booster

A Regional Declaration of Evangelical Criticality:

2008-06-01T18:49:00.001-07:00

(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...

2008-01-02T13:40:00.001-08:00

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

2007-09-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-28T18:55:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

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."

Hiatus

2006-12-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone, just a quick note that we've been on a bit of a hiatus at booster for the past while. New reviews are coming soon, though, so check back with us.

And thanks for reading.

Situation Comedy: Humor [sic] in Recent Art

2006-10-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

The MacKenzie Art Gallery
October 7, 2006 to January 1, 2007
Organized by Independent Curators International (iCI), New York
Curated by Dominic Molon and Michael Rooks

Situation Comedy: Humor [sic] in Recent Art is a deftly-titled exhibition currently at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. It is a large group show put together by iCI of New York and incorporating various media, although one might not be blamed for noticing that this touring, American show of works by contemporary artists boasts a larger proportion of video- and media-based work than one is accustomed to seeing at the MacK. In this show the televised image, it seems, is everywhere--but this is not the only reason that “Situation Comedy” is appropriate as a moniker.

The curators’ focus here is clearly humour--a predominantly adolescent humour to which I’ll return later--although it employs also the pretense of academia, where any title not consisting of the formula “Clever Pun: Didactic Explanation of Actual Subject” is almost unthinkable. Indeed, some of the works included here are genuinely funny, which, I suspect, is not exactly the same as being “humourous,” if for no other reason than because people say “humourous” when they want to sound fancier than when they say “funny.” The point is that art-world pomposity is not gone from this show, it is merely thinly-veiled as proletarian comedy.

The popularization of art may seem an admirable objective. The logic goes like this: if more people attend a gallery, then more corporate and governmental spending will be allocated to cultural (gallery-based) institutions, which will in turn be able to afford to bring in larger shows and further expand collections, thereby providing needed sustenance to greater numbers of artists. The trouble with this contract of reason is that apparently no one has bothered to tell the cultural funders about it. For even though gallery attendance in general has been steadily on the increase, the Federal Government recently announced massive cuts to the cultural sector, including the Museum Assistance Program--a facet of cultural spending which funds large, crowd-pleasing institutions like the MacKenzie Art Gallery. It would seem, then, that government views popularity among a mass audience as a sign of independence and sustainability. “If you’re so popular,” as it were, “then why do you need our money?”

Nevertheless, like a curatorial Dr. Faustus, this show’s organizers seek to play both sides against the middle in an effort to appeal to existing and potential gallery-goers alike. I heard a number of viewers--"art-savvy" and otherwise--claim that it was great to see that art could be entertaining. It is curious that it takes a show based on humour--rather than fear, romance, etc.--to prove that art can “entertain.” Furthermore, this transmogrification of art into entertainment begs a necessary question: does art even work as entertainment, or is entertainment-art merely the shadow thereof; the cheap imitator; the fashionista who is unaware that the punks she seeks so desperately to emulate as she slums it with her $500 plaid pants are, in fact, ridiculing her?

Take, for instance, Block Watching, one of the exhibited works by Luis Gispert. A video work, it shows a woman not unlike a Fly Girl from “In Living Color”--itself a showcase of false costuming and the pretense of hip-hop--in an odd cheerleader/schoolgirl outfit accessorized with large gold chains and assorted jewelry. She stands in front of a green wall, picking at her artificial nails and grimacing until a car alarm begins to sound. She suddenly mimes as though the sound were coming from her; she is lip-synching with the alarm. This continues for a time as she performs a cartoonish dance which, along with the lip-synching, ceases when the alarm ends. She grimaces some more, pouts, and the performance begins again.

Gispert claims to be a hip-hop artist, though I’m not sure what that means. But there is a critique that is barely hinted at by this work, a critique of the objectification of women so prevalent in the mainstream of hip-hop culture (disagree if you want to--exceptions like Queen Latifah and Dead Prez only prove the rule). This critique remains a vague suggestion on the periphery of the work and even if one is looking for it, it remains elusive. In fact, the work doesn’t interrogate this tendency within the culture it samples, but seems instead to celebrate it.

As Jullian Stallabrass described the work of the Young British Artists, it "puts opposing elements into unresolved opposition."

And if the tone of Block Watching is irresponsible, the tone of the work which became colloquially-known as Discoboobs, Gispert’s other work included in the show, borders on the exploitative. The piece is in video and consists of a closeup of a pair of breasts in a white shirt. The breasts move--or more accurately they are moved by an unseen manipulator--to the beat of the disco music which plays over the headphones attached to the monitor. If there is cleverness in this work or in Block Watching, it is because it seems as though they were designed to attract the yet-untapped contemporary art gallery market of 13-year-old boys. Regardless of their age, the point of this work seems to be that viewers can laugh at the silly woman singing along with the car, or the silly tits “dancing” to the disco.

The exhibition is not without its highlights. Bob and Roberta Smith’s carnivalesque, text-based paintings instruct viewers to “Make your own damn art,” and caution us that “Artists Ruin It For Everybody”. It can only be assumed, because of the bluntness of their gesture, that they recognize the irony inherent in making art as a refutation of the status of art. It is a further irony--likely also intentional--that these works are included in a large, international touring exhibition.

And so the curators of Situation Comedy have tried to assemble and exhibit work which is both art and entertainment, in an effort to sit between these and reap the benefits--mass appeal and high-culture cachet--of both; in theory, the effete will be distracted by the illusion of street-level, vulgar authenticity, and the commoner will be satisfied that they have found art that is recognizable and not totally unlike an episode of South Park or The Simpsons (with the exception, likely unnoticed, that these latter two are far more effective in their subversion than any gallery exhibition).

If Faustus is their model, then perhaps they did not finish the story; I don’t remember exactly how things went for the Doctor, but I don’t recall them ending well.

More Thoughts on Relational Aesthetics

2006-10-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

[For the first part of this debate, see Lee Henderson's "Some Thoughts on Relational Aesthetics" Post]

My apologies for not getting in on the debate sooner. However, I am glad to have had the chance to read the debate so far before throwing my two cents into the ring, not to mention the opportunity to pick the brains of those more informed on the matter than myself. The main points, as I see them, revolve around the relationships between art and life, art and audience, and, Relational Aesthetics and beauty/aesthetics.

With regards to the relationship between art and life, someone once said (someone famous, so please let me know who it was if you happen to know), “life is, and art means.” I agree. Art always involves decisions, selection and omission, each decision resulting in the production and implication of meaning. This is particularly relevant to our debate because it addresses a fundamental issue: to put it bluntly, are works that fall under the heading of Relational Aesthetics art?

Let me start by deciding that yes, they are. The audience participation, no matter how uncontrolled, is directed in some way. Decisions are made. This much is evident. There is form, and it is this form that Borriaud holds up as radically different from traditional art forms. Therefore, it is not fair to say that the social interactions are the sole place for finding artistic merit, satisfaction, beauty, criticality...whatever. Form must be considered, because, if the social interactions are held up as the site of beauty (or lack of beauty...again, whatever), then there is really no need for relational aesthetic art because social interactions exist without artistic intervention. We must acknowledge that these social interactions have been presented, collected and framed in some way. The critics and artists who question the form of relational aesthetics are not necessarily missing the beauty of the social interactions, but are directing their attention to the artistic decisions that brought that interaction into existence.

The relationship between art and audience is particularly contentious, and often comes down to questions of accessibility. Why is the issue so touchy? Because without accessibility, art risks losing relevance, agency, even a reason for existence in our society. Relational Aesthetics seeks to work against this gap between art and audience by directly involving the audience in the art. This is where I think we need to look more closely at what Relational Aesthetics reveals about the state of contemporary art. It seems to point to a belief that art has retreated into the institution, cut off from the public, and that we need to revolutionize art forms in order to right the situation. What better way to ensure interaction and participation than to make interaction the work of art itself? Relational Aesthetics, then, is in part a manifestation of a deep-seated anxiety regarding accessibility in contemporary art.

However, Relational Aesthetics goes beyond simply being a representation of anxiety by taking swipes at those things which it considers obstacles in the audience/art relationship: the structure and nature of the institution, the way that it defines the role of the artist and viewer. Even more importantly, Relational Aesthetics takes aim at the work itself. What we have is not the death of the author, but the death of the work. In the destruction of the traditional conceptions of form, the work has been destroyed as well, an object whose language has been deemed another obstacle impeding the interaction between art and audience.

However, there is no reason to believe that viewers/participants can read the language of Relational Aesthetics anymore readily than the language of painting or installation art, for example. In other words, simply having people “interact” does not ensure engagement with art. Furthermore, I fear that there is the potential within Relational Aesthetics to make art that, at first, involves the public, but is then swallowed up by the insular regions of the art world: I worry about the art being presented almost as a case-study at lectures or in galleries. I believe that would alienate the public, having now been turned into a subject for the art world’s gaze.

***

I am going to stop here, because I have tried to conclude this argument six or seven times, alternatively for and against Relational Aesthetics. Much to my own irritation, I have ended up in the middle (as I so often do), perched sheepishly on the fence. I hope that it is the result of a lack of first-hand experience with Relational Aesthetics, and that I will come back to this debate with something more definitive soon.

Angela Beck

Ingrid Bachmann: Symphony for 54 Shoes (Distant Echoes)

2006-10-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

Neutral Ground
September 9 - October 6, 2006

Rounding the corner and walking into the main space at Neutral Ground, one is greeted first by a large, clumsily diagrammatic line drawing, mural-like, of two shoes hovering over two pairs of springs. To the right of this drawing is a row of shoes upon similar springs, mounted on wooden planks two or three feet from the floor. The row wraps around the space and the shoes are all connected via wires to a control box to the extreme left of the row. There are 52 shoes, although one may assume the number is inconsequential as the artist’s statement, indeed the title of the piece, lists 54.

The shoes do not move at first, or at least that was my experience. I wandered about the space for a short while before gallery staff came to switch the work on, at which point the shoes began to make clacking sounds in an apparently random sequence. The shoes themselves are fitted with tapping plates, causing them to make these clicking and smacking sounds--which fill the gallery, provided the work is powered up--when they are moved suddenly by the small pistons that support them. The shoes are varied, as some are workboots, some are loafers, some are pumps and some are even actual tap shoes, and they are arranged in pairs.

Considering the variance of the shoes, I was aware that they were all of Western origin--there are no “ethnic” shoes here, unless caucasian in its broadest sense can be said to be an ethnicity. They don’t, however, indicate much about their former owners, except perhaps through their varying degrees of wear, giving an indication as to the nature of their former inhabitants only by their condition. And if the shoes themselves are characters, this piece is a bit like being in an asylum. The inhabitants here have only two states--agitated and comatose.

As they clattered, I began also to wonder if my presence or motion was triggering them (aside from the initial triggering of the staff to activate the piece). After noticing no difference in their motion whether I was moving or static, I realized this was not an interactive work but a process that simply goes ahead regardless of its viewership. What is made obvious, however, through the exposure of wires, is the fact that power and information (in the form of instructions) is being sent to these shoes. This is emphasized further by the fact that the control box makes a noise almost as loud as the shoes, and certainly more regularly, as its relay switches click on and off internally.

If this work is to be read biologically, then it suggests a model of a nervous system, with the brain clicking away to make its limbs dance. The instructions are fired from the central controller to the connected muscles, making them move or remain static. This, however, would be a somewhat grim view of the human condition, because it would suggest that we are then only responses to switches. These switches, further, are only internal and cannot be affected by other organisms, other presences, and can occupy only two polar states.

If it is to be read spiritually, then the control box is a sort of animator, allowing the ghosts of the shoes’ inhabitants to “act” even after they have disappeared. They cannot communicate clearly with the living, but they can perform the pedal equivalent to moaning or knocking over a vase. Neither can we interact with them, as we can attend or leave but not affect the tapping itself.

These are, I think, possible readings. But if this work, on the other hand, is to be read technologically--and this is unfortunately the only reading the artist’s statement suggests--then it is not a metaphor or a model for anything but is simply a bit of an electronic trick. It may be an interesting piece of engineering... but engineering alone does not an effective artwork make. It is also an elaborate noisemaker; a computerized musical toy that no one wants to listen to. I presume that the irregular repetition of noises is the reason for the gallery staff to have this work powered down until a viewer arrives. While it may be understandable on some level--consider sharing an office with a perpetual tapdancer, or 52 irregular tapdancers--one wonders about the efficacy of annoyance as an aesthetic strategy. Put more practically, if the staff are to be the mediators and keepers of an installation, why present this work if the staff can’t tolerate it?

--Lee Henderson

click to go to Neutral Ground's exhibition page

Some thoughts on Relational Aesthetics: an open letter

2006-09-27T09:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Relational Aesthetes,

The following is by no means intended as an assault on the individual practices of artists whose work falls under these themes/methodologies. Rather, it is intended as an opposition to the broad acceptance of the theory surrounding the work--and the reasons given for such work--described initially by Bourriaud and his theory of Relational Aesthetics. It is both a cautionary tale and a call to arms, in a sense; it has a deliberate manifesto-like tone and is intended to provoke strong criticism.

By opposing each other, may we find compromise.

The trouble I have with the term Relational Aesthetics is that the work the theory tries to classify is decidedly anti-aesthetic. Despite the term itself--coined not by the artists involved but rather by theorist Nicolas Bourriaud--it makes no claims to aestheticization or beauty; it is rather, in fact, the ultimate rejection or nullification of beauty. It is obsessed with societal interaction (the most quotidian of all possible concerns) and one-liners masquerading as concepts, building only superficial and stunningly brief "communities."

Relational Aesthetics is therefore image-nullifying (has anyone ever wondered why the photographs which document most of these works are interchangeable? How many photos of a person serving dinner to an audience must we see?). It is not a desire for ugliness fueling this work, because any antithesis secretly justifies its opposite; rather, the work is an assertion and manifestation of the idea that beauty and ugliness are irrelevant, pointless pursuits of a pretentious Bourgeois culture that predates the service-based economy. This is art imitating life, or more specifically art imitating the market and this, of course, is the true bourgeois pretension--that the marketplace is central.

Relational Aesthetics seeks therefore to destroy the line between art and life: a line which, as one might suspect, exists for a reason. In its use of social interaction as material, it becomes a sort of re-Duchamping of the world. “Readymade objects have been done,” says Relational Aesthetics, “and the object is an artifact of the old economy. If Duchamp removed the building of an artwork and left only the declaration of it, we will remove even the attempt to declare art.” But Duchamp’s point was that the viewer is already complicit in the agreement that what they are seeing is indeed art; any further involvement is superfluous and, in the long run, on the part of the viewer-cum-participant it is potentially unwelcome.

If one were paranoid, one might not be blamed for thinking that this self-decentralization is an attempt by the artists to absolve themselves of guilt if the work ends up being as boring as most of this work does. “Well,” one can always say, “I did relinquish sole authorship...” Like a Texan Governor who is able to claim that he neither wrote the law nor flipped the switch, these artists are nevertheless central and primary to the process, for better or for worse; the blood, as it were, is on their hands. If the removal of one’s authorship or primacy is the objective--conscious or otherwise--then these artists are the victims of an irony, or perhaps a paradox.

The proof of this irony is found in Warhol, who was a perfect example of the decentralization or the anonymity--perhaps the pretense of anonymity--claimed to be part of Relational Aesthetics, which is at best a pipe-dream and at worst a poorly thought-out swindle. In those moments where he was willing to say anything at all, Warhol claimed that he wanted to be non-human, anonymous, mechanical (he once said that he would like nothing better than for someone else to begin making work just like his own, such that no one would be able to tell the difference). This rejection of individuality, in turn, made him the center of the art world’s largest cult of personality...ever. Warhol’s rejection of his own worth as an individual personality was, of course, as much of a pretense as his personality itself, leading the astute observer to realize that perhaps today’s Relational Aesthetics artists are not totally oblivious to the lessons of history; the more you deny that you are an authorial personality, the more you are recognized as one.

As Jean Baudrillard has said, "Insignificance--real insignificance, the victorious challenge to meaning, the shedding of sense, the art of disappearance of meaning--is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it." It does not take a great logical leap to realize that if this is true, one can also substitute the word "artists" for the word "works" in the passage above.

Is this because of some stubbornness on the part of the public (whomever they are)? Or is it because all secrecy breeds further inquisition, the secrecy itself implying that there is something underneath it? These are possibilities, but I would suggest that it is a logical paradox that foils the supposed assassination of the Author. As Alan Watts has said, “no one believes in God quite like an atheist;” it is not much of a stretch to say also that any denial at authorship is a secret claim to authorship. Put plainly, no one is positioned to deny authorship except the author. Or, to state it poetically, “there is no author, and I know this for I am he.” Even the idea of giving credit to a project’s participants is a claim to authority--otherwise, what right does one have to be "giving away" credit?

The tragedy is that this deceit passes by us, thinly-veiled as benevolence and communism, when in fact it is the ultimate expression of neo-liberal capitalism, for when the traditional contexts, discourses and practices of art have all been discredited or destroyed, there will remain only the Free Market for determining what is art and what is not. Therefore this strata of works which claim to embrace community and "the public," claim to be populist and anti-elitist, and claim that anyone can and everyone should be a part of the artistic process, would have success or failure designated only by those rich enough to pay for it.

So I request that artists, writers, critics and commentators concerning themselves with Relational Aesthetics--especially those applauding it as decentralizing to the artist and inherently communistic or benevolent--take a long, hard look at what it is the work is doing. Because this elusive "community" that is so sought after does not form after five seconds of coerced interaction.

Thank you,
Lee Henderson

Ingrid Bachmann: Symphony for 54 Shoes (Distant Echoes)

2006-09-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

Neutral Ground
September 9 - October 6, 2006

Ingrid Bachmann’s Symphony for 54 Shoes attempts to delineate where humanity ends and technology begins. The symphony consists of 27 pairs of shoes which move up and down, accompanied by a clacking sound. The movement, which appears totally random, is controlled by a micro-controller and software. By presenting noise that is almost the opposite of music, and movement that could not be mistaken for dance, Bachmann removes evidence of the human hand--or, more specificallly, the human foot--from her work.

It is not simply that human presence is lacking, it has been eradicated. The artist is working with shoes, which, on an extremely superficial level, recall Marilyn Levine’s clay representations of leather shoes. However, the appeal of Levine’s hyper-realist shoes, and other leather articles, is the way that they imply human absence through the physical traces left by the owner of the shoes. Or, perhaps a more fruitful comparison would be to Dominique Blain’s non-kinetic installation of army boots, where every other boot islifted about a foot off the ground by a white box. The piece is eerily effective in its evocation of movement, and, as a result, the absent soldiers.

So, how does Bachmann take shoes, particularly effective in reminding the viewer of their absent occupants, and remove the human element? First, the shoes are presented to the viewer several feet above the ground, on a shelf that runs along the periphery of the gallery. They are not positioned on or near the floor, as Blain’s army boots are, and therefore do not have a direct relationship to either the viewer’s or imaginary occupant’s body. Furthermore, they have been lifted off the base of the shelf by two metal posts and a small box (which I assume contains the mechanical components which control the movements of the individual shoes).

Second, the movement of the shoes is distinctly robotic and mechanical. It is an intentionally and glaringly inaccurate imitation of the motion of the human foot. Third, although each shoe has taps attached to both the sole and the heel, the tap itself serves no purpose. The tapping sound is created by metal bits at the end of the metal posts. The shoe itself is mute. This is a particularly important element, because it renders the tap, the shoe, even the motion, absolutely pointless. There is really no reason for any of it, as none of it actually contributes to the “symphony.”

Lastly, the symphony is completely a-rythmical. I could not pick out any kind of arrangement, pattern or method to the clacking sounds, and the randomness of it is mildly unpleasant (which is perhaps why the gallery staff turn the installation off when no one is viewing it). Like the non-dance-like motion, the noise is almost exactly the opposite of music. This, the piece seems to say, is technology without humanity. It can imitate but it cannot recreate human expression. The artist--who is interested in technology, but also nostalgic, preferring those technologies that are not cutting-edge, that have been relegated to the realm of the obsolete--may not have intended this reading of the work. In her artist statement, Bachmann explains that she “[tries] to bring the complexity of the real world and experience into the digital experience, to complicate the relations between the virtual and material realms, to create works that situate themselves in the world in rich sensory, tactile and sonic ways.” For me, the work does complicate the relations between the virtual and material realms, but in the way that it fails to bring the complexity of the real world into the digital experience.

Angela Beck

Bart Gazzola and Donna White: Beautiful, as well as Brutal

2006-09-24T21:37:00.000-07:00

artistsbyartists series, Mendel Art Gallery
Summer season, 2006

Discomfort, whether social or biological, is only occasionally either the subject or the objective of contemporary art in Saskatchewan. In the case of Beautiful, as well as Brutal, it is all four--social, biological, subject and objective.

This pairing of artists Bart Gazzola and Donna White is part of the Mendel’s artistsbyartists program, in which a senior artist from the community is paired with a junior artist--age not necessarily withstanding--in the hope that each of their practices will inform the other. This particular pairing is a clever choice, because each artist is creating an imagery of discomfort; Gazzola’s emphasis is on a medical or biological anxiety, while White’s is on social tension.

Gazzola’s work in this case is a pair of digital prints. The prints are untitled, although Gazzola refers to them as “kisses” in gallery literature. The prints show fleshy pink shapes on a black background, and are poster-sized in a landscape orientation. Each print seems to have been produced by scanning a piece of meat, an image which is then mirrored horizontally and vertically to produce the final print. The final forms, then, appear bow-shaped--not unlike lips.

Gazzola’s kisses are incredibly suggestive, bearing greater resemblance to vaginal openings than to facial ones, although Desmond Morris might suggest that evolution has ensured that there is little difference. In either event, the lip pairings are grotesque, and viewers may find themselves shocked to imagine themselves kissing them--the detail in the photographs is high enough, and the surface glossy enough, to permit this. The fact that the lips are composed of cow tongues (as the gallery's information indicates) serves to interrogate the reasons for our disgust as viewers; after all, this is the same substance some of us put into our mouths and it is similar to that we already have in our mouths, except that Gazzola’s version is hyperaestheticized compared to what one finds in the butcher’s shop. Gazzola has made it plastic through digitization, and quarantined it under glass in his process.

If biological quarantine raises tension in Gazzola’s photographs, it is social quarantine that is the modus operandi of White’s sculptural works. These sculptures, entitled The Cyborg Collars, are ornate neckpieces crafted of metal and a combination of paper and translucent film. The paper/film is folded and rippled to create undulating patterns reminiscent of those on Elizabethan collars. The metalwork, on the other hand, is industrial and aggressive, coming to sharp points around the periphery of the collar. Whether these devices are worn by an isolationist aggressor or an isolated victim is unclear, and perhaps irrelevant, although I couldn’t help but wonder how the sizing for the neck was determined; do these works fit the artist’s body, built to her proportions? The collars are not placed on models of any kind; because of this, and the historical influences they incorporate, the collars also reference the artifacts of a civilization now obsolete.

If this work has an inconsistency, it is in the discrepancy between the detailed--almost obsessive--patterns on the paper/film and the technical imperfections and irregularities in how these materials are applied. Furthermore, all the works in the exhibition are illuminated by fairly standard gallery lighting. As such, the environment the works find themselves in becomes a compromise between the extremes the two bodies of work might call for independently: dim, focused museum lighting for the collar-artifacts, and cold, sterile surgical light for the flat, plasticized lips.

Neither of these concerns are fatal, however--but, by infection or impalement, the work itself looks as though it could be.

--Lee Henderson

link to the Mendel Gallery's site for Beautiful, as well as Brutal (must scroll down)

Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford: My Home Away from Time

2006-09-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Neutral Ground
August 26 - October 6, 2006

The concept behind My Home Away From Time has potential. Two artists in two different locations take photographs of their surroundings and send the undeveloped roll of film to the other. Both artists then develop the film and respond to what the other has photographed by shooting another roll of film, which is subsequently sent off undeveloped so that the process can be repeated. Unfortunately, the end result of this project, the exhibition, falls short of what might have been an interesting statement on the role of the artist.

Before entering the exhibition space, I had the opportunity to read a curatorial statement by Brenda Cleniuk. I found the essay somewhat self-indulgent; it is more concerned with the writer and her task and, as a result, does not respond sufficiently to the actual artwork. Possibly, this is the result of Cleniuk's desire to "keep [her] opinions about the artist and their work objective and not about [her] needs and desires to become credited with something that would in turn make [her] more special than the artist." In order to avoid saying something that might be perceived as biased, Cleniuk opts instead to say quite a lot about her approach to writing about the art. Identifying one's perspective or process is fine, but the emphasis should remain on the art.

The artwork itself consists of digital images of the photographs projected onto two screens, placed on the floor and angled slightly toward one another. Images remain on the screen for a few seconds before switching to the next, each switch being accompanied by a slide-projector-style click. In front of the screens, Dudiak has placed the digital projectors and a tangle of cords. I assume that the tangle of cords was added to give the installation a sculptural feel, an attempt to inject more visual interest into what is otherwise a fairly dull piece. Watching the passage of images is like sitting at dinner with two friends who work together and who are swapping work-related stories. The coworkers might be endlessly interested in their shared experiences, but you end up on the periphery of the conversation, as if listening to an extended inside-joke. Similarly, the conversation set up between Dudiak and Bomford is probably far more interesting to the artists. This alienation of the viewer is made worse by the placement of the screens on the floor, a timid gesture that betrays a lack of faith in the work, and by the tangles of cords that prevent the viewer from approaching the screens, an apt metaphor for the inaccessibility of the piece. If the work is a challenge to relational aesthetics, as the curatorial essay states, the artists have gone too far in the other direction.

However, I do think that there is potential in the project. I am particularly interested in the romantic, nostalgic element; as digital media increasingly replaces film, we lose that delay between desire and fulfillment. With a digital camera we can see what we have done immediately, edit photographs on the spot, reshoot when we need to. Film, however, requires that we wait. Dudiak and Bomford have increased this delay, and have used it to force themselves to relinquish control. However, for these themes to reach the viewer, the artists would have to take creative control back, in the end, to present a resolved and engaging work.

Angela Beck

Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford: My Home Away From Time

2006-09-05T23:34:00.000-07:00

Neutral Ground
August 26-October 6, 2006

In experimental work the end result can sometimes be oblique or impermeable, but this is not so in the case of My Home Away From Time. The work is familiar, bearing a marked resemblance to a travel slide show.

In the project space at Neutral Ground, there sit two projectors throwing images onto two Da-Lite collapsible screens. The cables feeding these projectors with data from a pair of DVD players are strewn about the floor, as are the DVD players themselves, as well as their accompanying speakers. The images from the projectors are actually paired videos of slideshows, and the switching of one slide for another is accentuated by the mechanical noise generated by the recorded slide carousel.

The images on the virtual slides are almost perfect in their banality. There is little that sticks out in these images, as they fit seamlessly into the artists’ “summer vacation” aesthetic. The only component of this installation which does not fit in with this aesthetic, in fact--apart from the nature of the gallery itself--is the inclusion of digital media, although one may argue that this represents the spectrum of tourists’ records of their destinations. Each image lasts from about five to ten seconds.

This work was produced, we are told by the statement on the door to the space, by Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford while one of them was in Europe and the other at home in Canada. They would take photographs and send them to each other to be developed, without having seen their own photos. They would then “respond” to the delivered photos with yet more photos, sending those off again, and repeating the process. The resultant photographic conversation takes the form of the twin slideshows in the installation.

Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford My Home Away From Time, 2006 installation view. Image courtesy Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford

In the gallery Director’s statement it is said that Mark Dudiak “directly challenges the aspirations of the new relational aesthetics...” But with this work which acts as a record of a visual but nonetheless private conversation, relational aesthetics are perhaps not so much challenged as entirely counteracted. As such, if the work posits anything at all with regard to relational aesthetics, it suggests a longed-for middle-ground between the pretense of a viewer- or service-based world and the world of the travel slide show in which the viewer endures boredom for the sake of the photographer.

If the uncertainty principle of quantum physics can be said to apply to travel photography--and I see no reason why it can’t--then Dudiak and Bomford’s collaboration may raise the question of the degree to which the photographer is influencing or editing the photograph with his simple inclusion in the process, or vice-versa. A genuinely artistic photographic voice may be as impossible to acheive as an authentically documentary one. But this work doesn’t seem to critique, challenge or dispute that as much as it resigns itself to it. With all of the emphasis placed on process, the visual subject matter itself and the privacy of the conversation in the installation, it seems that what is truly being tested on or experimented with here is viewership and the nature of the travel slide show; the work asks, “without the social obligation to please the host, how long will people stay?”

--Lee Henderson

Exhibition page at Neutral Ground

David Hoffos: Scenes From The House Dream

2006-09-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

Dunlop Art Gallery
August 12 - September 29, 2006

Passing through a curtain at the exhibition's entrance--and after my eyes adjusted to the low light--the first thing I noticed about David Hoffos' current installation at the Dunlop Art Gallery was a multitude of glowing stations. The stations are, with one exception, recessed into the black walls facing the entrance and take the shape of dioramas, not unlike the shoebox models children make for science fairs. Inhabiting these detailed miniature sets are glowing, flickering figures.

I'll not dwell on the particular characteristics of these figures and their environments, which range from a Lynchian scene of a drifter next to a car, to a scene of a boy with a toy boat. Nor will I focus on the narratives one can assume these scenes posit--as George Carlin has said, "nothing is so boring as listening to someone else describe a dream." After all, Hoffos' work is visual, apart from the low-level ambient soundtrack accompanying the space. Instead, it may be important to examine the aesthetic the artist uses, which may be described as D.I.Y. media. Viewers familiar with Hoffos' work will have seen it before--in, for instance, his installation Another City which was exhibited at Neutral Ground in 2004.

This D.I.Y. aesthetic takes a number of low-fi forms, but typically it involves the bouncing of an image off of a mirror and "into" the surface of his models. The images themselves are often generated by equipment we don't generally think of as projection-based, such as televisions, and may travel through miscellaneous lenses or mattes so that they are to scale when they appear in the models. The mattes and mirrors are all exposed, leaving no mystery as to how Hoffos constructs his illusions, and the mattes are made of electrician's tape or corrugated cardboard, reiterating the connection to childhood.

Because Hoffos has used these techniques--and the resulting style--so frequently, one might not be blamed for thinking it borders on being a habit. I wondered for some time as to whether he had perhaps been rushed into this method during art school--deadlines get the best of all of us eventually--and found that it happened to work. I then realized I was making assumptions and decided that there must be a way to read his aesthetic as intrinsic to this piece... whether the artist thinks of it that way or not.

So with a return to the title of the work, Scenes from the House Dream, and the artist’s statement, the theme of dream is raised. Dreams are individual fantasies composed without conscious thought, but more importantly they are the fun-house mirrors of waking life, supplying a non-physical surrogate world for the human psyche. If dreams are the imagined or metaphysical side of human existence, and waking life the concrete and tangible, then Hoffos’ work plays on this duality. A viewer may get enchanted by the dreams presented here, and by the flickering, interlaced figures that haunt the various landscapes. But if one withdraws slightly or turns away from one of the miniature fantasies, the physical reality of space and material comes flooding back in. Thus lapping ocean waves are changed back into the white noise of video, and the night sky is seen for what it is: black tape stuck nervously onto a television screen.

--Lee Henderson

Scenes From The House Dream at the Dunlop Art Gallery - exhibition site

David Hoffos' Another City at Neutral Ground, 2004

David Hoffos: Scenes from the House Dream, Phase Three

2006-08-22T20:54:00.000-07:00

Dunlop Art Gallery
12 August 2006 – 29 September 2006

If you have ever walked down a residential street after dark, able to glance into lit rooms through open curtains, you have likely experienced that strange sensation of being a lone, unseen observer, a voyeur. Similar feelings of isolation and omnipotence are evoked by Scenes from the House Dream, Phase Three, David Hoffos’ immersive video installation that presents viewers with the opportunity to glimpse into the artist’s dreams.

Upon entering the installation space, which is completely dark except for light from the projections, the viewer first encounters a young boy and toy boat. Both are projected onto separate black cut-outs so that they occupy a space somewhere between two and three dimensions. The boy is cut-off at the ankles to suggest that he is standing in shallow water; he holds a string attached to the boat (the idea of water is further suggested by the gentle, meditative soundtrack, which features a flute, loon calls, twittering birds and the roar of the
ocean). His expression is sullen and his movements restless, as though he is the one tethered, not the toy.

Opposite the boy are three nocturnal scenes. Projected into a recess between two walls is the central image of the installation, a window in a wood cabin through which a man is visible. He is either writing or drawing, and also seems restless, even agitated. Inside the walls to either side of this image are two miniature models, each visible through a square hole at eye-level. Through the use of mirrors and televisions—both conspicuously placed so that the means of illusion are obvious to the viewer and he or she does not waste time trying to figure it out—the artist has cast small, moving projections into the models (à la Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, for those readers as familiar with video techniques as I am). One model recreates a roman palace, suggested by circular formations of colossal columns. Five roman figures are projected in a group amid the columns, leisurely interacting with one another. Behind them, a circular pit of red light is just visible to the viewer. The other model presents a man, pacing impatiently next to his car at the edge of a cliff overlooking a lighthouse and the ocean. Both the man and the ripples of water at the shoreline are created through video and mirrors.

With the exception of the Romans, the figures are all trapped. The boy is attached to his boat; the writer/drawer is, formally speaking, constrained within the frame of the window, and also by difficulty expressing himself (hence the frustrated movements); the man by his car is restricted by the cliff and the small fence at its edge—he can go no further. The result is a strong sense of longing. The figures long for release, but it is not necessarily from an external force; in each case, the figure seems as trapped by his own actions as by his circumstances. The boy could let go of the rope, the writer/drawer might walk away from his desk, and nothing is stopping the man from getting back in his car and driving off. The conflict is, therefore, internal.

The viewer witnesses these conflicts from the comfortable obscurity of darkness. No light is cast in his or her direction. This omnipresence is intensified by the above-the-maze perspective afforded by the miniature scale of the two models. I wondered, as I peered into the little worlds, if the characters were representations of the artist, if he had in fact experienced this objective, all-encompassing clarity with regards to his own life. I was immediately reminded of the previous night, when I had wandered through the artists’ stalls at the Regina Folk Festival alone, taking a break from the crowds in front of the stage. I was struck by feelings of unfamiliarity. My surroundings had become vaguely foreign, as though I had just momentarily stepped just outside my own life. So perhaps Hoffos had also become an objective viewer in his own life, glancing into his own home from the street at dusk. And perhaps that objectivity disappears when not alone, which could explain the uniqueness of the multi-figured roman scene, devoid of the longing in the other images. As soon as I returned to my blanket of friends at the festival, my feelings of detachment faded and were, for the moment, forgotten.

Alternatively, the roman scene might require the context of the complete installation to be fully appreciated. The fourth phase will be completed in 2007 and an exhibition of all four phases will follow. For now, however, phase three successfully stands on its own, and is not to be missed.

Angela Beck

Ron Mueck

2006-08-21T10:37:00.001-07:00

National Galleries of Scotland @ Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
August 5 to October 1, 2006

The first thing one notices about Ron Mueck’s work is how incredibly life-like the sculptures are. Mueck’s technical skill is indeed extensive and nearly without rival, but because this is such an automatic association and because to approach his work as a technical oeuvre has become so standard, it seems even more crucial to situate the content of the work and to pull out threads of meaning that may get lost under his skillful manipulation of materials.

Mueck is, after all, if his background is any indication, primarily a technician (Mueck oversaw the special effects in Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth, in addition to other, similar projects). It is then to be expected, I suppose, that this is where criticism around his work is focussed. But Mueck’s sculptures--of full figures or only faces, sometimes made specific in a skewed portraiture and sometimes as indicators of generality--are uncanny not only because of their resemblance to his subjects, nor exclusively because of the shifted scale of the pieces. They are uncanny because both haunting familiarity and palpable discomfort are present in the subjects themselves, rather than just in their execution as sculptural objects.

Ghost, for instance, is a prime example. A sculpture of an awkward, adolescent girl in a navy bathing suit, it stands approximately 9 feet in height. The girl reclines against the gallery wall, shrugging slightly and tensed. She is plain, gangly, and has dirty-blond hair, some of which is falling in front of her face and which sways slightly from the gallery’s ventilation and the movement of the bodies around her. Her skin has a yellowed tone, simultaneously flushed with irregular traces of red. Her visual expression looks as though she has just said something non-committal, such as "I don't know" or "kind of", and then trailed off. She looks downward and to the side, averting her eyes.

Ron Mueck, Ghost, 1998

Curiously enough, in fact, I found it impossible to exactly meet her gaze, no matter where I put my head. As the girl shrinks away from all direct contact, physical or visual, one realizes also that she belongs to the most hypersexualized demographic on the planet. Her clumsy sexuality--coyness is a trait of the best Hollywood sex kittens--is as emphasized by her increased size as her physical liminality is.

This awkward liminality is present in Mueck’s other works as well, the more successful of which are Wild Man, a depiction at roughly triple life-size of a terrified Celt in retreat from the gallery’s visitors, and Spooning Couple, a small (one foot long) and perfectly detailed form of a rather sweaty proletarian couple connected physically but staring out into space, away from each other. Ghost, however, is perhaps the most successful and uncomfortable of these, due to the nature of Mueck’s subject. That is, Mueck’s Ghost is in a state of becoming, but is still for the time being (and subsequently forevermore, as this is a static, sculptural work) caught between girlishness and womanhood. The girl in Ghost has both a social presence and a kind of dismissed, non-presence; she is flawed and vulnerable but not entirely innocent and more than a little suspicious, all qualities suggested by her hesitant posture. After all, innocence and ambition are both characterized by a world-readiness, but the girl shuns both her audience and the vast spaces of the gallery. One also realizes that this work represents not only her regard for society but society’s view of the girl; as a semi-sexual entity to be controlled and capitalized upon, but not entirely trusted.

This understanding, then, allows one to see the work as metaphor for even further societal relationships (I am reminded of Nabokov’s portrayal of America--the nation itself an adolescent--as the hybrid manipulator/victim/teenager in Lolita). These works, be they the ostracized but fetishized girl in Ghost or the historical monster as opposed to the real victim as in the case of Wild Man, serve as an exploration of the nature of the uncanny itself. And the uncanny, simultaneously represented and embodied--explored here not only through physical accuracy but also through Mueck’s subjects and their treatment--in this exhibition makes for a disquieting experience in which a viewer may not be entirely certain of his or her role. The viewer, in other words, is also caught between possessing a privileged gaze and being challenged by what that gaze encounters.

--Lee Henderson

Ron Mueck, Spooning Couple, 2005

Ron Mueck at the National Galleries (exhibition site)

2006-08-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

Michael Waterman: Antiphon
Neutral Ground
August 5-25, 2006

The recorder, as a musical instrument, seems to have been relegated to the 3rd-grade classrooms of the world--its inclusion in "Stairway to Heaven" notwithstanding. Everyone in our culture, then, can likely play the recorder, but probably not very well. So it may be with little surprise that one can experience a playful naïveté when encountering Michael Waterman's work at Neutral Ground.

This work seems to have been tailored to the architecture of the space, as the hallway itself is the location of the first component of the exhibition. The short hallway leading into Neutral Ground's main space is lined on either side with recorders, which in turn are connected to and "blown" by small fan-like mechanisms. These mechanisms themselves are triggered through somewhat awkward motion detectors, so that when a body moves down the hallway--or back and forth within it--the recorders are "played," and each emits a single, clumsy note. The combined sound is an ambient dissonance.

At the end of this sonic gauntlet is a black curtain, blocking an exit to the right and into the gallery's main space. Pulling back the curtain triggers the first of several instruments inside the space; some description of these primitive and yet elaborate samplers is in order. Each of the several structures consists primarily of a speaker not unlike what one might find in a garage sale, as they seem to have been made circa 1970. Viewers familiar with similar contemporary art will no doubt draw a parallel with the work of Christian Marclay, although Marclay seems more interested in maintaining the sheer "speaker-ness" of his sculptural objects. In Waterman's case, the fabric front to each speaker has been replaced with coloured plastic (red, yellow, etc.). On top of each of these is a plastic tube, vertically encasing wires and leading to a bare motherboard and a stripped CD player. On the front of this is a tiny motion detector; when the motion detector is tripped, the CD begins to play, the speaker is lit from within, and a portion of a soundscape is heard (each disc plays something different, and most seemed to last between 30 and 60 seconds). When the sample ends, the light goes out and the CD stops, ready to be triggered again. The speakers do not function, nor sound, nor look quite the way they are "supposed" to.

My own first reaction was to dash about the room, finding out what sounds I could trigger in each of the machines; I then became selective, trying to remix the sound by triggering those I thought would sound "good" together. I was aware of how arbitrary this was on the one hand, and yet also understanding that my choices were built upon the history of Western music, as I combined low, rythmic thuds with higher-pitched tones. I was, of course, unable to completely orchestrate the machines, thanks to the unspecific gaze of each motion detector.

While Waterman's technology seems clumsy at first (picture a combination of Disco-era hi-fi and a Gibsonesque, Cyberpunk aesthetic), one realizes that this is an elaborate attempt to disrupt control of machine and instrument. One moves about the space, trying to negotiate the parameters set up by the range of each motion detector and the limitations of one's own bodily movement. This reconnection to the bodily pulls sound out of a cranial space and into a playful, physical exploration. The sounds are fairly stock ambient elements, not at all unlike what one might hear in work by Brian Eno or Steve Reich; but Waterman, like Eno, realizes the failure of a purely aural soundscape and insists that his sound be spacial.

Soundscape is, it turns out, what Waterman has created, allowing a viewer to lay his sound over the landscape of the gallery (I question here whether "soundscape" is actually appropriate, and therefore coin a new term: tonbauten, or built sound structures. You heard it here first. Use it at dinner parties). Antiphon--"contrast sound"--manages true user-unfriendliness; instead of being like a program that doesn't work, it ends up being like a program that writes poetry while failing to check your spelling.

--Lee Henderson

Antiphon at Neutral Ground

Christian Marclay

2006-08-03T23:16:00.000-07:00

Hello all, and welcome to booster!

This blog was founded by Angela Beck and I as a starting-point for critical discourse and review of the visual arts locally (in Regina, Saskatchewan) and elsewhere. Primarily, we'll be posting reviews of art exhibitions and performances, although we will also be covering work we come across in other disciplines and you may find the odd article on wider issues in the visual arts.

Feel free to post your comments in response to the reviews, though for this we hope that respondents will refrain from posting anonymously--we’re posting with an assumption of professionalism and openness, and we hope you will, too. If you’re interested, please also look below for our code of ethics and the reasons we've decided to build this site.

Enjoy,
Lee Henderson

Code of Ethics:

- We will not accept any remuneration for any review posted here.

- We will not review the work of close friends or of each other. While we believe that we can be entirely professional, there is always the potential that extensive, intimate knowledge of an artist could colour our reading of the work in question, or that such a colouration could be perceived. In the case of group shows, we will use our discretion.

- All reviews will be cleared by both Angela and Lee prior to publication on the site. Note that this does not mean we have to agree with the views expressed in each other’s reviews...

- Lee will not review the work of his students while they are his students. Other student work may be reviewed at our discretion, although this will likely require the work to be shown in a professional/off-campus venue.

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Mandate:

- To provide and foster local criticality in the visual arts.

- To encourage “collegial competition” that is honest, open, and helpful.

- To provide context and cohesion for art production in the city.

- To create an online presence for and increase the coverage of local work.

- To provide positive feedback where warranted and alternate readings of work where helpful.