A Regional Declaration of Evangelical Criticality:

(or: A Proposed Set of Vows for Provincial Cultural Producers, With Only a Hint of Overstatement and Sardonicism)


- I will create responsibly. Art is not an inherently good thing; more of it is not an inherently good thing.

- I will not point to Clement Greenberg’s brief presence as evidence that Saskatchewan is artistically innovative.

- I will not point to Aldous Huxley’s brief presence as evidence that Saskatchewan is politically progressive.

- I will not point to John Cage’s brief presence as evidence that Saskatchewan is intellectually open.

- I will not go to Emma Lake as an artist. I might go to Emma Lake as an arsonist.

- I will never create a portrait of myself as Vincent Van Gogh, in the style of Vincent Van Gogh, or titled “Vincent.”

- I will never buy the “Saskatchewan Encyclopedia.” It is bullshit.

- I will ask more of everyone. I will demand more of myself.

- I will employ my intellect even if I am NOT an academic, and I will employ my intellect even if I AM an academic.

- I will not say “photography” when I mean “pictures”; I will not say “pictures” when I mean images.

- I will be ferociously interesting.

- I will not advocate that art should be fun.

- I will include the sound of the letter “t” when I say “painting.”

- I will not agree with Carfac, Saskatchewan Craft Council, Saskatchewan Arts Alliance, Saskatchewan Arts Board or Canada Council policies simply because I am expected to; I will agree zealously with them on occasions where they make sense.

- Upon encountering the work of any of the following, I will scream and run at full speed in the opposite direction:
Joe Fafard
Vic Cicansky
David Gilhooly
Marilyn Levine
Jack Sures
David Thauberger
Wilf Perrault
William Perehudoff
Eli Bornstein
Ron Bloore
Doug Morton
Ted Godwin
Art McKay
Ken Lochhead
John Nugent
Joni Mitchell
Lindner (Ernest, not Degen)

- I will not move to Alberta "because of the money," just as I did not move here "because of the people."

- I will not confuse form with content. I will not evade discussion of content by instead discussing colour, line, technique, style, or arbitrary assessments of the shininess of an object.

- I will not assume a thing is good simply because it is here. I will not assume a thing is bad simply because it is here.

- I will not make pictures or sculptures or performances about or consisting primarily of:
grain elevators
wheat fields
the "prairie sky"
skulls
phalluses
breasts
tractors
prom dresses
stripes
my own blood

- I will not make shitty art drawing.

- I will not shirk my role as a public intellectual.

- I will praise rigour and assault laziness.

- I will be conservative in my use of the term “site-specific.”

- I will be conservative in my use of the term “installation.”

- I will be conservative in my use of the term “multi-disciplinary.”

- I will operate with the understanding that white people now have less in common with white people 200 years ago than they do with aboriginal people now.

- I will operate with the understanding that aboriginal people now have less in common with aboriginal people 200 years ago than they do with white people now.

- I will operate with the understanding that aboriginal people and white people have more in common with each other than they do with rich people.

- I will not sacrifice exclusivity and a %50 commission to any dealer, local or otherwise, who does not ram my work down collectors’ throats--you are sitting on your collective asses and you should be ashamed.

- I will assume that any gallery that relegates local work to its "project space" is being deliberately patronizing and insulting.

- I will not say “art” when I mean “craft”. I will not say “craft” when I mean “arts and crafts.”

- I will not classify as art that which is more readily one or more of the following traditions or spheres of human activity:
cinema
theatre
dance
literature
socialization
entertainment
design
decoration
philanthropy
pedagogy
hobby

- When I hear the words “great opportunity,” I will reach for my gun.

- When I hear the words "demystify," I will reach for my gun.

- When I hear the words "inner city," I will reach for my gun.

- When I hear the words "downtown core," I will reach for my gun.

- When I hear the words “I love Regina,” I will reach for my gun.

- I will not say “beautiful” when I mean “pretty.” I will not say “aesthetic” when I mean “beautiful.”

- I will not use the term “mediums,” unless I am referring to people who speak with the dead.

- I will spend my energy justifying the art I need to make, rather than in making art that is easily justified.

- I will dispute openly the validity of claims made in curatorial statements.

- I will not call myself an artist if I do not primarily occupy myself with the creation of art works.

- I will not call myself a curator without practicing the professionalism expected of curators.

- I will not curate my own work or that of my spouse into an exhibition. It is bullshit.

- I will refute the idea that Regina has ever preceded or one-upped New York. I will equally refute the idea that Saskatoon is similar to Paris, France, in any way.

- I will recognize art as the occupation of people who have no choice but art.

- I will not use benevolence as an excuse for mediocrity.

- I will not use regional identity as an excuse for intellectual laziness.

Even MORE thoughts on...

Recently, I attended the College Building Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and visited a pair of exhibitions by/of/relating to Micah Lexier. The experience got me thinking about conceptualist trends in Canadian art (history), which in turn led me to an interrogation of seemingly-current “community oriented” trends in Canadian art. Perhaps this is due to my having completed an “Artist in the Community” residency in Saskatoon recently, or perhaps it is due to this or this. At any rate, in trying to assess conceptualism on its own grounds, I began to wonder what grounds community art (aka: art of engagement, socially-engaged art, Relational art) is, should be, or would like to be assessed on. I figured that since it has been a year since I launched a shot across the bow of Relational Aesthetics, now would be a good time to consider this further. This is spurred also by my hearing that the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija sells the detritus of his performative actions through his New York dealer Gavin Brown, proving that a service-based economy just isn’t enough, sometimes--and that even champions of socially-engaged art have a commodity-fetish price. This in no way contradicts (and actually supports) my earlier assertion that much Relational Aesthetics is fuelled by capitalism and reinforces corporatism, rather than the community or benevolence it often claims.

***

Often, when debate is raised over the issue of Relational Aesthetics, Community Art, or Art as Social Engagement, one issue that arises for me orbits the question of whether this work is Art, or whether it is something else--a debate which often ends up disguising the value or worthlessness of an endeavour. Most of this kind of work, I suspect, is something else, but that’s largely due to my belief that for a thing to be art it must be made with the intent of being art, it must be received as art (by “the Art Community,” whatever the hell that is), and it must consist of a metaphoric parallel (what we used to call “content”). While the first two criteria may be largely acceptable as definitive to the art community at large, the third criterion is likely subjective, and may not find agreement with all or even most people with an interest in the visual arts. Still, I think it’s necessary, otherwise the production inhabits--and should be considered from within--an altogether different context.

But that’s alright, because our inquiry doesn’t necessitate it. Let’s assume for the time being that anything can be art--notice that this is a potential state, and is not to be confused with the assertion that everything IS art. Were we to follow this argument and treat all social, community, or engaged art practice as the art it claims to be, we would likely want to establish a way of assessing whether or not that art work or practice is successful. After all, we do this for all other art forms to date, and despite claims of social artworks being somehow unlike everything we’ve ever seen, we must assume some precedent is being followed as they are nevertheless claiming membership in the pre-existing world of art.

This exploration of the chosen topic is intended philosophically, and as a series of starting points for inquiry into works of relationality that readers may continue on their own. In other words, I don’t wish to provide answers, but rather questions which interested parties may wish to incorporate into their interpretations of the cultural material they are either producing or consuming.

In one model of the assessment of artworks, we find a purely subjective approach, and reception of artworks is a fairly subjective game. At the same time, however, a model of assessment exists in which we judge a work of art according to its own standards, or the supposed intent of its artist. Even if a clear delineation of an artist’s intent is not provided (or if it proves contradictory to the work), we can ask whether the work is consistent with itself and its stated objectives as worked into the project proper. Applying this to socially-focused artistic practice, we can ask: “Is this what it claims to be?” Although, given the supposedly experiential and non-commodified agenda of this kind of work, perhaps we should instead be asking, “does this perform the role it claims to perform?”

Significantly, the rhetoric of these practices is communo-centric. It further seems that this breed of work (such as those works addressed by and labeled as “Relational Aesthetics” by Bourriaud) adopts only the rhetoric of community building, as though the destruction or omission of communities were a) abhorrent, and b) somehow the domain of traditional or object-based practices. This second point is dubious, as human history is replete with examples of organizations and individuals using images and objects to foster community, sometimes with little or no authoritative voice. Furthermore, material artistic production breeds its own kinds of community--professional communities, communities of amateurs, or admirers, or consumers, or scholars, etc.

If we pursue the claim that socially-engaged art practices build community, we might want to examine how they attempt to build community. For example, what sort of community does the work foster? Is it long-lived or short-sighted? Are its participatory subjects engaging with the work (indeed often building the work themselves) out of attraction to the subject matter; out of a pre-existing drive the work happens to fall into step with; because they have been kept from what it is they are actually performing; or have they been in some way coerced into action? Clearly, the latter two possibilities are examples of work which, while it may seem communal, actually manages to maintain a sharply hierarchical structure (dividing those within its community into a pyramidal structure of status, for instance). Finding this the case in a work of social art, then, we may further question whether the work serves Community, a particular community, or a set of communities, or whether it adopts benevolent rhetoric to disguise some other, less egalitarian social structure.

To establish which approach is being taken, we may examine the liberty within the structures proposed (or enforced) by the work. This may be informed by a number of factors, including the degree to which the work is prescriptive in nature, the freedom for its participants to leave or to opt out of the project, their ability to effect change within the project, their responsibility to structures or individuals which created (or, rather, delineated) the work, and so on.

We might also examine the degree to which an individual or an organization absorbs the accolades for a work, produced by the labour of others and at their expense. We might consider egalitarianism as necessary to community, but more loosely we may simply wonder whether such a project considers people collectively, with product or outcome being shared by all members (even if in varying degrees).

We should also feel free to question any dubious relationships to criticality that arise from such a project. Specifically, if we, as a public, are told that a project is “community” oriented; that it is about bringing people together; that it is a collaborative, open endeavour that we all share in; where, then, are we to go if we wish to be critical of such a project? By its nature, it has sought to implicate us--by our acceptance of it or by a mere declaration that it represents our interests--and we therefore might feel as a public that there is no place that exists outside of it. Furthermore, due to the social rhetoric of such projects, critics of such a process or the methods used for such projects risk being ostracized for their dissent--if we are not willing to be team players, the argument might go, then we should shut up. This ethos contradicts entirely my interpretation of what art is and should do; art should encourage the asking of those critical questions, rather than quashing them or alienating those who pose them.

Furthermore, this interrogation of the involvement and agency of the project’s participants--and, by extension, their knowledge of the nature of the project in which they participate--may lead one to examine the claims made by the work regarding its objectives and whether such objectives rely on a commodification of human experience, or instead serve an existing and collective human need.

***

These are not the criteria with which we would assess, for instance, a painting. For while a painting is capable of focusing community, reifying culture, or effecting social change, it is honest with its non-participatory nature. Whenever the creation or fostering of community is claimed by a work, however, we would be wise to examine the degree to which such a community is capable of choosing its level of engagement with a work. If such engagement comes in the form of a requirement--with consequences for non-compliance--or in the form of a deception, we are not witnessing a community as much as we are a rigid and exploitative, though unofficial, government.

A thing's designation as "art," after all, can’t justify everything.

The Last Fish

The Last Fish
Curated by Sarah Abbott
MacKenzie Art Gallery - September 8, 2007 to January 27, 2008

The Last Fish is an exhibition that suggests we consider the importance of planetary resources--chief among these being water--and the sadness of their disappearance. The curator's statement deploys terms like "memorial," "pilgrimage," and "worrisome," briefing (or debriefing) the viewer into a corner. After all, who would be willing to argue that we should dispose of our aquatic resources as quickly as possible?

The exhibition is divided into two chambers: that which we must encounter first, and another behind it. The first chamber is painted white, and contains, we are told, the "creepy, confrontational Aeronast" (by Mark Prent) as its centrepiece. Around the finned-and-straining gymnast made from polyester resin and Fiberglas--a fact to which I'll return later--are a number of other works. Almost exclusively 2-dimensional work, they show scenes of wrecked landscapes, animal death, and--most bizarrely--a colourful scene of people at a picnic.

Passing through this space and entering the darker, blue-hued second chamber, we are confronted with Abbot's "memorial" to the last fish in the form of a display built around Johnny Aculiak's Fish. Again, radiating around the central work are other works which bear tenuous connections to the central work in that they reference water or landscape or nature or plants or the traditions of Aboriginal peoples. The walls are painted blueish-teal and what we might describe as water sounds are piped in, presumably to give us the impression that we are in the last fish's habitat; I admit, however, to having had a hard time suspending my disbelief when I took off my shoes as instructed by the vinyl lettering on the central platforms and felt the synthetic carpet and latex-painted MDF underfoot.

Because this exhibition relies as heavily as it does on emotion, both in its interpretation and seemingly in its curator's methodology, I suspect it might be appropriate to respond emotionally. I find this exhibition unsettling; not because of its message (a dirge to which we have become largely desensitized, as a culture) but because it doesn't seem to practice what it preaches. And it does preach.

Art is disruptive to the environment, as is all human activity... assuming you're willing to adopt the cynical and modernist view that humans are somehow separate from nature and that we have the power to destroy or to fix it (as this exhibition does). Art production uses, makes, and destroys things that don't need to be used/made/destroyed. As artists, we can try to minimize our ecological footprints, but as long as we're rearranging stuff or using energy, we're part of the problem. But there's a range of greys in being part of the problem, which is why the amount of photography in this exhibition surprised me. Film photography materials, processing, and development (as well as those of motion-picture film--what's the old saying about people in celluloid houses?) are incredibly toxic, and it is with an understanding of this that I find the inclusion of Ed Burtynsky's work to be emblematic for the exhibition as a whole--it looks like it's decrying environmental exploitation, when it is, in fact, helping to perpetuate it. In other words, the work, and the exhibition containing it, reject the act of environmental repair in favour of its environmentalist rhetoric.

The same could be said of Prent's sculpture included here, as it is made from caustic and plastic materials, but I remain unconvinced that Prent's work is even about the environment in the first place. His aeronastic character has fins for feet, and as such it seems to me that he is not striving for "capitalistic progress," as the curatorial statement suggests, but rather is compelled or even forced to support himself in one way (with his arms, painfully) because he is incapable of doing so in another. While the language of the pommel-horse may suggest competition, the figure's physiology suggests necessity instead.

There is an argument to be made--not by me, but surely by somebody--that takes into account the recontextualization of Johnny Aculiak's sculpture Fish, which is given central focus in this exhibition. I am insufficiently educated in the original contexts and intentionalities of his work, but I can address the facts of the exhibition itself. The "memorial" to the last fish is constructed in such a way that does not evoke sacred spaces, as the term memorial might imply, but rather those of museological doctrine and the exhibitionary order. The plexiglas vitrine, the low, multi-angle lighting and the processed-wood platforms all suggest this, as does the standard museological labelling (consisting of artist, title, medium, provenance, etc.). It seems as though the display of the work is at odds with the work itself, or even totally supercedes it, and one therefore might wonder whether Abbott is curating here or making her own piece using another. As viewers, we might ask ourselves, "if there were some other representation of fish-ness on the podium--a child's drawing, the word "fish", a plaster koi, etc.--would it change the meaning of the thing significantly?" Upon answering this, we might also wonder whether our answer suggests that the display acts in service of Aculiak's work, or takes advantage of it.

Rebecca Horn at the Rodin Gallery, Seoul

The first work a visitor encounters in this important retrospective--a term I hesitate to use given that Horn continues to be a prolific producer of art--is Large Feather Wheel, from 1997. Assuming (rightly, I think) that a large proportion of Korean viewers will be unfamiliar with the history of Berlin's installation-art innovator, the curators have provided a cover by which we may gauge the contents of their assemblage of a really quite surprising number of Horn's works. The wheel, for its part, consists of splayed feathers which are bolted to a motor and they slowly and intermittently arc around a central axis. The work suggests flight through the potential for the feathers to move, while simultaneously (and subsequently) rendering such flight impossible given that the wings themselves rely on a motor that is bolted to the wall just as it is bolted to them.

Potentiality is a constant in Horn's practice; she treats the tense negotiation between biological imperative and physiological limitation without a trace of the maudlin. Her repeated use of wing and feather motifs suggests this, as does her revisitation of small, discrete motors. The motors are, for the most part, unsettlingly slow--so slow as to be inexorable--and often quantized into short periods of operation followed by long periods of inactivity. This is the case with her Butterfly Machine, a small motor which intermittently flaps a pair of 4-inch butterfly wings, although perhaps even more so in Feather Wings, a similar construction but with feathers that unfurl against each other while rotating slowly around the motor that powers them. The sloth of these arcane, brass, steampunk constructions is the means by which they demand to be considered.

We see also in this exhibition her use of mirrors and of water as a reflecting surface, in work such as Cinema Verite. While a subtle agitator in a flat, low, black pool of water generates a moving reflection on the wall behind it, some viewers may miss the occasional connection of a pole hovering just above the water. This interruption causes larger ripples to issue from the agitator, for a very short time--ripples which produce reflections resembling spread wings--and anyone present then realizes the perpetual possibility that the protrusion will again interfere with its liquid counterpart.

The literal restraint with which Horn uses mechanical elements is more compelling than their full kinetic ability, and she designs her art with deliberate stalls, hangups, and lethargy built into the systems of the works. It is this way in which she has made her works reference humanity--Night Wood, for instance, in which a hammer repeatedly and seemingly eternally (though intermittently) knocks face powder through a sieve, where it falls onto an open book. Employing such themes and imagery, we realize that Horn's approach to technology is a maternal one; she is willing to wait for her machines to produce a given result, and we must be too.

There are other works of note in this exhibition: her generative Painting Machine Prussian Blue and Art Eaters, for instance, which turn acts of artistic creation into drawn-out, operatic, mechanical-but-nevertheless-human ballets; her series of drawings Pink Ghosts and Ghosts of Fire, which reference the body and its failings more obscurely than the kinetic works; and the array of video and film works collected for this exhibition--with a ridiculous combined duration of approximately 6 hours--which all belong to a sort of late-Cold War Berlin aesthetic, shot largely during overcast days in high-ceilinged white apartments. They manage to be both emblematic and fresh, not unlike the rest of this exhibition.

Scribe & Gretel: An Interview with Johanna Bundon

Johanna Bundon
Scribe & Gretel
Globe Theatre, Regina
May 4 to 5, 2007


What is Scribe & Gretel?

Scribe & Gretel is a contemporary dance piece that's forty minutes long. It’s for four dancers, Branwyn Bundon, Donald Taruc, Barbara Pallomina and myself, and one musician, Jeff Morton. The piece is an exploration of narrative to a certain extent, the limitations of narrative, an exploration of the form “A, AB, ABC, ABCD” to a cumulative effect and to how we leave traces in space through dance.

Can you talk about the idea of traces, and specifically your use of chalk to make marks throughout the performance?

I think that dancers always have a little bit of envy for, lets say, novelists, painters or visual arts wherein there is some sort of remnant of the work that's been created because dance is ephemeral. I wanted to bring a marking system into the dance to show the patterns that we're always working with in dance, the patterns that are present in the space, the shapes, the forms, the directions that are to a certain extent the formal elements of dance. I think I referred to the role of the chalk at one point as traffic control and this directing is work that would be going on whether the chalk was present or not, but I wanted to use the chalk to reveal this work to an audience.

How did you build the patterns and layers of the choreography?

We had to sort of work backwards. I began working by myself and then was joined by one member of the ensemble at a time. Barbara was the one most responsible for the chalk. She's the scribe in the work. She's essentially like the author of the work. It's like putting the author on stage, so she had to have some knowledge of what was coming next, but it became really obvious that that was gong to be impossible because I didn’t know what was coming next, at all. So we ended up having to work backwards where the piece had to be created before we could feign Barbara directing it.

She was an interesting character because she was not only creating, but also, for much of the piece, observing what was happening with the other characters, which put the audience in this weird space as a third party. Can you talk about how you thought about the audience while creating this piece?

Sure, I had a lot of conversations Lee Henderson about exhibitionism versus voyeurism. I find that the work I'm the most interested in is voyeuristic in nature. There's a certain—it's not disregard for the audience, it's inviting to the audience, but it 's also a certain tone communicating to the audience, “This would be happening even if you weren't here,” or “We're autonomous of you,” or “This has always been happening and this will be happening when you leave.” I think that's a really fascinating tone that can be manufactured in theatre. We ask, “Why is this theatrical? Why doesn't it belong to another medium?” I think when you can suspend an audience’s disbelief of the time shared, and what the limitations of the time shared are, that's what makes this piece theatrical.

Why are you more interested in voyeuristic work than exhibitionist work?

Because I'm not interested in confrontational work. I'm not interested in confronting an audience. If there is something I want to give an audience its permission to watch, permission to be in the space. I don't understand, or it’s definitely not my voice to make an audience uncomfortable in the space.

So you communicate through seduction rather than shock?

Yeah, totally. I want to be drawn in as an audience. I don't want to be cast out of the picture.

Can you talk about any sources for this work?

I always source literary places or maybe language in general. That's what I'm always interested in. The idea for the piece came when I was in Vancouver last spring and I was working with Helen Walkley, a choreographer, on an improvisational score based on fairy tales. I was also working from some poetry I had written around the character of a riddler who narrates these poems and who questions incessantly. Another place was, when I was younger, I never seemed to know the difference between my Bible stories and fairy tales. Noah's arc was always my favourite fairy tale. That started coming back to me a lot over the past year. Why was I drawn to these characters of the Bible more than, say, those of the Grimm brothers? But those were the characters I was interested in, so I started to read specifically Hansel and Gretel and to do a spiritual reading of it, as if it were a parable, because that seems to be the form I like.

You've also mentioned, previously, a book that revisits Noah's Arc.

Yes, Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage is one of my favourite books of all time. Findley sort of bridges the world of the Biblical and the fairy tale in this work, and does it really brilliantly wherein there is a definite line between the female narrative and the male narrative. The male figures in the work are very weak characters. God is presented as this male who is bipolar and lacks endurance in a really big way. Noah is hung up on the idea of sacrifice and is stubborn as all get out and can't get past his need to sacrifice these animals out of tradition, legacy, empire and all of these ideas he's just really attached to, whereas the female characters in the book are like water, are malleable, are imaginative, are dreamers, and are drunk, a lot. They're very malleable, and they're victims to a certain extent.

Along that line of the female versus male voices, can you talk a bit about Donald's character and how you developed that vocabulary?

The image that I had for the piece was of a man downstage left, just lying down on his back for quite a long time before moving. It didn't take long or me to realize that this was Donald’s role and that, to a certain extent, he was the reason that the rest of us were there, be it that his body was the remains of an incident, a calamity, maybe murder, an event of some sort, and that he was holding space for the rest of us to be there but that his story existed in another time. So we started calling Donald's character Noah but in that Noah he represented a lot of the men that I was reading about at the time, like the father in Hansel in Gretel who is quite weak in the story and to a certain extent Jesus in the Bible; I had this idea for a man child, for this very innocent male character. I see Donald’s character as existing in a different time than the rest of us in the piece. He oftentimes is blind to the action of the others. We sort of wove a story about him living in the apartment above the rest of us, as him as sort of a father listening to the events in the apartment below.

By contrast, your character and Branwyn’s character seemed to be very much in the same space and time. Can you talk about the symbiotic relationship between those two roles?

Yes, Bran's my cousin, which is important to point out. We definitely began to refer to our characters as siblings, you know, sometimes naming them Hansel and Gretel. It was the idea of us being in some sort of symbiotic connection, in some sort of partnership where we didn't have a lot of choice, sort of how a family works. There was a certain amount of obligation between us, I found, and hopefully that was reinforced by the unison of our movement.

There really focus on relationships in the piece. It sort of took the bones of a fairy tale and zoomed in on the relationships between characters rather than, say, plot or events.

Relationships were a focus, even a preoccupation for me, but it became evident early in the process that that was my story and maybe not the story of the cast. Essentially, it comes down to the fact the work is physical and that we work physically before we work intention in dance. That’s what makes dance different from theatre.

That’s interesting because artists are often asked whether they start from material or from an idea. So, in dance, you are predominantly starting from your “material”?

I’m not sure if that's the case for everyone. I think that's definitely the case for me. I can think of a very small passage of movement I created last spring and shortly thereafter I wrote a passage that said I want to dance a character named Gretel. I'm pretty sure the movement came first.

Yes, I can remember you focussing on certain elements of your body, like you right hip, and speaking from that area. Can you talk about how that ties to your project and how that starts to mesh together with content?

I think preoccupation is a word that comes up. I’ll be working in the studio and be like, “Oh my god, I'm so fucking hung up on my left hip crest. What is this about?" Left hip crest, right arm and edges of the feet are basically the physical reference points in the body for this work. The more I started to exploit the mechanics of that anatomy, the more I fell into postures. The more I started thinking about those postures, the more those postures lent themselves to characters. The more those characters started to grow, the more the narrative developed. That's the step by step from physical to story for me. Then it was a matter of making all that stuff to dance together. I had to create phrases to explore that postural language and then bring the space inside the body outside into a larger external space, which I think is how we fabricate tone. I knew there was an interrogative, questioning tone in the work. I kept on raising my right arm over and over like, “I have a question.” I started to think about how that question would resound in the space.

In previous projects, you've worked with poetry and text. Can you talk about how your writing practice relates to your dance practice?

I've always had a writing practice, journaling. I normally write about love, almost always. But the part that interests me in writing is the rhythmic dimension of it. It just became really clear to me three or four years ago that rhythmic dimension is totally in alignment with where I dance from. There's the same intonation in my dance composition as in my writing composition. I have a lot less faith in the writing as in the dance, but I have a lot of faith that they’re coming from the same place. The other thing is that element of fatigue in dance is a real limitation of the work, and I think it’s necessary for me to have some other tool of rehearsal or other space in which to think about the work. Writing is a big part of the practice and preparation for the work.

Can you talk about the imagery in the work?

One of the images is that of a girl with her arm raised, as if she has a question in class. Another is of a man lying downstage for a very long time, motionless. Another is a little incline of the head, a quizzical look in the spine. And grasping up. The moving images or phrases in the piece are built around a series of vertical threads hanging in the space, about hanging in those threads, being wrapped in those threads, being controlled in those threads. I'm really interested in the idea of puppeteering and the idea of choreographer as puppeteer. That directorial presence is often a really controlling one and it does pull rank above the interprets in the work, so the puppeteering image is a metaphor for the choreographer/interpret relationship. Those threads are also a testament to this fascination with verticality, with us as upright citizens. I feel like I'm always trying to get more vertical, to stand up straighter, and to be more aligned. What does that mean spiritually? I think I'm quite bound to this image of a vertical god who lives above us.

Do you think that has anything to do with your initial training in the ballet?

Totally, that and being from the prairies. There's definitely a link to ballet and that whole premise in ballet of trying to get higher; the divine being on point trying to levitate to the heavens with it’s the saintly body, that whole world. I also think there is something really powerful about one vertical figure on a horizontal plane, one person standing on the prairies.

A very vulnerable, lonely position.

Yes, very revealing. I'm still negotiating whether we showed progress or a circle. I wanted to show a circle, and not progress. It was this idea of a loop, repetition.

Why was that your focus instead of progression?

I think that goes back to the idea of the relationship with the audience or the space that I'm trying to create, the idea that this would be happening, this has always been happening, that you’re witnessing a chunk of time in this story.

You mentioned earlier that most of what you're writing about is love. Did that factor into Scribe and Gretel at all?

No, well....

Even with the Donald character when he was interacting with other characters, mainly your character?

Mainly…Huh…Yeah, there was definitely a love or an invisible bond with him, or a longing, but I didn't create it as a love story, but maybe I just mean a sexless love…No, I don't think there's a lot of love in the piece.

Which is interesting because dance is so often related to sex, maybe because of the closeness it has to the body and physicality. How do you deal with that history, or maybe the preconceptions audiences have about dance?

Yeah, someone said to me that they couldn't believe how androgynous it was and I was like, “Really?” I hadn't thought about that because I'm quite far from the ballet tradition right now. In the ballet tradition gender roles are so clear, what a woman does. It's formulaic and that doesn't really factor in for me. I definitely don't see gender as a limitation to the movement that we would do or the postures we would find ourselves in.

Does sex or sensuality factor in at all?

Sensuality definitely does.

But not sex?

No, not in this work, maybe partly because of the dynamics of the ensemble. Maybe we sourced that from a real place: Donald is homosexual so there wasn't that energy from him; Bran and I are cousins, so it’s something else entirely. It was more filial, brotherly love, and I think that’s the dynamic I'm attracted to in a working relationship. It helps that Branwyn was there to bring the familial element.

And maybe because there is a theme of innocence or of the child in the piece, seen in Donald's character, the questioning tone, and the fairytale references?

Yes, all of that stuff bulked with the fact that I had a lot of nervousness about the piece being performed in Regina, about who the audience is, about presenting it in a city where my parents live. And to a certain extent I just think it’s not my conversation. Maybe it goes with that whole shocking thing. Maybe I would include sex if there was a way to do it and make people feel very welcome and comfortable!

There was a fifth player in this project, Jeff Morton, the musician. How did you work him into the process?

I didn't work him into the process; Jeff worked himself into the process. I invited him as a collaborator. We had worked together a few times in Robin Poitras work. Jeff is a brilliant jazz musician who is maybe getting further and further from those roots. Jeff and I had a lot of conversations back in January about the idea of error and revealing error. We had some conversations about silence, an avalanche of silence, and how to make silence very loud. It was important for me to have Jeff playing live during the performance, so he did play live on a piano he treated with tuners and felts to get a very dissonant sound. We were very reliant on the rules of improvisation. The improvisation in the dance came earlier in the process, until it became set. When Jeff came into the space he really just went towards improvisation, and he has a really strong foundation in that. He just started playing with noises and we decided what would support the picture, what would challenge the picture. In general, I think Jeff created a lot of the tone in the piece: dissonance, a bit of anxiety, and a lack of resolution. There was something ill at ease in the music.

Jennifer Crane: Becoming

Jennifer Crane
Becoming
PAVED Arts, Saskatoon
May 25 - June 23, 2007


Entering the space at PAVED Arts, you might have to go through a white lattice archway. You wouldn’t be wrong to assume this space is about marking a transition, but it’s far more complicated than that--this is a long one, folks, so please bear with me. There is room, with this show, to discuss photographic philosophy as it relates to the idea of the document, and what makes art photography different, by any measure, from commercial or documentary photography. But there are more pressing issues at work here, which hover unresolved.

To the left of the entrance are 10 photographs, and across from them are 5 larger variations. The smaller works depict girls--16 or 17 years old--in casual clothing. They are smiling, posing slightly and awkwardly, and standing in front of lockers. “SHAINA,” we are told, is the name of one of them, and "SARAH" is another; we are told the names of the others as well, although the labels--in all capital letters and solid black font, organized outside of the images--seem to resemble names less than they do catalogue labels or model numbers. The photographs themselves are cropped tight to the girls heads, giving them only a small amount of visual breathing space in front of the institutionality of their lockers--their calves and feet are severed by the border of the picture. Next to these is a pair of video monitors which show the same girls in a series of camera-dress sequences, also in front of the lockers.

The larger photographs show the same girls in prom dresses. These images are even more uncanny than their smaller, casual counterparts, as the girls possess the immediate outward appearance of being dressed up; upon closer inspection, however, we see that they are all wearing the same makeup and hair as in their pseudo-candid portraits. One girl grimaces with her tongue sticking out. Therefore they have put on the clothing but still cannot manage to embody the commercial elegance they seem to be after. In these larger versions, their heads are also given more room and nothing of theirs is severed by the borders of the image, although they remain flanked by the institutional structure of the lockers.

This exhibition itself has an institutional layout typical of gallery spaces and the exhibitionary order, and of the lockers the girls inhabit--images are arranged according to a grid system of rows and columns. There are a couple of group photographs to the sides of the other images (and another in front of the aforementioned lattice gate), each of which depicts a set of three of the girls posing together. In these cases, the girls are posed in a classroom, in front of a board containing posters, drawings, letters, etc., all arranged more according to size and shape than any obvious external order.

Looking at the images in the classroom scenes, we realize that the girls pictured understand visual media less hierarchically than an artist or gallerist might, arranging images and data with more emphasis on where that data fits, rather than establishing a system of regulation to which the images and their placement conform. This raised, for me, issues of control in a photographer-subject hierarchy; while the girls may have been able to "choose" their clothing (from a limited array of available dresses) and poses, they presumably did not choose their location (as it is uniform). Furthermore, the photographer retains control of the camera position, framing/composition and fundamentally the editing of a sequence of shots down to a single proof, thereby reclaiming control over her subjects. Finally, they are displayed the way the photographer, in conjunction with exhibitionary norms, chooses to display them.

Viewers may therefore be tempted to read the artist’s process as the imposition of conformity upon something innately organic, or that an otherwise gradual process--the preparation for the “coming out” that is graduation, normally lengthy--has been rushed for the sake of efficiency. Reading the exhibition text we realize that the girls pictured are not graduating until next year, and are therefore willing participants in this process of structured visual precociousness--in what I can only assume are ways they don’t or can’t fully understand yet.

In addition to the layout, I couldn’t help but notice that these images depict a fairly uniform demographic--white, thin girls who are roughly of the age of consent. Furthermore, gleaning from the exhibition text that these girls attend Holy Cross High School, one wonders about the decision to exhibit this work in Riversdale. Walking through the space created by the installation, I couldn’t help but be aware that it is incongruous with the majority of institutional educational experience in its surrounding urban environs. This is, after all, an area of Saskatoon where under a third of the residents are listed as having completed high school--a number which is, incidentally, decreasing--and where, for some, institutional education is synonymous with the catastrophic and genocidal Residential School system.

Even though prom culture may be "enduring," it is by no means universal.



The walls not populated with photographs of the young women carry a set of 4 photographs of fallen dresses. The dresses appear to be of the type used in the other photographs, although I don’t recall noticing any direct correlation between them. The fallen dresses are shot from above, and most radiate around their central apertures. Understanding the sexual nature of prom culture and the form of coming-of-age that is perhaps the most anxiety-laden for adolescents, I cannot help but see the more flesh-coloured of these dresses as hymenal orifices; the others are flower-like, although even they are subsequently unable to avert the sexual implications of that metaphor. Furthermore, because the dresses are earthbound and uninhabited, they take on the character of discarded shells. While this may also reference transition, it also implies nudity and vulnerability. The images themselves appear to have been shot on a grey (concrete?) background and with a flash only slightly to the side of the camera--the effect this produces is the low contrast and washing out that resembles the snapshot. These images, like their portraiture counterparts, are awkward; lacking the chiaroscuro or the asymmetry that would secure their place as formally beautiful art photography, they have a grittiness which only serves to underscore the clandestine and unsettling nature of their context and content.

In the end, I found this exhibition to be confusing, disturbing, and unresolved. In attending Jennifer Crane’s artist talk, it became clear that others had also been knocked off-balance by the work presented. This is especially troubling in that the artist seems to possess a sincere concern and an investment in the nature of prom culture and working with young women. However, while this is apparent in her personality, it is muddied in the artwork. Some of it may stem from the fact that there seems to be a lack of a coherent thesis or articulated reason for making the work, while another factor may be the litany of political hotbuttons that are being bumped into (such as underaged sex; racial, financial and stylistic inequities; institutionality and control, etc.). As such, we are left with some fairly disturbing images, some semi-opaque processes, and some assumptions about the rhetoric of transition and development which, when examined, suggest processes of institutionalization, alienation and violation.

--Lee Henderson

Handheld Landscape at AKA Gallery

Handheld Landscape
Toni Hafkenscheid and Tim Van Wijk
March 30 to May 5, 2007 - AKA Gallery, Saskatoon


I first saw Toni Hafkenscheid’s photographs at the Aperture Foundation in New York. I suppose my reaction to them was similar to that of most people--an assumption that the photographs were of scale miniatures, followed by the realization that his subjects are actual landscapes (as actual as any photographed subject is), manipulated visually.

Hafkenscheid’s work, featured at AKA Gallery alongside Tim Van Wijk’s mechanical Landscape Generator, is less a practice of photography of or about something external than it is about photography itself. As viewers, we go through the aforementioned stages of assumption and realization a number of times. While looking at these photos, I found myself wondering why we first read his subjects as miniatures; his distortions are not the product of narrow depth-of-field, but rather the product of a particular type of lens (this is why there is a band of focused image through the middle of each piece, with blurriness radiating from it regardless of how close to or far from the camera a given object in the frame would have been).

Compounding the photography-as-subject tendency in these works is the fact that viewers, observed during my time in the space, were discussing the success of a given photo relative to another based on formal qualities and the quality of the illusion generated by Hafkenscheid’s process. That is, if there arose a claim about which of the images was “better” than another, it was supported by evidence including the difference in blurriness between the middle and the side of the photograph, or of the discernability of the people pictured, or of the way the saturation of the image made the objects look plastic. In other words, typical photo-aesthetic analysis--concerning light sources, composition, dispersion and proportion of colours, etc.--was not applied to these photographs by viewers. I suspect this is not due to a lack of knowledge (AKA shares space, and audience, with PAVED Arts, and both institutions have a photo-savvy core audience) but is instead a result of the clear intentionality of Hafkenscheid’s work; because he has not entirely fooled us, we are interested in discussing how he was able to come so close.

Hafkenscheid has given these works what seem to be deliberately inane titles (Motel, for instance, or Train Trestle--both of which are pictured here), and I suspect this is to further the focus of these works as a technical one rather than one based on content or subject matter. I suspect the artist could continue to produce these images indefinitely, although I’m less sure of whether that would be a good idea or not--such photographs would likely be as successful as their earlier iterations, but would also not contribute anything new to the dialogue.




Tim Van Wijk’s Landscape Generator, on the other hand, is designed and built to be functionally transparent. The work is a large machine composed of a series of axles, wheels and cogs made of painted wood; it has a hand crank protruding from its back and as a viewer turns the crank the gears are set in motion. These gears in turn cause circular sections of landscape--visible from the front of the machine--to rotate at different speeds, creating a pseudo-illusion of passing in front of things at various distances from one’s eyes. This is assuming, of course, that one has a friend willing to crank the machine for him or her. But the large trees in front move more quickly than the smaller trees in back, and faster still than the mountains behind those; this is all viewed in motion through a white sheet in a gold frame with a windshield-wiper arc-shape cut out of it.

I use the term pseudo-illusion because there is no attempt made by Van Wijk to deceive, even briefly, his viewers. This machine is theatrical in a way that Hafkenscheid’s photographs are not--it requires physical interaction and produces a certain awkward illusion of depth, but it does so in a way that introduces one to the means of illusion before the illusion itself can occur. We are asked, therefore, to suspend disbelief from our first encounter with the work, and this is fortunate. Otherwise, we may wonder why a single tire could fit around several trees, or why we seem to be looking out the front windshield of a vehicle when the landscape is moving sideways.




As for the combination of these works, to emphasize landscape seems at first to be a grasping at a connection between two very different practices which both happen to image landscapes; I don’t believe that any of this work is really about landscape as content. Rather, the two practices employ the imagery of landscape to interrogate, from opposing approaches, the nature of illusion and our willingness to participate in the acceptance--or generation, or perpetuation--of the illusions that surround us, whether those are environmental, social, utilitarian, or purely visual. However the decision in both cases to explore illusion while imaging landscape suggests--potentially--a cultural trend that is responding to the possibility of ecological disaster. "One day," the thesis could go, "all landscape will be illusory."