Pierre-Yves Girard at Galerie D'Este.

Pierre-Yves Girard - Écorceur de pruches

Pierre-Yves Girard's paintings take up the corner of Galerie D'Este's end of year show. A strong and lush brown to blue palette with tinges of blood red circulates and unfolds throughout his swirling oil paintings. A good sense of contracting and releasing torsion in a few, particularly the verticals. The paintings orchestrated on the horizontal lose much of this. Their rendering is looser, the composition less clear. Rather than being dynamic, they tend to thud. This is a bit tragi-comic; a set of convulsions registered as smears that shadow action. But this delicacy, often verging on failure, is damaged by his frequent spattering of black dots that muddy up the negative space around his cautiously manipulated zones. More carefully applied, they might have provided a certain degree of ironic displacement for the central gestures. Instead, they come off as less uncertain and more distracted: too much of too little.

Kent Monkman's Urban Res at PFOAC.

Kent Monkman - Red

I have to admit that I've always been ambivalent about Kent Monkman's work. That hasn't changed, but I've finally found a way to look at it and not see it as tedious. Monkman, winner of the Hnatyshyn 2014 Prize for excellence in the visual arts and winner of 2014 Indspire Award, has been the poster child (or pin-up girl) for politicized art in the country for awhile. His latest exhibit, Urban Res, at PFOAC displays homoerotic aboriginal youths with tattooed angels, spirit warriors, figures from Picasso and Francis Bacon, all running riot in what appears to be Manitoba. It plays on images of Christian martyrdom and echoes some of Attila Lukacs' earlier work. By coincidence, it also benefits from the imagery of the latest racial fiascoes south of the border to have become the fodder for an orgy of televised and online stupidity. I mention this largely because the sizable volume of writings to accumulate around Monkman tends to replay many of the same underlying moral and political arguments, albeit in more domesticated, if no less pretentious, tones.

Luke Painter's Hither and Thither at Galerie Trois Points.

Luke Painter - Fantasy 02

There's something too restrained about Luke Painter's ink on paper works displayed at Galerie Trois Points. They manage to be not quite lively enough to be successfully decorative and yet still not quite developed enough to be the backgrounds for a graphic novel. There's not enough atmosphere for either. A sense of expressionistic set design runs throughout the pieces. He even titles one Blue Room (Dark Italics Dr Caligri). It is reminiscent of Weine's classic film (though perhaps more of Laughton's The Night Hunter sets). To up the ante, he sets the work in a slanted frame (thus italic). This underlining of his images points more to what they are missing than to anything else. They don't express much, they just stage it. What results from this is an oddity: spaces without place. They are one liners that run in a vacuum of unlimited time. There's something interesting about that. I can't imagine what it is. That's what's interesting... the not imagining of the image. If, in practice, this often makes them come off like throwaway set designs from a forgettable 80s kids movie (Gardens [Basilius Besler] is reminiscent of some of the sets of Return to Oz) or a no budget dystopian fantasy, it also makes them strangely close to Minimalism. The best summary of the show is probably Fantasy 02 which provides both the overgrown yet wispy vegetation he seems fond of with romantic Gothic ruins and a gaudy sign that could be from a strip club or a Bruce Nauman. However, his restraint, his overbearing push to being not quite something or other, dissolves any tension that his compositions could hold and leaves them feeling flatter than wallpaper.

On Bertram Brooker.

Glamour of the Underfolk.

"There is so much heat in my heart, that Humanity cannot escape being scorched, no man shall escape the heat of my heart. [...] I am the overflowing scourge whom God has sent down to chasten the earth. [...] I am the champion of the Underfolk." (Brooker, 155-156)

Unlike the majority of Canadian artists working in the first half of the twentieth century, Bertram Brooker wrote voluminously about his own work and that of his contemporaries, expounding and elaborating his aesthetic theories in different milieus. His attempt to articulate a peculiarly Canadian form of Modernism that could respond to the demands of his adopted nation frequently involved a mildly antagonistic engagement with the specifically English strains of Modernism, embodied, at least in his mind, by Wyndham Lewis, who he refers to as a pessimistic and reactionary humanist (Brooker, 215). And while the influence of Vorticism is clearly present in much of his work, and the critique of the Time Cult is also echoed, Brooker's answer to the issues which Lewis raised were very much his own.

Of Alex Colville.

Bodies in a grave, Belsen (1946)

A retired war artist who had documented the acceleration of technology and the destruction of flesh, both around battlefields and in Auschwitz, Alex Colville abandoned the figure for years after the Second World War. He finally re-introduced it with a series of nude, Grace type figures, dotting the shore to which he had returned. As his career progressed, Colville drew far closer to the technological theodicy promulgated by Marshall McLuhan, carrying on the vitalist fantasies of Bertram Brooker. Like the latter, and for much the same reasons, he regarded his work as a very special kind of primitivism, claiming that his own work has the "characteristics of an essentially unsophisticated, that is to say, primitive art" (quoted in Burnett 18) one which was intrinsically bound to a spiritual understanding of a new and technologically advanced world. But where Brooker's figures exuded a vital quality that radiated through space and frequently fragmented it, Colville's are only devices for measurement that flatten the figure as an 'arrested happening' (Dow 127) intended to testify to the eternity of Being: The hallucinatory re-codification of space and time with the irreality of a neo-Thomist theodicy. And yet, in spite of Colville's (and many of his commentators') insistence on the unity, harmony and measure of his work, built right into this hallucination of eternal order is its immanent collapse. And it is this, as much as the tension which he manages in the ambiguous, decontextualized moments he creates, that causes a further problem, one less moral than logico-mathematical.

E-Catalogue for Sum of two and three, One more than four

I contributed two and a half essays to this catalogue for the exhibit Sum of two and three, One more than four: Sherry Czekus, Lynette de Montreuil, Mike Pszczonak, Niloufar Salimi, and Matthew Tarini at the ArtLab in London. I wrote the second, third and fifth.

Notes: On the rudiments of culture

 

From The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture by A. Samuel Kimball. Not a popular book by any means, but essential reading for the too often ignored basics.

The infanticidal implications of reproductive success, easy enough to demonstrate, are burdensome to accept, for they signal the mistakenness of the common belief that evolution is principally the set of processes by which life proliferates. To the contrary, evolutionary change gives rise to life only as that life economizes on - lives off of by destroying- itself within a thermodynamic horizon that condemns all living things to extinction. (42)

Evolution is economization; economization is sacrificial because it necessitates the deflection of costs onto others and the environment. What's more, this sacrifice is intrinsically infanticidal following the thermodynamic limit imposed by the evolutionary economy. Infanticide destroys lineages singly and collectively, in the present and into the future. This economy entails not only these ends, but "the inevitable end of life itself." (37) Terrestrial vital existence is axiomatically ruled by these principles. "The evolutionary program knows no other economy, and the economy it does know is sacrificial." (38)

E-catalogue for Rory Dean's The Bassoonist

Get it here. From The Petrified Forest Gallery. With essays by yours truly and Joe Becker.

Jared Peters’ Just as it should be at the McIntosh Gallery.

Surrealist of the bland unconscious

Car seats, toilets, bars of soap, sinks and industrial tiles. These are the dominant subjects of Jared Peters' Just as it should be at the McIntosh Gallery. Toilet is indicative of the show as a whole. Muted in colour, geometrical but soft on line and sitting with slight unease in a boxy but not quite square canvas space. It's a lot of not quite ball-in-a-box. Viewed from above, the toilet has only a subtle sense of depth. Like the sink in the painting beside it, the flattening wins out. With careful attention to the detail of floor tiles, it is also the decorative which dominates. This is only accented by the striking lack of any excretion in the toilet: just the twists of some paper rendered like the wrinkles of a shirt. While the clean/filth divide has been fairly overstated by anthropologists since at least Mary Douglas' seminal, if simplistic, Purity and Danger, there is remarkably little of the latter in evidence. Instead, it's a world so decontaminated that the only sense of life is the murkiness of its colour scheme.

Mike Pszczonak: Retrospective of an Emerging Artist.

My essay for Mike Pszczonak's Retrospective of an Emerging Artist
at The Petrified Forest Gallery.

Sophie Jodoin / Jacinthe Lessard - L at Battat Contemporary.

Sophie Jodoin has been doing elegantly spare, slightly menacing collage work for years. These have tended to involve severed body parts with some additional ink or paint work and were filled with echoes of violent events (war, terrorism etc). Her new show at Battat Contemporary is far more pared down, but this has, strangely enough, added to her workꞌs suggestiveness. Spanning two walls, the pieces feature collages made from book pages. Things have been reduced to bare lines and the occasional rectangle. Stark black and white dominates the show with the exception of greyish and grizzled book sitting alone on a ledge and facing the other pieces. What the works suggest seems far removed from that which so much of her other work tends to hint at. Adding to this is her rather wise pairing with Jacinthe Lessard-L. Her work, including both large photos and a set of videos, involves the various combinations of the elements of a chair. The stark lines of the chair are set against a white background in different configurations. Both sets of work insist on their quality as assemblages that, in spite of their minimal qualities, also attest on their capacity for ready transformation. Their combination also brings out forcefully the architectural qualities which their images possess, the sense of interlocking elements for the creation of articulated spaces and neutralized negativity.

Letter from Montreal (July).

Dear X.,

Just returned from Montreal. The weather was less terrible than usual in July. The streets more clotted than ever by tourists. Yet, it still smells less horrible than most Canadian cities. The food is still good. My French is still bad. The flavour of beers more unique and more disappointing. Many galleries were closed to avoid the congestion. The John Heward show at Galerie Roger Bellemare was much like every other Heward show Iꞌve seen. They were mostly called masks or self portraits. Usually weighed down by metal clips. This was an unconvincing gesture but hinted that they may have had another life. Rags and lilting flags. The occasional reference in a title to spice things up. They are the remains of a shipwreck that never had a ship. But they were nicely laid out in the gallery. Across the hall were a few striking pieces by Angele Verret. Enjoyably irritating, mildly hallucinatory.

Dave Kemp: The things you know but cannot explain at The McIntosh Gallery.

Dave Kempꞌs PHD exhibition The things you know but cannot explain at The McIntosh Gallery includes two sets of photographs, a video series and one long-playing video work. One set of images were taken using the one pixel camera which the artist designed and built. Its severe restrictions create monochromes which are actually captures of deliberately clichéd subject matter (sunsets, birthday parties, Niagara Falls etc.). Facing these images is the Locations series which pictures banal landscapes, unremarkably composed and framed. The video works all play on boredom: watching water boil, watching paint dry, watching the grass grow etc. These idiomatic capsules of boredom are rendered literally and played out in time. The idiomatic aspect insists on their familiarity. Their literalizing seeks to actualize the rhetoric, passing from figure to phenomena.

Walter Benjamin sells magic beans

In Walter Benjamin's Little History of Photography, he contrasts three kinds of photography: art or creative photography, fairground 'huckster' photography and industrial photography. The middle form he largely abandons to set up a tidy duality. He speculates that the return of the former in the early twentieth century may be linked to a capitalist crisis (507) and equates it with 'philistine' (508) conceptions of art. Benjamin suggests that the philistine reacts in abject terror when technology is posed to erode their romantic conception of genius. He then recasts the photographer in the equally romantic role of the 'overturner' of art-fetishism who could unleash unanticipated effects.

NB: What is Photography?

Talbot had already suggested a way of understanding photography which undermined the singular author. Reactions to this tended to fall along the lines of a creative/productive split. In the essay What is Photography? from Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, Ariella Azoulay tracks the shifts of this as a photography turned from something operated by people to something operating on them as well (15). The author promotes a political ontology of photography, one which involves the relations between humans and objects (18). Because cameras seem to saturate contemporary spaces, the sense of being, or potentially being, photographed becomes omnipresent. While we may never see the images these cameras produce, the majority of images we do see are seen without their cameras. The photograph could then become a generator of events and encounters where none of the participants holds sovereignty (17).

Roland Barthes II: De-Realizing the World.

Camera Lucida is Roland Barthes attempt to come to terms with the transparency of the photograph which seems to "annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself." (45) This transparency is not so much a content but a mechanism for the 'de-realization' (118) of the world. The photo stands as an absolute. Barthes ties the photograph explicitly, and ad nauseum, to death. Dropping in references to de Sade (14) and BDSM porn (41-42, 57-59), there's something very theatrical about this death (31). Even more explicitly, he links the photo to an ancient Etruscan torture (5) which had served as an ontological model to Aristotle.¹ Barthes' description of the phenomenological experience of photography is compared to this torture which, by virtue of the effects of putrefaction, bound the two bodies together thanks to the vermicular culture that grew between them and dissolved their boundaries. He provides an Oedipal image for this experience: "A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze...a carnal medium..." (81) What results, in regards to experience, is a continuation of the putrefying remainder, or in his preferred grammatical register, aphaeresis. This subtraction forms one of the essential poles in Barthes' thinking. The excess which is cut away from it is what he attempts to redeem via a libidinization.

Roland Barthes I: Thinking as a Maggot.

The 'death of the author' demarcates the opening to a negative space. In fact, there is only an author insofar as they are in the process of dying, of entering and become an element of this space. "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (Barthes 142) But this is a very specific kind of negativity, one which is focal and pervasive. It is not even a matter of dialectics. In fact, there is no dialogue between this negative and that which is to be scrawled over it. They are in an asymmetrical relation; the one antecedent to, and in excess of, the other.

Ruth B. Phillips: Piety and Propaganda.

For Ruth B. Phillips, the museum functions as a 'diagnostic' device for 'Western modernity' as it progressively displaces the religious sphere as the domain of art.¹ In its place is erected a monument to secularism, the establishment of the nation state and the domination of indigenous people. This is the backdrop she draws for her polemical article "A Proper Place for Art or the Proper Arts of Place? Native North American Objects and the Hierarchies of Art, Craft, and Souvenir." From her first sentences, Phillips spells out the ideological claim she's staking. Note that she uncritically naturalizes 'indigenous systems of spirituality, expressive culture, and value' while insisting on the artificial quality of 'idealist notions of art and scientific paradigms of objecthood'.² In effect, 'Western' could be understood in her lexicon as artifice, variously regarded as a 'mystification' and 'commoditization' process. Therefore, when she comes to speak of cultural hybridization, a substantial part of what she is insisting on is the entrance of a previously non-capitalist culture into the international market. What her article struggles with is the nature of this reterritorialization.