A Letter to One of Tiger's Sponsors

To Whom It May Concern,

Tiger is a proud man who was raised to be proud and that remains a problem for so many North American men of Anglo-European descent.

When Tiger was arrested for DUI the other day, talk show hosts like Charles Adler were speculating that, although Tiger said he was taking meds (four back surgeries in how many years?), he was likely drinking too, and he invited listeners to call in and agree or disagree.

I know talk show hosts are in the business of getting listeners to contribute content, and some will say anything to get them to do so, but for me this was the last straw, so I emailed Adler and told him as much.

Haven't heard back from Adler or his people, and don't expect to, but I feel a little better for having put that out in the world. Same too for this note, which in this instance is the opposite of an admonishment -- a thank you!

Thank you for standing by Tiger.

Statement by Sam Durant

Let me begin by describing the sculpture that has become the focus of protest in recent days as I envisioned it when it was first exhibited in 2012 in Europe at The Hague, Netherlands; Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland; and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany.

[Is the work's exhibition history important in the context of this statement? Or is it there to validate the work?]

This wood and steel sculpture is a composite of the representations of seven historical gallows that were used in US state-sanctioned executions by hanging between 1859 and 2006. Of the seven gallows depicted in the work, one in particular recalls the design of the gallows of the execution of the Dakota 38 in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862. The Mankato Massacre represents the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, in which 38 Dakota men were executed by order of President Lincoln in the same week that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Six other scaffolds comprise the structure, which include those used to execute abolitionist John Brown (1859); the Lincoln Conspirators (1865), which included the first woman executed in US history; the Haymarket Martyrs (1886), which followed a labor uprising and bombing in Chicago; Rainey Bethea (1936), the last legally conducted public execution in US history; Billy Bailey (1996), the last execution by hanging (not public) in the US; and Saddam Hussein (2006), for war crimes at a joint Iraqi/US facility.

[Is the artist's "composite of the representations of seven historical gallows" yet another example of ramrod conflation, where the particularity of an event is reduced to what one knows and doesn't know of those it is (con)fused with?]

Scaffold opens the difficult histories of the racial dimension of the criminal justice system in the United States, ranging from lynchings to mass incarceration to capital punishment. In bringing these troubled and complex histories of national importance to the fore, it was my intention not to cause pain or suffering, but to speak against the continued marginalization of these stories and peoples, and to build awareness around their significance.

[Do we believe the artist when he says his Scaffold "opens" anything other than its own trap doors? How could an artist known for his deep research not have anticipated a negative response to this work prior to its placement so close to where so many Dakota were executed? And if not, could he not have thought to speak with the relatives of those who, it has been reported, "wailed" and "danced" and called out their names in their native language atop those doors prior to their opening?]

Scaffold seeks to address the contemporary relevance and resonance of these narratives today, especially at a time of continued institutionalized racism, and the ongoing dehumanization and intimidation of people of color. Scaffold is neither memorial nor monument, and stands against prevailing ideas and normative history. It warns against forgetting the past. In doing so, my hope for Scaffold is to offer a platform for open dialogue and exchange, a place to question not only our past, but the future we form together.

[When the artist writes "my hope for Scaffold is to offer a platform for open dialogue and exchange," don't the puns ("platform" and "open") carried in these words compromise the sincerity of his apology?]

I made Scaffold as a learning space for people like me, white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists. It has been my belief that white artists need to address issues of white supremacy and its institutional manifestations. Whites created the concept of race and have used it to maintain dominance for centuries, whites must be involved in its dismantling. However, your protests have shown me that I made a grave miscalculation in how my work can be received by those in a particular community. In focusing on my position as a white artist making work for that audience I failed to understand what the inclusion of the Dakota 38 in the sculpture could mean for Dakota people. I offer my deepest apologies for my thoughtlessness. I should have reached out to the Dakota community the moment I knew that the sculpture would be exhibited at the Walker Art Center in proximity to Mankato.

[It is only when the artist writes "However, your protests have shown me..." am I aware that he is speaking to anyone ("your"). And yet in offering his "deepest apologies," who is he apologizing to? And if it is the "Dakota community," why can't he say that directly? As in, I offer my deepest apologies to the Dakota community.]

My work was created with the idea of creating a zone of discomfort for whites, your protests have now created a zone of discomfort for me. In my attempt to raise awareness I have learned something profound and I thank you for that. Can this be a learning experience for all of us, the Walker, other institutions and artists and larger society? I look forward to meeting the Dakota Elders on Wednesday in Minneapolis, and am open and ready to work together.

[What about the "zone of discomfort" this statement has created for "whites"? When might whites expect that apology?]

Reflections

Our window of sunshine and high temperatures is about to be broken. Tomorrow's forecast calls for a 10 degree drop, and rain!

Maudernism

Detail from an untitled painting by Maud Lewis.

Denis Johnson (1949-2017)

Looking Out the Window Poem

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BY DENIS JOHNSON

The sounds of traffic   

die over the back lawn   

to occur again in the low   

distance.

The voices, risen, of

the neighborhood cannot   

maintain that pitch   

and fail briefly, start   

up again.

Similarly my breathing rises   

and falls while I look out   

the window of apartment   

number three in this slum,   

hoping for rage, or sorrow.

They don’t come to me   

anymore. How can I lament   

anything? It is all

so proper, so much

as it should be, now

the nearing cumulus   

clouds, ominous,   

shift, they are like the

curtains, billowy,   

veering at the apex

of their intrusion on the room.

If I am alive now,   

it is only

to be in all this

making all possible.   

I am glad to be

finally a part

of such machinery. I was   

after all not so fond

of living, and there comes

into me, when I see   

how little I liked

being a man, a great joy.

Look out our astounding

clear windows before evening.   

It is almost as if

the world were blue

with some lubricant,

it shines so.

Denis Johnson, “Looking Out the Window Poem” from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New. Copyright © 1995 by Denis Johnson. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1995)

Japanese Cherry

Every April I visit Locarno Beach to see the sand-locked Prunus serrulata.

Pictures From Her(e)

On Tuesday I walked through the VAG's Pictures From Here exhibition. Although I was aware in advance of the artists included in the show, one never knows what one will see until one steps inside.

On that note, hanging outside the VAG's south face is an exhibition banner that uses Rodney Graham's Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour (2012-2013) not as the triptych it is, but the image therein. Could the VAG not have made a three-part banner consistent with the artist's work instead of simply displaying the image the artist worked with?

Something else that bothered me is Paul Wong's Vigil 5.4 (2010). This is the last work in the show (if one proceeds clock-wise), and employs video documentation Paul shot of Rebecca Belmore's 2002 Vigil performance at the Talking Stick Festival (Full Circle First Nations Performance), footage that Rebecca projected in its entirety onto a surface of lightbulbs as a subsequent work entitled The Named and the Unnamed (2002).

Now I know there is nothing wrong with an artist making work from the work of other artists, but there is something troubling about what Paul has made of Rebecca's performance documentation. While I have no doubt that Paul is supportive of Rebecca and her intentions, the means by which he expresses his support does not critique/transcend the gaze that contributes to the conditions that allow women to "go" missing or "get" murdered.

No Fun_ City

Good Morning, Midnight (1939)

In 1908 E.M. Forster published Room With a View, where the desired view is not of a courtyard but of a free and flowing river. Six years later Gertrude Stein published Tender Buttons (1914), a book that ends with "Rooms".

Another notable "room" writer is Jean Rhys, in particular her novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939). It opens with a room:

"Quite like old times," the room says. "Yes? No?"

There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a larger room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobblestoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse.

I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life.

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Sei Shonagon was a 10th century Heian courtesan who kept a diary while serving the Empress Teishi (977-1000). A mix of "vignettes and opinions and anecdotes," according to her translator, Meredith McKinney. English readers know this diary as The Pillow Book (1001).

In 1996 Peter Greenaway made a film of it.

Here's something I fell asleep to last night:

[28] Things that make you feel cheerful -- A well-executed picture done in the female style,* with lots of beautifully written accompanying text around it.

* the female style: A painting done in the softer, sometimes tinted, "Japanese" style, as distinct from the bolder "Chinese" style known as the "male style". Here it is presumably part of an illustrated tale.

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PLAZA Projects

Made my first visit to Richmond's Aberdeen Centre mall last week to attend the opening of the New Collection group show at PLAZA Projects.

Fonder and director Steven Tong was there, of course, as were most of the artists and some of the mall's representatives.

I purchased a cotton abibas bag from Olga Abeleva and Shizen Jambor, saw the permanent installation of the latest version of Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson's The Night Times Press Bar (2016) and poked my head in on 7:30 Assemble's ongoing performance I didn't know the Blue Jays were from Mexico (2017).

But the biggest hit was the mall itself, with its many tiny shops, none of which are franchises. Amazing. Had me returning to the exhibition -- to look again.

History Painting

Allegory is not a problem. It has been with us, carried along with church and state, private and public capital, and the development of industrial processes. It has been readymade for some time. Suspended disbeliefs are fabricated and squeezed into tubular packaging, woven canvas pulled from looms of mass production, thin wood sheet layered, glued and heated together to form a rigid substrate for our pleasure. Allegory has history, a production value and the results are familiar.

The Exiles (1961)

Sherman Alexie speaking on Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles (1961) at the 2008 Northwest Film Forum.

Here is a link to the L.A. Weekly article Alexie mentions concerning one of the film's stars, Yvonne Williams (Walker).

Miss Lonelyhearts

“Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, and they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.”
-- Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

"Tahiti in urban form"

There were many Brits working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, something Evelyn Waugh noted in his novel The Loved One: an Anglo-American Tragedy (1948), written after he, too, came west to make a buck.

But if the Brits descended on Hollywood for financial reasons, Germans were motivated by more immediate concerns: remaining in Nazi Germany had become a biological impossibility.

Thomas Mann loved Los Angeles, while others, such as Bertolt Brecht, loathed it. It was Brecht who described Los Angeles in 1940 as "Tahiti in urban form." Two years later, in a March diary entry, he writes: "extraordinary in these parts how universally demoralizing cheap prettiness stops one from leading anything like a cultivated, i.e., dignified life."

Brecht might be describing exterior architectures like the Brown Derby (above) when using words like "cheap prettiness," but is there a literary equivalent? Like the simile? Is not the conflation of "Tahiti" and the "urban" a kind of cheap (informational) prettiness?

In 1987, Peter Ustinov described Toronto as "New York run by the Swiss." He meant it as a compliment. But to those who feel their city is no longer the product of an equation but a variable independent of it ("No one runs us," I was once told by an art collecting landlord), the comment continues to burn. Raise it and you get freak-outs like this.

Canada 150 Heritage Moment

Seventy-two hundred and thirty-nine seconds of our current moment can be found in this CBC news item. And yes, while it is two men doing most of the talking, they are kept on course by a woman charged with moderating their "conversation".

More from Jesse Wente (this morning) can be found here.

Mother's Day Movie

This year's Mother's Day movie is Claudine (1974).

Light and Space

In that kindly light the stained and blistered paint of the bungalow and the plot of weeds between the veranda and the dry water-hole lost their extreme shabbiness, and the two Englishmen, each in his rocking-chair, each with his whiskey and soda and his outdated magazine, the counterparts of numerous countrymen exiled in the barbarous regions of the world, shared in their brief illusory rehabilitation.

Image: Peter Alexander 7/18/11 (untitled blue diptych), 2011
Text: second paragraph from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One: an Anglo-American Tragedy (1948)

A shíshálh Family

Reconstructed from bones by the Canadian Museum of History, this shíshálh family from B.C.'s Sunshine Coast is described by CMH president and CEO Mark O'Neill as "perhaps the wealthiest and most important family in North America 4,000 years ago that we've been able to identify."

For more on this ghastly action, click here.

The Three Greenthorns

We are now eleven days away from tabulating the 179,100 absentee ballots cast during the 2017 B.C. provincial election. To put those numbers in perspective, there are 3,156,991 eligible voters in B.C., of which 57% cast a ballot.

With certain ridings close enough to be decided by absentee votes, the leaders of the three main parties are understandably cagey about what to say and do in the days leading up to May 22.

For those concerned that the three Green MLAs might form a coalition government with a 43 seat Liberal party willing to enact the Green's main election promise of proportional representation, rest assured -- it's not going to happen. The Liberals like the current first-past-the-post format, just as the Greens deplore the Liberals' indifference to the environmental consequences of oil, gas and hydro production.

But this is B.C politics. And in B.C. politics, anything can happen -- from a former premier who changed his name to Amor de Cosmos to an NDP candidate (Morgane Oger) who changed more than that and came within 561 votes of defeating the Liberal incumbent (Sam Sullivan) for the riding of Vancouver False-Creek.

Below are the email addresses of B.C.'s three Green MLAs. Write to them and let them know that a Green-Liberal coalition would be, in the words of the current U.S. President, "A bad -- a very bad -- a very, very bad idea."

SONIA FURSTENAU: Cowichan Valley | cwv@bcgreens.ca

ADAM OLSEN: Saanich North and the Islands | san@bcgreens.ca

ANDREW WEAVER: Oak Bay-Gordon Head | obg@bcgreens.ca

Portrait

I have known Olive for most of her eight years. Her current interests include drawing.

Recently her father showed me some of her portraits and I was impressed enough to ask Olive if she would accept a commission.

"Let me practice on you first," she said, so I sat for a ten minute session, after which she said she would "colour it in" and get back to me.

"Zorak Is Many Things"

(2:25-2:27)

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

I awake to the latest on that serial melodrama known as the French election and an update on our own provincial election (tomorrow), with the centrist Greens "surging," according to their haughty leader.

Following that -- floods. Not just in the Okanagan or the Fraser Canyon, where Cache Creek's fire chief was swept away last week, but in civilizations like Montreal.

"Après nous, le déluge," said Madame de Pompadour to her lover Louis XV, who, in keeping with the spirit of de Pompadour's declaration, revised it to "Après moi..."

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Live at the Malcolm Lowry Room (February 1994)

An opening night recording of cub (with guest) at the Malcolm Lowry Room in the fabulous North Burnaby Inn.

The Final Frontier (1992)

The Georgia Straight is exactly 50 years old. That's a long time, especially these days.

To mark its anniversary the Straight published an annotated list of "50 albums that shaped Vancouver." Included is an album I helped to make with my old band, Hard Rock Miners.

Normally I would be flattered -- but there are too many omissions! (Remember, the Straight is talking albums that "shaped" the city, not our favourites.) For example, of the 50 albums selected (one for each year), only three are by solo women artists!

Ann Mortifee's recording of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1975) is an important record -- an original score from a play that everyone in Vancouver saw that year.

Same too for Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993), an album whose contribution to Kitsilano goddess culture is on par with Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark (1974) and Tracy Chapman's Tracy Chapman (1988).

Animal Slaves was an art band, a great band. What about Dog Eat Dog (1984)?

Spirit of the West's impact was huge and intergenerational. What about Labour Day (1988)?

No hip-hop? What about Rascalz's Really Livin' (1992)?

cub's Betti-Cola (1993)?

Kinnie Starr's Tidy (1996)?

Destroyer's We'll Build Them a Golden Bridge (1996)?

Oh yeah, and Louis Cyphre -- thanks for uploading this yesterday. That Circle C record is among my Top 50, everywhere.

Signs

North Vancouver's Tomahawk Barbecue in 1936 -- or The Tomahawk as it is known today.

What to make of its sign? A clever (resourceful) use of a civic utility pole, or evidence of the state's role in the perpetuation of negative stereotypes?



What about the pairing of an indigenous signifier with one associated with the "Orient"?

Here is the Salada sign today: