VAG Notions

Now smothered in money, the Vancouver Art Gallery will do all the right things under its current administration, yet it remains to be seen if it can transcend itself, become more than the sum of its line items. When institutions set out to build new buildings, it's often less about art (ambiguity) than it is about business (certainty). This will go on for a while.

We are told that if all goes according to plan, the new and recently revised VAG (above) could open as soon as 2026. But by then we might have achieved Adorno's prophecy and find that what once went by the name of Art now goes by a different name -- and as McLuhan suggests, what wasn't considered Art, now is (a historic VAG example could be Paul Wong's Confused: Sexual Views, 1984).

How weird to be living in a city that, according to its boosters, claims to be a world leader in contemporary art, and therefore deserving of a proper building to display it; and yet having this declaration come at a time when Art, as we are beginning to know it through its gestures and relations, has left the building to Art as it was, as objects, once upon a time.

OG Punk

 

Just opened at the Polygon Gallery main floor space is OG Punk, an exhibition of fifteen photographic portraits by Dina Goldberg.

Of the fifteen portraits, three are of women, eleven are of men, and because that adds up to fourteen, the "missing" portrait, as it were, is of a decorated black leather motorcycle jacket that carries its own portrait: a painted skull and cross bones. For those unfamiliar with the embodied practice of punk, the jacket is the third surface upon which its wearer displays their art. Beneath that, the t-shirt, and beneath that, the wearer's own hide -- our god given skin.

The array above features members of Victoria, B.C.'s punk scene. On the left is The Cretin, aka Murray Acton, graduate of St Michael's University School in Victoria and frontman for that city's longest-running punk band, Dayglow Abortions (1979-). Moving right (above), Lisa Jak, (below) Spud and, finally, the portrait bearing jacket, whose attribution I am waiting on and will supply in an upcoming Polygon podcast.

OG Punk is curated by Helga Pakasaar.

Two Little Houses

I love these two little houses on the west side of Dumfries, just north of East 30th. Not just the houses -- war houses built for young families after WWII -- but how they sit next to each other on the slope, as well as the plantings, in particular the pine that curls into frame. Or maybe it's how easy these houses are to picture that I like best about them, actors in my drama, which more recently feels like a comedy, if it could be said that Beckett and Melville were writers of them. Waiting for Bartleby? Imagine that. But this time Bartleby shows up, despite his preference.

I could stare at these houses all day long, I think to myself when the sun is out, the morning sun, in October or April when it's not so high. Everyone should have a house to live in. It is insane to me that, given the world's wealth and our technological advancements, we should have to enter a system of servitude in order to protect ourselves from the elements that contribute to that wealth. How can we change this? Is it as easy as knowing who to shame? There are many who no longer feel shame, nor are positively motivated by it. Same with pride. Looking at these houses, I can't imagine rage living inside them. Nor self-loathing, envy. It they did, it would show. 

Sunday's Walk

Sunday's walk was slow and drawn out. This time I reversed the usual route, beginning at Knight and King Ed, not ending there. Had I gone the other way I might have missed the "no parking" marker at 30th and Gladstone: a plastic container with a drawing on its side (see above). The marker was on the boulevard, a car in the space beside it. I assumed the person who relies on this marker was inside the house to the right of the picture. I would have been uncomfortable if it were otherwise. 

Boss Bodies

Opening this week at CSA Space is Rowan Melling's Boss Bodies, an exhibition of 16 painted portraits of 16 disembodied heads. Applied to these decapitations are faces that many Vancouverites look to -- or away from -- for cues on how to appreciate a city that these bosses of construction, real estate,  secondary manufacturing and retail claim to be building, beautifying, writing, empowering ...

Of these faces, not all of them are men. Nor are all of them white. Nor are all of them heterosexual. All of them have some form of disability that allows them to do their work without losing a night's sleep. All of them believe that what they are doing is good and right, and that goodness and righteousness are measured not by humility but by financial profit. Those who disagree have been, in some instances, encouraged to move to the suburbs.

Most remarkable about these portraits (apart from the absence of their "entitled" bodies) are the bodies "playing" them. For example, when I look at the face of Bob Rennie (above), I see Bob, but I also see Jim Carrey (with a hint of former Social Credit MLA Pat McGeer thrown in). Same with Ian Gillespie, as played by Matthew McConaughey 

and Michael Audain, as played by a Paper Chase-era John Houseman.

Whether inhabitations like these are the intention of the artist, I don't know. What I do know is that the evocation of these actors and their styles stands in for the absence of the bodies these bosses have been removed from, enlivening them in ways that are not inconsistent with how they appear IRL (the ludic Bob, the laconic Ian, the patrician Michael), but also underlining the ongoing performances they are engaged in in their effort to exact the same of those living in "their" city, where the best advice to those trying to survive that city is to be anyone other than yourself.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

My favourite Bond film is On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I saw the film first as a seven-year-old, one of the half dozen or so films my father took me to because he wanted to see them.

I recognized the Countessa (Diana Rigg) from television's The Avengers (1961-1969), and I think that was the moment I learned that people in movies are not their characters, only the jobs they take, like the job that took my father from our house at 5:30am weekday mornings because the New York and Toronto stock exchanges opened at 6am Pacific time.

Since that first screening (at the Dunbar Theatre, where I recently saw the latest Bond film, No Time to Die) I have seen OHMSS a half dozen times, and this time what struck me most was how badly it was dubbed, Bond's parts in particular. A leading reason why might relate to how badly one-time-only Bond George Lazenby was alleged to have behaved on set. Bond's post-production voice carries equal parts condescension, diffidence, frustration and disdain.

Bond franchise holder Albert R. Broccoli once said that Lazenby, at his best, was the ideal Bond, and I thought so too as a seven-year-old. But what did I know? I had never seen a Bond film before. Nor did I have any desire to see the next one (Diamonds Are Forever, 1971) after learning that Diana Rigg would not be in it. "Her character was killed," said my father, to which I replied, "Yes, but not the person who played her!"

Made/Unmade

A couple weeks ago Monte Clark Gallery opened an eight picture exhibition by the lens-based artist Stephen Waddell, entitled Made/Unmade.

Given the design of the gallery's main display room, viewers are encouraged to move counter-clockwise, and so it is that we experience on the east and north walls a pair of delaminated circular tables, the hollow insides of figurative statuary (front and back?) and a forgotten graveyard featuring a more solid form of (granite) statuary -- in this instance, a kneeling, grieving figure, head bowed. 

Moving to the west wall, a picture of an art school hallway, where against its high walls lean paintings, presumably made over the course of an academic year. On the same west wall, a young worker untangling a piece of rope at what looks like Vancouver's Jericho Sailing Club. On the south wall is a single picture, this one of a dead-faced figure, mid-40s, alone on a chain carousel as it swings clockwise towards us.

Both the exhibition title and its counter-clockwise orientation suggest an undoing. The tables were made, and functioned as such (socially circular) until something (a flood?) brought about their decay. As for the two hollow statues, are they halves of a single statue (halved for what reason?), or were they designed to stand "proud" from a wall, their hollowness or incompletion hidden? As for the monumental grave marker, it is categorically less the subject of its picture than its signifier: a graveyard, yes, but a landscape first and foremost.  

That the first two walls carry the petit genre troika of still-life (tables), portraiture (hollow statues) and landscape (graveyard) has bearing on how I process Waddell's art school hallway. If not of the petit genres, does this art school scene, then, belong to something grand -- like a history painting? And if so, the history of what? The past school year? The past year of COVID? Or because the work is double dated (2012-2021), the past nine years, a decade that has seen a shift not only in political economy, but in technology, ethics and aesthetics? Is this decade the knot our young worker is trying disentangle, unmake, make sense of, or is it something this worker has unconsciously succumbed to? Is this decade what haunts the eyes of the figure on the chain carousel, someone insanely conscious of what has transpired, to the point where this figure can no longer go on in any direction, but in circles?

Made/Unmade closes November 13th. Please see it.