overcome my distaste for friendly orange spheres because they have hired one of my favourite writers, the brilliantly witty, informed and cranky Pierre Tristam of Candide's Notebooks to create the content for their new Middle East Issues site.
Lisa Kiss, super desinger extraordinaire, just won an OAAG award for her design of our Neutrinos They Are Very Small catalogue. Yay.
The evening primrose is my favourite plant. I think there are a bunch of varieties. The ones in our garden are weedy things that slowly take the shape of pokey spikes. They produce little yellow blooms that open at sunset and die off the next afternoon. Me and VB tend toward the nocturnal ourselves, and we like to sit outside in the evening. This scraggly little plant, popping open new buds every single night, makes very good company.
This week's little image assignment for school is about "the gaze."
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Vito Acconic, Theme Song, 1973 video, 33 minutes sample dialogue: Look right in here, right into me. Oh look how my body’s waiting for you. We don’t have to worry about tomorrow, we don’t have to worry about forever, it just has to be about now. We don’t need any illusions, we don’t want any illusions, right? Sure, you can be on stage, you can be on stage with me. I’ll put you in the spotlight! I’ll admire you, I’ll love you. I’ll watch every move you make. You’re gonna let me be all alone. You’re gonna leave me before we even had a chance to get started. I’ll remember the time when we could’ve been together. Oh wouldn’t you have wanted to be a memory for me? Wouldn’t you have wanted to be fixed in my mind? |
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Vito Acconci activates ‘the gaze’ in a most aggressive and frustrating manner. The artist lies on a carpet — his face seemingly crushed up against the inside of the monitor's screen — attempting to seduce the viewer to join him in the space that he inhabits. It is a prolonged monologue, conducted an unpleasant, bar-stool tone of seedy, hasty need. Yet at times, watching this video, I thought about succumbing, if only to stem Acconci’s relentless flow of sleaze. But of course, this creature addressing me is not a person, it’s an artwork, and I am categorically, ontologically unable to join Acconci in his representational space, even when I reluctantly agree to do so. As viewers, we are both tantalized and rebuked. We gaze and the artwork appears to gaze back. We are implicated by the representational gaze, but it remains remote. As with Lacan’s glittering sardine can (see comments), we are not seen by that which we behold. Seduced, and then rejected — by an artwork! It’s shameful but it’s also deeply funny. I walked away from Theme Song laughing and feeling that despite (or because of), the existential gaps and voids, I’d been given a weird little gift. see the video here (but it's better full screen on a tv monitor) |
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Robert Bateman, Burrowing Owl. Image from North Coast Cafe
excertp from Sarah Milroy on Robert Bateman...
Let's be clear: There is no conspiracy operating here. The fact is that Bateman engages with a subject matter that is dear to the hearts of Canadians: the beauty of the natural world. But he describes it in terms that are essentially those of illustration. There is no way in which his handling of paint, or his understanding of what painting is, pushes that medium forward, or even gives it a personal inflection. There is no way in which his paintings reveal interesting thinking about the relationships between man and nature; his environmentally themed paintings, for example, have all the sophistication of Reader's Digest illustrations.interesting letters to the editor (Globe and Mail)...
Over-the-top challenge
Ross Bateman
In her criticism of the Robert Bateman show at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (A Tale Of Two Shows - Review, Oct. 4), Sarah Milroy has a point of view that neatly wraps a common anxiety of her profession. Her worry is that the public is ignorant and, if it is unfortunate enough to stumble on an art show that panders to this ignorance, it becomes bewildered. If true, it's good this was brought to the public's attention; I don't think it had noticed.
A humble illustrator
Ken Nutt
I have got up off the porch long enough to write to thank Sarah Milroy (A Tale Of Two Shows - Review, oct. 4) for her concern about us small-town folk not knowing enough to defend ourselves from exposure to the art of Robert Bateman. It was helpful of her to give us some guidelines: Abstraction equals good; realism equals bad.
The International Festival of Authors opens on October 17 at Harbourfront. My video, English, updated as usual, will be projected on an 8' by 8' wall for the 10 days of the festival. (2,522 titles as of this week).
(I'm sure that Margaret Atwood & Alice Munro worked very hard on all those books that I just chewed up and spit out onto a screen for two seconds each.)
I won't be at the gala opening because its the same night that ETHEL AND THE MERMEN are playing at the Smiling Buddha on 961 College st. at 10:30 pm. (and also, I forgot to ask for comps to the big party with Maggie and Ian before the damn thing sold out, because then I could have brought Ethel and the Mermen with me as arm candy)