Fifty-minutes all told from my door to the Broadway & Commercial Skytrain station (on foot), where I caught the Millennial Line for eight stops, then transferred to the 145 SFU that took me to the foot of Convocation Mall.
Shockingly early for historian Roxanne Panchasi's 2:00PM screening of Audrey Diwan's L'événement (2021), I visited SFU Galleries' who claims abstraction? Echoes from the SFU Art Collection exhibition. Fourteen historic works, with four insertions by contemporary artist Francisco-Fernando Granados, whose same-named echo-making Teck Gallery exhibition "opens an inquiry into the legacy and implications of Modernist abstraction."
Four years since I'd been to SFU's Burnaby Mountain gallery, and in that time, the exhibition space has been reduced by two-thirds. I mentioned this in my conversation with the exhibition curator, and was told smilingly that because the gallery had hired additional staff, more office space was needed. Isn't that the case with universities in general these days?
In Unwanted Advances (2017), Laura Kipnis supplies statistics on the climbing ratio of administrative hires over faculty hires. Can the same now be said of university gallery and museum administrations, where the ambiguities of art are secondary to the logical certainties of institutional operations? If SFU's new "stand alone" gallery ever gets built (in the works for how may years now?), it will invariably exert itself as a rationalizing apparatus, once more turning art into information.
* image: Meat: New York Steak by Attila Richard Lukács (1986)
I enjoy almost all your posts, maybe all that I’ve read…but just in case, I’m going to say “almost all”. I especially like this one because I find your last line “once more turning art into information” most insightful and thought provoking.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's a zinger. And True.
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