Hassane Amraoui

L'arc-en-ciel du désert, Hassane Amraoui

Starting the year with a bang...

Churchtank Type 8 mixed media assemblage 2010 © Kris Kuksi

The Art of Warfare: more such arresting images here. 

Do Ho Suh

Floor

Do ho Suh

Nozkowski

Just got back from three days away at my inlaws' (incommonlaws?) cottage near Kaladar, Ontario. On the way back, we swung through Ottawa and took in the National Gallery. The main exhibit, From Raphael to Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome featured some finely executed masterworks by the two artists in its title, as well as by Michaelangelo, El Greco, Titian, as well was by superb but lesser known artists. The quality of the work is of course unsurpassed -- a couple of drawings by Michaelangelo were worth the price of admission -- but I found all those papal portraits, altars and biblical tableaus under heavy institutional Roman architecture lugubrious & stifling, and was greatly relieved to wander over into Thomas Nozkowski's light, airy, unpretentious abstractions. Also worth taking in was a small exhibit of prints by Symbolist artists including Munch, Gauguin, Lautrec & others.

MONEY... and a modest proposal

Just read today in the french Montreal entertainment review, ICI, that the Conservative government cuts to our already meagre arts funding -- $45 million -- amount to a mere 70 cents per Canadian, per year. As the article points out, most of us lose that much between the cracks in our sofa cushions.* Hardly a victory in a war against waste. And yet the implications for arts... well, I need not go on.

Meanwhile, close to three-quarters of a trillion dollars south of the border are being ploughed into AIG and other failing financial institutions to bail them out from their own colossal mismanagement and malfeasance.

Not to mention billions upon billions in US federal reserve graft that "disappears", trillions wasted on the military, etc.

Doubtless we have our own counterpart to that profligacy, hidden like an iceberg beneath our icy waters.

Meanwhile, in Southeby's last week, British artist Damien Hirst shattered all records by auctioning off more than 200 pieces for a cool $200 million.

Hirst specializes in animal carcases pickled and elegantly displayed in cases of of formadehyde. One piece, a bull calf with a golden disc on its head and golden hooves, fetched $60 million. Golden calf, indeed. Actually his work is brilliantly provocative, diverse, and at times beautiful as it is macabre. Consider his diamond-encrusted skull above, which sold last year for $98 million. Whatever one thinks of his art, one can't deny how deftly and ingeniously he plays with symbols of death, status, old-time religion, opulence ...just the things that appeal to the upper echelons of today's power elite. Decadent art, if you will -- with a firm emphasis on the etymological root, decay.

Hirst, who employs a factory of dozens of assistants, is our present-day Warhol. If anything, Warhol pales by comparison. (He was already pale...)

Better, I suppose, that all that booty go to an artist than some hockey player. Or some mogul in Dubai. (I don't doubt some of it is from moguls in Dubai.)

Maybe we Canadian artists who complain so much about our government should offer ourselves up for Hirst's next formaldehyde collection. I'm sure we would fetch a good price. Then we wouldn't have to depend on Harper's subsidies at all!

*Actually their math is quite off. According to Stats can estimates, Canada's population as of this writing is 33, 380,162 -- which would put the value of the cuts at roughly $1.35 each. Still seat cushion money, more or less. Arts types are not always known for getting their figures right.

Le Moulin à images (The Image Mill)

Just got back from Quebec City, where we hung out for a couple of days, eating out, walking around the old town, shopping, reading in cafes. I took along for reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (highly recommended -- a brilliant book), and my bilingual edition of Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil -- magnificent not only for Baudelaire's poetry, but for the superb translations by the likes of Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Roy Campbell and others. For me, for almost entirely personal reasons, Baudelaire and this town are intimately connected: in its antique elegance and inanity, it could well be the closest approximation I can get in this corner of the world to my idea of his mid-19th C. Paris; also, during last year's stay I wrote a palimpsest of one of his prose poems. (For more pictures of Quebec City, click on the label below.)

This year is the 400th anniversary of the founding of this town: there were lots of events and hoopla. That was really not why we went, but we did take in Le Moulin à images. I had heard some rave reviews (or at least rave mentions) by acquaintances and the media, so it seemed like a must-see.

Le Moulin à images (The Image Mill) is a forty-minute (well, according to my watch, 50 minute) audiovisual production projected against the grain silos in the Port of Québec, created by the renowned animation group Ex Machina under the direction of no less a mover and shaker than Robert Lepage. The idea, according to the website, was to create an "impressionistic portrait of the city over time" -- a kind of visual symphony in four movements corresponding to the city's four centuries of history. The production is huge-- the largest outdoor architectural projection ever created, some 600 meters long by 30 meters high, with 27 synchronized video projectors, 230 spotlights and more than 300 loudspeakers. Some of the tableaus are quite stunning, as you can see:





The production, as could be expected, was done with plenty of panache. The cylindrical shape of the silos was frequently put to cunning use; one of my favourite series of tableaus represents the visual arts, including a celebration Sico Paints, a major paint company founded in Quebec City -- assembly lines of paint cans dissolving into the spectrum of brilliant colour seen above. (Was Sico one of the sponsors? En tout cas...) One of the most powerful moments was when decline of Catholicism was represented by the shattering of stained glass images all over the screen.

The focus was primarily socio-economic-technological; conspicuously absent was any treatment of politics, particularly during the last 40 years. For some reason, Lepage et al decided to zero in on the Queen's visit in the '50s, with a video panning a small crowd placard-carrying protesters -- hardly the most significant political event in the capitol of Canada's (near)breakaway province. What of the PQ, Rene Levesque, School/Language reform, etc? Was the nationalist legacy considered too hot to handle? Yet it seems to me that reality could have been dealt with briefly and intelligently within this enormous visual collage without necessarily pouring gasoline on separatist flames. Anyway, from Robert Lepage I expected something far more daring. For all the size and technical mastery of the production, after thirty minutes I found myself looking at my watch to estimate how much time was left; and I was not alone. As a couple beside me said when the lights dimmed on the fake fireworks finale: “C’etait beau, quand même.”

Art by Doris Salecedi, Installation for the 8th International Istanbul Biennial 2003; Photo by Muammer Yanmaz, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Green Landscape with Red Cloud
Emil Nolde
1867 - 1956
141 images

Time out for at least 9 days. Tomorrow I'm off to my very own writing centre, in a countryside very much like the one pictured above, where for certain there's no internet access.

Iran Plata

Iran Plata: "Ambiente Familiar" (Family Ambience)

A week or two ago a friend and I wandered past a collective gallery on Parc Ave. -- Ame Arte, it is called -- that generally displays local artists of varying quality -- and were surprised to find a show there worthy of a major museum. It turned out to be paintings of one Iran Plata, a Cuban who just immigrated recently to Montreal... and who happened to be there at the gallery at the time. A former art professor in Havana, I don't know how he got out -- when I vacationed in Cuba almost 20 years ago, people couldn't, and have things changed that much? -- but he seems to be here to stay. His canvases, mostly quite large, are at once grotesque, disturbing, playful and warm. It's easy to pick out influences -- Aztec and Inca art, Diego Rivera murals, Escher and de Chirocco perspectives, Pop Art psychedelics, Salvador Dali dreamscapes (he has a number of figures with ants crawling over them, clearly a salute to Dali). But he has blended these into his own bold style, and the painterly skill is extraordinary. He tells me that his palette, typically a riot of tropical colours, has already become toned down somewhat by the Canadian winter. I wondered if the austere canvas below was an expression of that. He answered, no, this one was also painted in Cuba, but inspired by a younger friend who had confessed to him that he had spent most of his adolescence alone in his room. Anyway, you can see more of his work -- including some striking quasi-landscapes -- on his website.

Iran Plata: "Adolescente"

Animal Energy

Apparently, along with two other chef d'oeuvres by the same artist, this fine example of Abstract Expressionism recently sold at a respected London auction house for the comparatively modest sum of $25,000. Not bad. I prefer it to many a tame landscape. It shows talent: the artist obviously has an extremely vivacious stroke. Turns out, he's a chimp.

Paint drying etc.

Never has a Montreal January been so balmy -about 12 degrees c. in the sun. Rode my bicycle ...

Paradisiacal, this prelude to planetary destruction.

Today my partner and I went down to Musee d'Art Contemporain, saw an exhibit of Neo Rauch, a surrealist German painter somewhat a la Dali who was quite depressively impressive , a Serge Murphy installation that was quite delightful, and some offbeat/pretentious video art by Rodney Graham and others. One of Graham's videos (the best one in my view) featured the artist seated in a deck chair before a bored/bemused audience about a hundred, throwing potatoes at a huge Japanese gong (I think this one was called Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong): sometimes he hit it with a big kabaam which resonated through the whole gallery, but sometimes the potatoes missed with a loud thump. A collision of Eastern mysticism and Western matter-of-factness (am I reading too much into this?), with dead pan (resounding pan) humour. Another video (not by him, by someone else) showed a snail crawling across some sand for about 20 minutes, from a distant, not-so-in-focus camera.

I couldn't help but wonder -- if I painted a wall and then filmed it drying and titled it "Watching Paint Dry", would I be able apply for funding? Has this idea been already done? Ah well...

Doppelgangers

CBC Arts website today featured the work of Montreal photographer François Brunelle, whose project has been to find and photograph pairs of people who look like (or almost like) identical twins but have no blood relation. Fascinating.

Montreal ExpoArt

Monika Aebischer, "Balancing Ritual", 2006

On Sunday, my partner and I went to the Montreal ExpoArt Festival exhibition in Old Montreal -- four big tents of "emerging" contemporary visual artists from around the world. It was fun strolling among the stalls, seeing what people were doing or trying to do. It's sad to report that of the 100-odd artists featured, only two or three struck us as really quite interesting, and of those the work of Toronto artist Monika Aebischer captivated us the most. Her work has both a decorative appeal and symbolic depth, and we spent a fair amount of time talking with her about the themes and methods of her compositions. What can't be captured here is that all her works are covered in a smooth, thick resin that makes them look like figures trapped in amber and -- by extension -- in time. More can be found on her website. Others, well -- we saw ones who had their technique right down, but left us cold with facile or overly conventional conceptions; others that were downright bad (whatever that is -- won't go into that today). It seems everyone, including Monika, was striving to achieve a certain unique but appealing artistic signature or "look", a recognizable, repeatable and (hopefully) marketable "brand". In a world of multitudinous influences, where any sort of juxtaposition is possible, this kind of self-imposed limitation seems stifling. But that's what people are doing these days in all the arts: one-note Johnny's riding one-trick ponies. In the world where everything's happening all at once more than ever, that's one way to get noticed. I guess I'm feeling snarky today... I think, though, Monika's work is really good.

CANS OF SOUP FOR ALL OF YOU...

Or if you prefer just Onion or Tomato ...

Another can of soup for you...

Or if you prefer Tomato....

So here's your soup... and it's on me.

The reason for this is that for the last three days I've been getting a steady rain of Google inquiries for Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can, of all things. Maybe 60 hits so far, most of them from Google Images, although also from Google. A passing soup can reference I made about five months ago seems to be the reason -- and that hyperlink is dead. So why now? Does all this have to do with my last name? Anyway, I thought I'd satisfy 'em.

Tonerworks

There's some fine photocopy-based artwork up at Reed Altemus' blog, in case you feel like taking a respite from the written and easing into the visual...

Happy New Year!

Randomness & Art: Spirited discussion at David Leftwich's blog: part 1

Joseph Cornell: Untitled (The Hotel Eden): 1945
Below Left: Objet, Roses des Vents 1942-53;
Below Right: Untitled 1942;
Bottom Right: Untitled (Medici Princess), 1952

The last few days much of my blog-writing energy has gone into this spirited discussion on David Leftwich's blog. Since this kind of debate is part of my own process, and since I think it would be of interest to more readers than the worthy (and perhaps not-so-worthy) few who trip and trickle into his blog, I've taken the liberty of cutting and pasting here. Following on some remarks of Thomas Basbøll's about random processes and art in relation to possibilities unwittingly suggested by Flarf poetry, David did a Google search of the rhyming words of Shakespeare's Sonnet One, and took the first full sentences that came up. The sentences can be found here. Following these, he came up with these reflections and a challenge.

Are these poems yet? A collection of found objects? Readymades? Or raw material in need of “weeding” and “workshopping” (or "worshipping", according to spell check)? Most art that uses found objects, like Cornell’s boxes, relies on the artist to “edit” and juxtapose according to his or her “vision.” But is randomness, or at least structured randomness in this case, also art?

At the very least, this is a collection of raw material to be manipulated/transformed/workshopped edited into something else. I might try that in a following post, and the material is open for anyone else’s use. It would be interesting to see what becomes of this language in the hands of various writers.

Here's some of the discussion that ensued.

At 1:48 AM, Brian Campbell said...

As Jean Clay writes somewhere in his great critical study of Modern Art 1890-1918, the introduction of "systematic randomness" left art virtiginously free. The trouble is, a process where the heart is absent for the creater offers little or nil for the heart of, in this case, the reader. Ibid for the rigidly stylized illusionist products of the Institute and the Salon. Contrast with, say, the poetry of Ilya Kaminsky.

At 1:56 AM, Brian Campbell said...

P.S. Thanks for the flarf link. I think we have the makings of a blog post chez moi...

At 9:33 AM, David said...

Brian, you might be right about pure randomness (and randomness in art is nothing new) will ultimately fail, or run its course, as an aesthetic project. So can a poem be whittled down from this raw material (which I think is what Basboll is suggesting)? Would the creator then be present in such a process?

However, randomness does create some interesting juxtapositions? Also, does it serve to eliminate the ego, the arrogance of the creator? Something Mac Low explored using chance. Does art, art we usually conceive it, depend on the ego, the individuality of the creator? Is art ego?

At 9:55 PM, Brian Campbell said...

Of course, randomness does create interesting juxtapositions, and to the extent that life is random, there is a place for randomness in art. I really doubt though that the systematic use of randomness in art eliminates ego, and indeed believe the project of "eliminating ego" is not only impossible and undesirable, but the most phony and arrogant assumption behind such an aesthetic project. (Notice too how some of the purveyors of such "art" are so adept at promoting themselves and climbing into the art establishment...)

To me art only grabs me when it expresses the whole human being who created it -- ego, heart, lungs, belly, balls (or vagina), aspirations, cosmos. I'm not talking about any quality you can measure -- just the feeling you get when you read a poem by say Vallejo that "his whole life went into this poem". If my whole being is there to appreciate a given work of art, it is up to the being of the creator to be all there in his art, wouldn't you say? Personally, I have no choice in the matter: I just can't have it any other way. (And I don't think you can either, David...)

At 11:26 PM, Thomas Basbøll said...

Interesting stuff.

To my mind, the Google searches you've done here are a bit too random (or arbitrary), but, you're right, the trick is to see where workshopping them might lead, not simply to present the Google searches as poems.

As Gary Sullivan notes, 'Not too long after 9/11, people began posting again, though now all of the flarfs-many of which were parodies of AP News items-in some way shape or form addressed the aftermath of 9/11, including media portrayal of same. I remember, for instance, Katie's "We'll rebuild the Twin Towers-on your Pizza" (which I think was published in the latest online edition of Arras). I started a "sadness" series-doing searches on "The horrible sadness," "the awful sadness," "the unending sadness," etc., in response to what was becoming a kind of stifling national(ist) mourning.'

There is nothing especially "random" about that procedure and part of the utility of Google lies in using it precisely as a search engine.

Since the poet will be "sculpting" the final material and will have made decisions (search terms) in finding it, there is no reason to think that Flarf poems have "no ego" or are unrelated to "the whole life of the poet". But there are specific reasons not dwell on the relation between a poem and the poet's biography.

Flarf is way of avoiding (though not a sure way) that "the feeling you get when you read a poem" is not taken as a representation of the feeling the poet had when writing it.

That said, I think Brian's idea that we use our "whole beings" to appreciate works of art is a bit unrealistic. Or maybe I would qualify it by saying I use my whole being such as it is to read poetry and I much prefer poems that clever people put together out of things lying around in plain view to poems that creators found in their hearts.

At 12:34 AM, David said...

Thomas, what makes “the clever people’s” poem interesting? Is it just its cleverness? Or is there also something else that makes the poem tick/click/work whatever word you choice? From corresponding with Brian in the past, I think he is suggesting that poetry, and art in general, works on many different levels, not just on the level of intellect, an idea I agree with. Of course, if we had the definitive answer about how poetry works we wouldn’t be having this conversation, which is what made your original post so interesting – the implications of reshaping existing language in our own image.

At 12:45 AM, David said...

Brian, I agree that you can never actually remove the “ego”, the “self” from art. That’s why I ended the last comment with that question. Art is ego, or at least the production of art, even the CHOICE to produce something randomly, evolves the “ego”/”the self.” But I’m not sure the desire to “eliminate ego,” even if it is in the end impossible, is always “arrogant” or “phony.”

For instance, Mac Low was Buddhist and influenced by the teachings of D.T. Suzuki. And “randomly” opening Suzuki’s “An Introduction to Zen Buddhism” I saw this passage, which I had underlined:

“Life is an art, and like perfect art it should be self-forgetting.”

I think Mac Low was genuinely attempting to explore the possibility of “eliminating ego,” forgetting the self in the Buddhists sense. And as someone influenced by Buddhists thought I find the idea intriguing as well, even if, at least in my hands, it would be a project doomed to failure. I remember Peter Matthiessen writing about his conflicts between what he perceived as the egotism of his writing and his Buddhists beliefs. Maybe the only real way to eliminate ego from art is silence, to produce no works at all. Or is that also a choice involving the “ego?” Ah, it seems there is no escaping the bastard.

As for randomness as a technique I do find it interesting less for its ability, or lack there of, to mask the ego (the creator) but as a way to examine how language interacts, how surprising juxtapositions may create the shock of art and what that teaches us about how art works, and about the role of the artist.

Which I think is what Basboll was ultimately interested in. I think he was interested in how a poem is edited down/whittled/”workshoped.” Can the poet shape the raw material provided by the information age into a poem, the “ego”/”self” still very much involved in the process? I introduced the randomness as a way to generate the raw material, but not to really be the end product (though I think it was worth at least examining). Just as an experiment would you be up to (and any other poet could try it as well) attempting to create a poem from the mass of language I generated? Maybe choose the language from one search or from all three. I’ll give it a try over the next week – I’m traveling for work all this week, so I will have limited time to work on it, but will see what I come up with by the weekend. I’m not expecting this to be earth-shattering, nor just some sort of cheap “workshop” gimmick/exercise, but an exploration.

-------------------------------

More to come (or if you're curious to read in advance, you can always read here...)

WITH THE CHANGING SEASON...

Jean-Paul Riopelle "Untitled" 1954

Sound & Light Show Extraordinaire

For one of the finest flash & sound presentations on the net (or that I've seen, at any rate), check out the web site of Nicolas Ruel, Montreal photographer. If you can't afford a trip around the world right now, here's a pretty evocative substitute...