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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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mail art #1
Remember mail art? There are artists still engaged with the medium, but in my life the practice has been replaced by blogs and email. Most of my old mail-art friends have quite rightly cut me out of the loop (because I no longer respond in-kind), while they continue to send beautiful, personalised objects to one another via Canada Post. Others are sharing code, posting to lists, posting to blogs, etc. In a recent root through my closet I just unearthed an old box of mail-art postrcards from friends, family, and otherwise-designated loved ones. Below is one of my favourites, sent to me during the Gulf War when I was living in an attic in Upper Gagetown, NB, right next door to the Oromocto army base (meaning that the house we lived in rocked with munitions testing all day long).
top: A side of cut-n-paste postcard depicting US testing of tomahawk missile in California,
middle: excerpt/detail from message on B side, bottom: detail of middle panel from A side.
I saw Big Fish recently, cause it was a good night for self-indulgence. Tim Burton makes interesting things to look at, and Ewan MacGregor still turns my crank. My friend S. used the word "forced" in a positive way to describe the weird fictive visuals. Father/son drama is about as loaded as it gets: hot cipher-on-cipher action. This movie was surprising and captivating except for all the other parts where it was tiresome and predictable. Why must Tim Burton work with Danny Elfman? (In fact, couldn't we do away with Danny Elfman's music altogether?) The fiction/reality flip-floppery was fun, but not quite fun enough to outweigh the long-winded, broad-stroke, get-out-the-violins crap. For a really intense, scary, beautiful , unsentimental (and short) father son film, see Collin Zipp's artist's project at Samplesize.
As I left my neighbourhood diner the other day, the waiter remarked, "You sure seemed to be enjoying that book." I gather I'd been chortling aloud over my pasta and pint. Great, more fodder for the neighbours' impression that I am some kind of no-good weirdo freak. No wonder I like Girls Who Bite Back, the latest project from the ever prolific Emily Pohl-Weary. I was initially a tad dubious about the topic for this anthology: female superheroes. And there are a lot of references to a certain pretty, moody blond TV icon vampire slayer. But Buffy is just a launching pad and a bunch of these essays are on a uniquely oddball edge that it feels damn good to indulge.
I'm still reading the book, and not in any particular order, but one of my favourites so far is Carma Livingstone's "Madame Mouth's Little Get Together," in which a clatch of female video game characters meet up to discuss their profession and get looped on a beverage called CircuitPlus. The cast are The Legs, The Hair, The Ass, The Brain, The Tits, and Madame Mouth. They spend the whole time agressively bickering, comparing notes on nude patches and the "bitch actresses" who are portraying them in the movie versions of their games. They all flirt with The Tits, who only has eyes for The Brain. There is violence, but I don't want to spoil the story so I'll say no more.
"Five Case Studies of Females With Enhanced Characteristics" by S.P. Bustos, is an incredibly convincing study in fictional genetics that charts mutations in the X chromosome resulting in super powers.
This mutated protein allows the subject to undergo morphological alterations of the body to resemble any person. Nerve-growth factors become up-regulated in the subject, which triggers high numbers of cells to migrate throughout the body and form various tissues, including cartilage and bone. Strict regulation of tissue formation, especially in the facial area, allows successful morphogenesis.I also very much enjoyed Sophie Levy's "A Manifesto For The Bitten," a riff on cyborgs, aliens, vampires and queers.
When cyborgs look in the mirror, do they see vampire reflections? What do they see? And how do they see it? Robot vision only becomes discernible in the movies at the point when it fails -- pixellates. Think about the last moments we share with the T-100 in Terminator II: as he dissolves himself, his vision fails, breaks up, and we are reminded (at the point of his most human action) that he is a robot. His eyes are screens upon which the world is projected. When we look into cyborg eyes, do we see ourselves reflected and distorted as on the convex surface of the television screen?I can't wait to read the rest of this strange, energetic book. The Toronto launch for Girls Who Bite Back is this Thursday evening at the Cameron House from 6 to 9pm.
For those of you in New York, go meet Emily and contributors Carly Stasko, Daniel Heath Justice, and Mariko Tamaki on Sunday, May 23, 7 pm at The Lucky Cat (245 Grand St, Williamsburg). More details about both events are here on the website.
Two cyclists were killed in the Toronto area last week. Some ARCers (not me) did a memorial ride yesterday. Sad pictures here, by Tino, of nice people taking flowers to an empty place. The other memorial ride, much more central, is planned for Wednesday. If you are a cyclist you are welcome to attend. Here are the details:
One week following the death of a 29-year-old cyclist, Toronto cyclists will ride to the site of the fatality to pay their respects to a fellow cyclist. Flowers will be left at the site to mark the death.
When: Wednesday, May 19 at 6:00 p.m.
Where: Intersection of Dundas St. W. Service Road and Dupont St.
Meet: Cyclists will gather at the Bloor/Spadina parkette and ride to the site together leaving at 5:30 p.m.
There will be a brief ceremony of solidarity and respect at Dundas and Dupont at 6:00 p.m.
At 6:30 p.m. the cyclists will leave together and ride to the Ferry terminal to catch the 7:15 p.m. ferry to Ward's Island. A ceremony and celebration of the cyclist's life organized by his family and friends will be held on Ward's Island at 7:45 p.m.
Any Canadians feeling smug about our general left-wingedness as compared to USA should read Christie Blatchford's article today in the Globe and Mail, an article about crimes committed by people wearing hoods being more heinous than those by perpetrators who are boldly bare-faced (no outright mention of skin colour...), an article that begins and ends with her $200 trip to the hair salon. Actually, I take that back: nobody should read it, but in case you feel like getting all steamed up, here's the link. I am finding it extremely disturbing that degrading images of Iraqis are still being splattered, now with musical soundtrack and voice-over narration (as on CBC's "The National"), all over the mainstream broadcast news. We have devolved the function of this footage from breaking information to yet more vaguely titillating eye-candy, a transition that opens the door for idle, decadent speculation such as Blatchford's. Reminds me of the now too famous 1968 photograph by Eddie Adams of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner. It might be my ignorance, but I can't think of any images of white people in extremes of dehumanisation that have been adopted in this fashion, recontextualised, and mutliplied a million times by the western press.
 Power Plant brochure with painting by Daniel Richter | It takes me forever to go to art shows. I recently went down to see the current show at The Power Plant and because I'd already heard everybody else griping about how bad it is, I ended up liking it much more than I thought. In fact, I actually got caught taking pictures of Daniel Richter's work and had to erase them in front of the gallery attendant. D-OH! I'm not easily mortified, but that did it. Later I realised that the shot I wanted is the exact same one they used on the cover of the free brochure. So here's a picture of that instead, as it looks sitting on my window ledge. Enough anecdote...on with the art review! Daniel Richter's paintings caught me off guard. I spent a full five minutes in battle with myself, saying "these are horrible, and everyone knows it" while at the exact same time digging them quite a bit. They are scratchy and ugly and too big for their britches. They are animistic, apocalyptic doomsday carnivals that remind me of Euorpean science fiction and revolution. The one on the brochure, titled, "Das Missverstandnis" (now that I have the spelling right, I think the translation is "The Misunderstanding" ... any help with this would be appreciated), depicts a motely crew of feathered, costumed folk, come up from town to pay some sort of strange homage or serenade to a big tree full of birds. Yet all the while a predatory, knowing, radioactive cat is stalking the scene and giving us art viewers the nod. An interesting note on Richter is that he used to paint abstraction, and recently, suddenly, took on rendered space, representational form, and content. It's an unusual transition. There is an image of one of his abstract works from 1999 here. |
Cloaca, image stolen from artnet.com |
The main event, of course, is Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca", a big machine that has been exhibited all over the world, and takes food (in this case table scraps from a fancy downtown Toronto restaurant) and, through a complicated process that replicates human digestion, produces small, demure portions of poo. One of my friends who saw it early in the run complained that it was too clean and sterile. I believe the exact words were : "much too clinical for an ass-licker like me." But by the time I got down there the damn thing stank badly and I was kind of impressed. I could barely stand in the room for the time it took to tour of the mechanism, and fled before I'd seen quite as much as I wanted. The gallery attendant (a different one) was very generous with information, and shared with me that when she goes home from work, people sitting next to her on the streetcar wrinkle up their noses and go "sniff sniff." Geez, thanks, Wim. I liked the sad cyborg aspect of this work, but I think the digs at both corporate culture (see the Mr. Clean w/bowels icon and "buy feces now" slogan) and art world preciousness are add-ons, making up a shaky, ironic patina that fails to function as subversion, but gives the piece a detrimental sheen of political correctness. |