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2012-01-29T10:47:00.000-08:00

A small room above 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.

On the table before me is a three-inch-wide rust-coloured plastic pot filled with three different kinds of cactus and a black stone slightly smaller than the smallest cactus. Each cactus is wildly different from the others, and together (with the stone) they remind me of a '70s rock band.

I purchased the pot a couple week ago after getting my haircut at Amir's on Victoria Drive. Evoke Flowers (currently known as New City Flowers) is located a block south of Amir.

According to Facebook:

Evoke Flowers is a passionate, community-minded, full-service retail florist and gift shop serving greater Vancouver. We create arrangements and find local one-of-a-kind treasures that are worthy of your loved ones.

Flowers are a symbol of an emotion or a sentiment you want to convey. Our designers interpret your message and express it beautifully with flowers.

Our retail location boasts carefully selected beautiful, unique gifts and home décor items to complement your flower orders. Locally crafted artisan jewelry, unique greeting cards, and many home and garden feature pieces. We are presently occupied with the adventure of filling the store with these treasures and are adding new items all the time.

Stop by, have a look around, let us know what you think and what you'd like to see!

About Gina-Lily...

Gina-Lily is wildly in love with flowers and plants. Her home has oft been called a jungle, where lovingly hand-seeded and propagated plants and flowers have always cascaded from verandah planters and backyard flower beds. For a girl whose been out in the yard weeding and naming flowers with her mom since before she knew how to read, it's only natural that she turn up combining blossoms and foliage in her own floral design studio. Her lifelong passion for flowers has blossomed into a love for beautiful things, and the joy and happiness they can bring when shared.

She has a diploma in Floral Design from The Academy of Floral Design.

2012-01-28T18:32:00.000-08:00

2012-01-27T10:21:00.000-08:00

Where does it say that what is pictured here is enough for you to accept all that it has to offer?

And if not, if in seeing nothing that matters, let us credit the question with having prompted the next one: What does?

2012-01-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

On the north side of the 1300 block of Kingsway is a shop that repairs and sells electronic equipment. I wish I had a chance to acquire the "BEFORE" phone. Reminds me of a Jerry Pethick.

2012-01-25T16:08:00.000-08:00

On Monday Cyprien Gaillard and his younger brother Matisse came to town in advance of Cyprien’s talk at ECUAD, an event organized by Presentation House Gallery. Cyprien had expressed interest in touring our ruins, so I took them first to the literal (the recently demolished Pantages Theatre near Hastings and Main), before ending with the figurative (the Museum of Anthropology at UBC).

Cyprien’s tour request came as no surprise, given his interest in entropy, the sublime, "land art" and documentary fiction. In many ways, he is the inheritor of Robert Smithson, who, along with Robert Fillou, Dan Graham, Mary Kelly and Paul McCarthy, has had a huge influence on local practices, at least for my generation and older.

Cyprien, who has all the assurance of Smithson, showed a number of works during his talk, ending with documentation of The Recovery of Discovery (2011), a beer pyramid (beer-amid?) which he invited gallery patrons to both sit on and drink from.

While power-pointing through Recovery, it occurred to me that Cyprien’s achievement is to take Smithson’s notions of geometry and entropy and deliver them to a popular audience. That he used free beer obviously helped that along. That the beer was warm is a testament to the power of art.

There are a number of similarities between Cyprien’s work and a younger generation of Vancouver artists, particularly his fire-extinguisher-in-the-landscape pieces, which brought to mind Kevin Schmidt’s dry ice nocturnal forests (Fog, 2004). Same with a booze-guzzling monodrama from Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009), which made me think of Jeremy Shaw’s Best Minds (2008).

Although tonight is Cyprien’s last night in Vancouver, there is already talk of his return. Whether towards a commissioned work, or to take more photographs, or both, no one knows but Cyprien.

2012-01-24T23:28:00.000-08:00

2012-01-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

Last Friday was the launch of Brian Jungen: Carapace, Art Gallery of Alberta/ Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian/Frac des Pas de la Loire, Edmonton/DC/Nantes, 2012 at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, where Brian opened his Prototypes for a New Understanding exhibition in 1999. The catalogue, designed by Barr Gilmore, features essays by Candice Hopkins and myself (see below).

BOWLS, COMBS, GUITAR PICKS… : THE “ALBERTA VERSION” OF CARAPACE

“Transformation is a strange word to use. It implies that art transforms. It doesn’t, it just plain forms.” – Roy Lichtenstein [1]

Reading through the many reviews, articles, features and essays on Brian Jungen, a pattern emerges. [2] The pattern foregrounds the artist’s Dunne-za roots, his transformation of consumer products into masks and animals, and the politics his heritage and practice imply. Another pattern is the relatively limited discussion of his non-representational works (works that, to some, resemble little more than the materials they consist of). This is often the case when an artist’s work is championed in the popular press, where narrative and story rule, and figures are not sold separately.

As a child in the 1960s I did not play with Transformers like Jungen might have in the 1970s, but with G.I. Joe. When not with Joe, I was in front of the television watching strange men behaving strangely, in ways they never stepped clear of, as if caught between caterpillar and butterfly. Even as a child I knew these men were more complex than their television personae; that the caricatures they made of themselves were both who they were and who they were not -- which they did impeccably, with an elegance rarely seen these days. Even as a child I knew. Even as a child I knew these men were special.

Every day after school I raced home to watch Charles Nelson Reilly on “The Match Game,” yet it was only after his death that I learned he was a respected teacher and director of opera, theatre and television. Truman Capote was a talk show regular, and I knew that he wrote books, yet it was only after his death that I read In Cold Blood (1966) and wondered how such a fist of a book could emerge from such a pinky of a man. Andy Warhol, who appeared on an episode of “The Love Boat,” was a Pop artist, yet I knew that because I had seen his stacked Brillo Soap Pad Boxes (1964) in my parents’ Time magazine. What I did not know was that the serial patterning of Warhol’s own Factory-reproduced boxes is as important to the work as the boxes themselves, like Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966) or the metal forms of Donald Judd’s untitled wall reliefs.

The activation and serial arrangement of consumer-product imagery and objects is a recurrent theme in Vancouver art, of which Jungen’s work is a more recent example. In 1978, Ken Lum produced his first furniture sculptures, which, according to Jeff Wall, “were [among] the first indications of the opening of a new stage in the local reception and interpretation of minimalism, body art, earth art and related phenomenon.”[3] Lum’s sculptures, with their physically inaccessible yet visually open centres, provide a “space in which a distressingly evocative absence – something from [Lum’s] own social experience – was made visible”[4] This in contrast to Michael Fried’s insistence that the “hollowness” of minimal art was an example of its anthropomorphism, as if every Andre or Judd called forth a statue instead of a phenomenological presence.” [5]

Absent in Wall’s “Four Essays on Ken Lum” is mention of Pop art’s reproduction and deployment of once effeminate domestic products, such as soup, soap and scouring agents, versus minimalism’s tendency towards more masculine surfaces, in the middle of which fall Lum’s indoor sofas, and later Jungen’s outdoor plastic chairs used to make his “whale-skeleton” sculptures. This increasingly gender-neutral inventory has been taken up by Jungen‘s local contemporaries Geoffrey Farmer, Damian Moppett, Myfawny MacLeod, Steven Shearer, Ron Terada and Kelly Wood, who have, in their own ways, explored pop as a cultural form [6], but only Jungen has pushed his explorations to the realm that is in fact closer to the montage strategies of Wall and Stan Douglas.[7] And now he is drawing on that most slippery of elements: time.

I have been asked to write on the “Alberta Version” of Jungen’s Carapace (2009-2011)[8], a monumental sculpture comprised of blue and green plastic industrial waste bins reconfigured into what many believe to be a turtle shell. That this work is most often recognized as a turtle shell and not, say, an aspect of the male and female sexual anatomy, or perhaps more to the point, a formline pattern of curvilinear abstraction, speaks to what I mentioned earlier about narrative and story and how they reduce our aesthetic experience to a bottom-line reading. Aha! It’s a turtle shell. I get it. Now let’s check out the whales.

So let’s start again -- with the turtle shell.

In the summer of 2010, while a guest of the Queen Charlotte Islands Arts Council, I had occasion to meet a young Haida artist named Geda Ku Juus, or Walker Brown.[9] When asked if he was open to a studio visit, Brown said he was not yet ready to show his work, but would I like to see his research, a display at Kaay Llnagaay [10] where he works as a preparator? In what turned out to be an illuminating afternoon, Brown presented evidence of the formline associated with Northwest Coast art on both the anterior and posterior sections of Pacific Ocean sea turtles known to have washed up on Haida Gwaii’s shores. Indeed, it was from considering these turtles that I recalled similar patterning in Meso and South American painting. However, it was only later in my trip that I came upon that other motif most associated with British Columbia art, and that is the geodesic], evidence of which can be found in the dome structures built by counter-culturalists who came to Haida Gwaii in the 1960s and 70s. [11] Both the formline and the geodesic are central to Jungen’s Carapace.

For me, the success of Carapace is not restricted to Jungen’s ability to turn a mass-produced consumer product into something mythopoeic. Nor is it his ability to create a structure whose metaphoric resonance allows for a commentary on how those commodities were sourced (for example, the transformation of dinosaurs into oil, oil into plastic, plastic into “dinosaurs”). What fascinates me is the fusion of the two motifs into a hybrid work, one that does not end at the level of metaphor but continues on, enhanced, capable of overtone, allowing for the kind of art experience that is bigger than the literal proposition that supports it.

Certainly the union of the indigenous formline and the Western geodesic can be seen as parallels to Jungen’s mixed Dunne-za (mother) and Swiss (father) parentage, but when applied to the turtle shell we are presented not with a subject whose place is assured but, like the turtle itself, at home with that which it carries on its back, and that is place. That Jungen gives us the turtle shell and not the turtle speaks more to the evacuation of the nomadic than it does to its residual monument. That the turtle is comfortable on both land and water is yet another dimension. Another is the turtle’s slowness. Another is what turtle shells were once used for -- bowls, combs, guitar picks…

The reconfiguration of Carapace, based on an earlier reconfiguration of plastic industrial disposal bins (themselves emblems of a linear system that still has some categories of garbage shipped directly to landfills), will be read in relation to the place where that reconfiguration occurs. Unlike what Jungen solicited for his first solo show at Calgary’s Truck Gallery in 1997 (representations of “Indianness” by non-Indians, which he converted into contemporary cave paintings [12), this time the artist has replaced the representations of other in favour of his own, and in doing so reminds us that what he has brought for reassembly is, like the reproduced packaging Warhol silkscreened in serial form, perceived by certain members of the public to be perceived as its own product: the commodified art form. But rather than turn the many into one, Jungen provides the inverse: an environmental critique, but also a recognition of the cyclical, or dialectical, nature of our ever-turning world, burdened by linear impulses manifest in the unsustainable extraction and vertically-integrated delivery of “dirty” oil.

But the conceit does not end there. For example, is it a coincidence that the reconfiguration of Carapace is taking place on the one-year anniversary of the new Art Gallery of Alberta, architect Randall Stout’s zinc-clad nugget atop the site of the gallery it has now replaced, a gallery now amenable to the kinds of exhibitions it has grown to accommodate? Once again the artist reminds us of where we are, for in abstracting Carapace from a recognizable figure to a system of pattern and recurrence, we look harder for evidence of life as we know it, whose parallel is found in the overlapping metalwork that snakes inside and outside the building. (Jungen did something similar with Variant [2002], where instead of his usual practice of turning Nike trainers into masks, he gave us a wall work that, although symmetrical, has more in common with a Jackson Pollock “action painting” than something hanging in a Kwakwaka’wakw band office.)

Another reorientation of Carapace concerns its new entrance. Whereas the earlier version had the viewer entering absently, marveling at the ingeniously articulated interior grotto, this new version, in keeping with Wall’s critique of minimalism’s promotion of phenomenology, implicates the viewer, forcing us to consider ourselves in relation to the work and the space that contains it. In the “Alberta Version”, the entrance, like the ceiling, is lowered and we must rearrange our bodies as we would our minds, bowing down in order to open ourselves up to where we are and what we have entered into: a theatrical experience as opposed to a (purely) formal one.

The Alberta version of Carapace is part of a continuum that began in Europe, travelled to the United States, and eventually settled in Canada. As a work of sculpture it is based as much on time as materials. The introduction of time in Jungen’s work was highlighted some months before, at an exhibition at Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver, where the artist presented sculptural works and a production room that, over the course of the exhibition, produced prints screened from the hides of elk (their skins being part of the sculptural installation). On the surface, the subject of these prints appeared to be little more than circles and had nothing in common with the animals whose own surfaces provided the screens. But stare at them long enough and you might see those elk, just as you would the turtle shell whose reconfiguration evokes the interior and exterior pattern of the new Art Gallery of Alberta. This is the spirit of Carapace, the one that has come from Europe to swallow Stout’s design.

Michael Turner

Footnotes

1. G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Interviews by G. R. Swenson with Roy Litchtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns,” in Avant-Garde Art, Thomas B. Hesse and John Ashbery, eds. (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 198.

2. Jungen’s first solo exhibition (entitled Half Nelson) was at Calgary’s Truck Gallery in 1997. His second, at Vancouver’s Charles H. Scott Gallery in 1999, marked the debut of his Nike trainer masks, paired with wall drawings solicited for the Truck show. Both exhibitions were curated by Cate Rimmer.

3. Jeff Wall, “Four Essays on Ken Lum,” Ken Lum (Winnipeg/Rotterdam: Winnipeg Art Gallery/Witte de With, 1990), 37.

4.Wall. 40.

5. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum V:10 (Summer 1967), 12-23.

6. These artists, between a year and nine years older than Jungen, comprised the roster 6: New Vancouver Modern, Scott Watson’s exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver. Although debated in relation to other local survey exhibitions (notably the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 1996 Topographies: Aspects of Recent B.C. Art), “6” was especially recognized as a generational show, and as such generated anxiety over where the city’s art (and artists) might be headed. In “Placed Upon the Horizon, Casting Shadows”, a Vancouver art survey essay delivered at apexart in the spring of 2000 (http://www.apexart.org/residency/mahovsky.htm) , Jungen contemporary Trevor Mahovsky revisits Ken Lum’s “6” review (Canadian Art 15:2 [Summer 1998] 46-51), where he describes Lum’s assessment as “both scathing and supportive,” and that, in Lum’s mind, the work can be “characterized as appearing conceptual, but behaving like Pop; this formulation the result of a submission of the social aspirations of conceptual art to pop-art irony and interiority,” a description that speaks more to one too many mediated notions of Pop than, say, Thomas Crow’s analysis of Warhol’s electric chair (capital punishment) and race-riot (civil rights) series as political “truth-telling” (see Crow’s The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent [New York: Abrams, 1996], 87).

7. On Douglas and Lum’s relationship to production, see: Tim Lee, “Specific Objects and Social Subjects: Industrial Facture and the Production of Polemics in Vancouver,” Vancouver Art & Economies, Melanie O’Brian, ed. (Vancouver: Artspeak and Arsenal Pulp Press), 97-125

8. Carapace was first constructed and installed while Jungen was a resident at Pay de la Loire, France, in 2009. A second configuration was displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C., in 2010.

9. While the former Queen Charlotte Islands are now officially recognized by their Haida name (Haida Gwaii), the local arts council has yet to change their letterhead.

10. Kaay Llnagaay is located in Skidegate. Its English name is the Haida Heritage Centre.

11. Geodesic patterns first appeared in art from Vancouver as early as the 1940s, in the paintings and design work of B.C. Binning. For Expo ’86, the provincial government unveiled Expo Centre (later Science World), a Buckminster Fuller inspired pseudo-geodesic structure at the eastern end of False Creek. More recently, geodesic patterns have been explored by Vancouver painters Holger Kalberg and Elizabeth MacIntosh.

12. The original drawings for these “cave paintings” writ large were solicited from consumers at Calgary malls by the curator, Cate Rimmer, and a group of local volunteers.

2012-01-22T21:51:00.000-08:00

On that same April 2010 reading tour of Northern B.C I had a chance to visit Haisla Hereditary Chief Sam Robinson, who invited a group of us to his studio where he works in silver and gold. Earlier this month Sam was in the news, speaking out against the dangers of Enbridge Incorporated's Northern Gateway Pipeline and the conversion of Kitamaat into an oil port.

Here is Sam in his studio:

The view outside his window:

The view to the west:

And what's at stake:

2012-01-21T22:25:00.002-08:00

2012-01-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

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2012-01-19T14:36:00.000-08:00

2012-01-18T06:17:00.000-08:00

Further to Pignatari's "bebe coca cola", a paragraph from Benjamin Moser's 2011 New Directions translation of Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star (1977):

I also forgot to say that the account that is soon going to have to start -- since I can no longer withstand the pressure of the facts -- the account that is soon going to have to start is written with the sponsorship of the most popular soft drink in the world even though it's not paying me a cent, a soft drink distributed in every country. Moreover it's the same soft drink that sponsored the last earthquake in Guatemala. Even though it tastes like nail polish, Aristolino soap and chewed plastic. None of this keeps everyone from loving it with servility and subservience. And because -- and now I'm going to say something difficult that only I understand -- because this drink which contains coca is today. It's a way for a person to be up-to-date and in the now.

2012-01-17T19:06:00.000-08:00

2012-01-16T19:03:00.000-08:00

2012-01-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

2012-01-14T18:54:00.000-08:00

An inverted version of Decio Pignatari's "beba coca cola" (1957):

2012-01-13T23:09:00.000-08:00

2012-01-12T10:16:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow marks the "soft" opening of LETTERS: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, an exhibition I have been working on with co-curator Scott Watson these past few months (the official opening is Thursday January 19th).

At the centre of the show are the six "Letter" paintings Morris did in the late-1960s. Surrounding them, concrete works by Morris, Haroldo de Campos, Henri Chopin, John Furnival, Eugen Gomringer, Decio Pignatari and many more. There are also some mirror works that relate to the mirrors Morris inserted in his paintings.

Much of my curatorial work can be found in the "print gallery", a section called LETTERS: Transparent and Opaque: Concrete Poetry in Canada, 1963-1973, the subtitle derived from an essay Ian Wallace contributed to the UBC Fine Arts Gallery's 1969 Concrete Poetry exhibition ("Literature -- Transparent and Opaque"), which Morris co-curated with then-director Alvin Balkind.

Accompanying LETTERS will be a catalogue with essays by Watson, Jamie Hilder, William Wood and myself, to appear at the end of the exhibition in April. In the meantime I have been asked to write three short texts to help orient viewers to the relationship between Morris's paintings and concrete poetry, as well as the relationship between concrete poetry and the New York Correspondence School, all of which are included below:

LETTERS: MICHAEL MORRIS AND CONCRETE POETRY

The relationship between the Michael Morris paintings on display and concrete poetry has its genesis in two letters: Kurt von Meier’s June 1967 “Los Angeles Letter” in Art International, a site survey that includes a discussion of Morris’s paintings; and a May 1968 letter Morris received from New York Correspondence School founder Ray Johnson in response to Morris’s painting The Problem of Nothing (1967), which Johnson saw reproduced in ArtForum earlier that month.

Art International produced five more site surveys in their “Letter” series (Rome, Paris, New York, Madrid and Beijing), and Morris would respond to each with a painting (all but one were displayed at Vancouver’s Douglas Gallery in November 1968). As for Johnson’s letter, Morris responded to that as well – and in receiving a further letter from Johnson, Vancouver became a node in the NYCS network.

Johnson’s first letter to Morris was included in the unbound catalogue that accompanied Morris and Alvin Balkind’s 1969 UBC Fine Arts Gallery Concrete Poetry exhibition. The impetus behind this show began with Morris’s exposure to concrete and sound poetry as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the mid-60s, where he first experienced the work of Bob Cobbing, Edwin Morgan and Ernst Jandl during a visit to the 1965 “Between Poetry and Painting” exhibition at the London Institute of Contemporary Art. The result was a series of concretist works Morris undertook towards a book he was calling The Problem of Nothing.

When Morris conceived of this book, in 1965, he envisioned an “imaginary museum” filled with his concrete poems and “related collages.” It was only after his engagement with the NYCS that the contents shifted. Although “Michael Morris’ Book” appears as a foldout poster in the Concrete Poetry catalogue, much of the “related” work is collagist correspondence, and many of the concrete poems are from others (bill bissett, Haraldo de Campos and John Furnival, to name a few). Thus, Morris’s book became an anthology, not a monograph. As for what is “correspondence” and what is “concrete”, that might be the problem of nothing.

CONCRETE POETRY AND THE NEW YORK CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL

Concrete Poetry is often referred to as one of the first international movements in Modern Art, one that began simultaneously in Brazil and Switzerland in the mid-1950s, with vital editorials in Belgium, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom. Although much of this activity appeared in handmade magazines such as blewointment (Canada), Labris (Belgium) and Tlaloc (England), often alongside manifestos, collages and expressive poems, some of it was circulated through the mails, to be hung on walls and looked at in the same way Mallarme wanted us to look at Un Coup de Des (1897) – as painting.

The New York Correspondence School was the name Ed Pluckett gave to the mailings undertaken by Fluxus artist and “Nothings” founder Ray Johnson in 1961 and formalized in an April 1968 first meeting in New York City. These mailings, which often included collages, drawings and rubber stampings, were the material extension of Robert Fillou’s “Eternal Network”, connecting practitioners the world over. But Johnson proved to be an eccentric postmaster and would drop members who attempted to sell their letters or, in some instances, for having hung around too long.

As with all avant gardes that enter a larger public, Concrete Poetry and the New York Correspondence School began to wane in the 1970s, just as Abstract Expressionism had in the 1950s when department stores such as Sears Roebuck introduced paintings that matched their couches (Pop Art reversed that by returning commercial design to large scale painting and sculpture). A good example of the aestheticization of Concrete Poetry can be found in Robert Hollander’s literal representation of a Coca Cola bottle (“You Too? Me Too – Why Not Soda Pop?” 1968) – this in contrast to Decio Pignatari’s “beba coca cola” (1957), where the words “coca cola” are reorganized to spell cloaca. The same could be said of the New York Correspondence School when Rolling Stone announced “Mail Art” in 1973.

LETTERS: TRANSPARENT AND OPAQUE
CONCRETE POETRY IN CANADA, 1963-1973

The emergence of a self-conscious Canadian concrete and sound poetry scene began in Vancouver in the early 1960s with the publication of bill bissett’s blewointment magazine (1963-1970). Prior to that, experiments with typography and language were more often than not isolated occurrences, like the work of UBC English professor Earle Birney who, as early as 1950, was using multiple type-faces to construct poems such as “The Ballad of Mr. Chubb” (1951/1956).

When one of Birney’s students, bpNichol (1944-1988), arrived in Toronto in 1964, he was shocked to learn that no one had heard of Vancouver poets bissett, Martina Clinton, Judith Copithorne, Pierre Coupey, Lance Farrell, Maxine Gadd and Gerry Gilbert. To rectify that, he and David Aylward began work on a magazine similar in design and content to blewointment, called Ganglia. In 1967, after having connected with concrete poets in England, Belgium and Brazil, Nichol started a second magazine devoted wholly to literary concretism, called grOnk.

Today, bpNichol is arguably Canada’s best-known concrete and sound poet. However, what is often overlooked when speaking of Nichol this way is that he, like bissett, continued to work in both concrete and expressive styles, expanding the medium, as opposed to seeking its perfection or destruction. Something else worth noting: while their concrete works are known for their political economic critique, Nichol’s is restricted to Canadian nationalism (“INQUIRY OF MINISTRY”), while bissett’s knows no bounds (“in praise of all quebec bombers”).

Michael Turner

2012-01-11T23:15:00.001-08:00

2012-01-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

Travelling south along the B.C. coast.

2012-01-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

Last July, after visiting Los Angeles, Judy and I drove our rent-a-car up the 101 to Big Sur.

The last time I visited Big Sur was in the early-1980s, when it was still possible to hitch-hike the coast, or take the Green Tortoise, which today is more a hostel chain than a bus, where foam platforms replaced the seats and luggage racks were converted into bunks.

Hard to explain what it was like to enter Pfeiffer Beach with no one else around. Kept looking behind the trees, for St. Peter.

2012-01-07T10:05:00.000-08:00

Last February, whilst in the midst of my winter malaise, I travelled to Portland via Amtrak's Cascades train to visit Matthew Stadler's Publication Studio and celebrate the launch of his novel Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha. While slowing through the Peace Arch border crossing I noticed what looked like a work of public art.

A project of the Lead Pencil Studio, "Non-Sign II" takes the billboard as its referent (and the "non-sites" of Robert Smithson?). However, instead of an image, we are given a window. What you see "in" that window depends on your perspective. As I was on the train, this is what I saw:

2012-01-06T21:15:00.000-08:00

Taken on July 19, 2011 at the southeast corner of 15th and Fraser.

2012-01-05T21:58:00.000-08:00

Lovely juxtaposition on the front page of today's "Globe Arts": Russell Smith announcing that the "colour of the year" for 2012 is "a shade of orange," while Andrew Ryan's article to the right shows a picture of Dragon's Den star Kevin O'Leary behind bars -- dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. Talk about a fashion crime.

2012-01-04T23:11:00.000-08:00

These paintings were part of a group exhibition at the Terrace Art Gallery, where I took part in a reading organized by the B.C. Book Prizes in April, 2010. The artist is Maureen O'Connell (not Shay Semple) and the portraits are entitled "Sister 1", "Sister 2" and "Sister 3". Something about the candles, who gets one, and why.

2012-01-03T19:17:00.000-08:00

Taken by Doug Turner on April 3, 1985, Victoria, BC.

2012-01-02T23:22:00.000-08:00

Taken on August 1, 2010, Queen Charlotte City, BC.

2012-01-01T16:14:00.001-08:00

2011-12-31T21:05:00.000-08:00

I'm going out,
flies, so relax,
make love.

2011-12-30T23:16:00.000-08:00

My cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I’m feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.

A power of butterfly must be
The aptitude to fly,
Meadows of majesty concedes
And easy sweeps of sky.

So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.

2011-12-29T23:17:00.000-08:00

2011-12-28T20:40:00.001-08:00

2011-12-27T22:08:00.001-08:00

2011-12-26T22:33:00.000-08:00

2011-12-25T10:03:00.000-08:00

2011-12-24T12:50:00.000-08:00

Vancouver Art Gallery librarian Cheryl Siegel's annual Xmas tree:

2011-12-22T19:27:00.000-08:00

2011-12-20T19:31:00.000-08:00

After a slow lunch at the Wedgewood I ran into an old friend who once worked in book publishing but left to make his fortune in what we now call “electronic games.” Does he miss the world his new line of work helped to alter? Apparently. “Had I known what games would do to books, films and music, I never would have sold my soul to ___.”

Interesting that he should resort to the supernatural to account for his actions, and that had he stayed in publishing, none of this would have happened.

We live at a time when there is so much to apply our minds to, yet the content has never been so limited. In Literature, the magic of Harry Potter gave way to the narcissistic bloodsucking of Twilight. Part of me understands this, while another part blames an infantile culture of elimination that chooses the one over the many and the market as its arbiter.

Maybe it is time to read these books closer, as allegories, as evidence of the “invisible hand” Adam Smith wrote about in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” or what Karl Marx wrote in Volume One of Das Kapital: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” With knowledge comes understanding.

2011-12-19T00:34:00.000-08:00

SICINIUS
Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.

MENENIUS
Pray you, who does the wolf love?

SICINIUS
The lamb.

MENENIUS
Ay, to devour him; as the hungry plebeians would the
noble Marcius.

BRUTUS
He's a lamb indeed, that baes like a bear.

MENENIUS
He's a bear indeed, that lives like a lamb.

2011-12-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

A small room above 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.

This morning my neighbour had a caller; an actor like her, someone she has been rehearsing with.

Occasionally a line seeped through, always recognizable. Or maybe they all seeped through, and I only heard the ones I recognized.

From the sounds of it they are making a play based on selected lines from Shakespeare plays. And now they are arguing over what to call it.

2011-12-17T09:07:00.000-08:00

2011-12-16T00:04:00.000-08:00

2011-12-15T00:08:00.001-08:00

2011-12-14T00:38:00.000-08:00

2011-12-13T16:27:00.001-08:00

2011-12-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

Today is the thirteenth and final meeting of those enrolled in Emily Carr University of Art and Design’s HUMN 311 F006 (Expanded Literary Practices), a special topics seminar course designed by practicing artists based on their research interests. As my interests include convergences between visual and literary practices, we looked at everything from Baudelaire to Flarf, from the Cubism of Gertrude Stein to the poems of Dan Graham.

The course began with four lectures based on a reading of Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s introductory essays to their Against Expression (2010) anthology of “conceptual writing,” followed by weekly class presentations. At the end of last week’s presentations, participants submitted their essays, which I have now marked and will be returning to them this afternoon.

Although HUMN 311 courses are academic, I gave participants the option of doing a “creative” paper in place of an expository essay, or an additional "creative" work to enhance their grade.

Below is a video by Petyna Bougie, who presented and wrote on Flarf poetry, a search engine generated poetry that begins with odd juxtapositions. After her presentation, it occurred to Petyna that she might make something based on her longstanding interest in “bad dancing.” At the end of her essay, I found a page that read:

Youtube Flarf videos by Petyna Bougie

Flarf Feeder – The initial video collage of the Google video responses from typing in “Bad” + “Dancer”. “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga also came up in the search which is why it is the audio track for the video.

Inappropriate Bad Dancing – My performing * the video I put together for Flarf Feeder. The Clash was chosen as the audio track as a contrast to the choreography that was being done and the length of the song fit the video.

The videos are both searchable by title on Youtube.

* Bad Dancing is better and easier when you have an audience [happy face emoticon].

2011-12-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

2011-12-09T23:10:00.001-08:00

2011-12-08T23:17:00.000-08:00

2011-12-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

A small room above 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.

The song on my guitar today is "When First Unto This Country", about an immigrant who visits his girlfriend on horseback, only to one day "spy" a finer horse, which he steals. Unfortunately the horse belongs to a military captain, and this magnifies his crime. The immigrant is sent to prison, where he continues to visit his girlfriend -- in mind only.

I have heard many versions of this song over the years, but the one I like best is from the early 1960s and belongs to the New Lost City Ramblers. Guitar, banjo, and that saddest of old time instruments, the autoharp.

2011-12-06T23:14:00.001-08:00

2011-12-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

2011-12-04T23:08:00.001-08:00

2011-12-03T16:23:00.000-08:00

2011-12-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

Recently, a friend brought to my attention the fiction of Bruno Shulz (1892-1942), a Polish artist and writer who died in the Second World War.

Below is the third paragraph from The Republic of Dreams (1939), as translated by Walter Arndt:

"The garden plots at the outskirts of town are planted as if at the world's edge and look across their fences into the infinity of the anonymous plain. Just beyond the tollgates the map of the region turns nameless and cosmic like Canaan. Above that thin forlorn shipper of land a sky deeper and broader than anywhere else, a sky like a vast gaping dome many stories high, full of unfinished frescos and improvisations, swirling draperies and violent ascensions, opens up once again."

2011-12-01T18:40:00.000-08:00

Currently at CSA Space is “Into Thin Air”, a selection of twelve digital photographs by Vancouver-based art writer, curator, photographer, bookseller and gallerist Christopher Brayshaw, taken between 2008 and 2011 in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York. The curator of the exhibition is Steven Tong, who likely had a hand in the sequencing of these works, a sequence I will follow in the writing of this review.

The first thing that comes to mind after viewing these pictures are the angles from which they are captured. In the first picture (Opunta fiscus-indica, 2011), a cactus, like so many of those succulent fountains that greet us as we walk the streets of California’s largest city, stands at the edge of the sidewalk. From there, the photographer’s eye is drawn downwards (La Cienega, 2010), where curled leaves gather neatly at the base of the tree from which they have fallen and a ghost-like reflection dances in the shadows to the right. Following that, a garden of cacti (A Heterogeneity, 2011), where Latin nameplates, not fallen foliage, beckon at the base of these plants. Following that, the contents of a shop window (Antique Dealers Window, Los Angeles, CA, 2010), after which the high-angle view is broken (In a Conservatory, 2011) by a dead-on view similar to the one that greeted us at the outset (Opunta fiscus-indica). The difference here is that now, for the first time, the photographer is on the inside (of a glassed section of a building), looking out (past the cactus before him).

The sixth picture in the exhibition marks a shift in light, colour and subject. The photographer is still looking downwards, but this time on the outside looking in; in this instance, at a worker digging a hole, his back turned from the camera. Between the photographer and the worker is a gridded safety screen. After that, we are back in L.A., looking at the largest work in the show (Cosmopolitan Book Shop, Los Angeles, CA, 2010), a picture that hangs alone on the west wall, dividing the north and south walls of the gallery, and perhaps setting up an expectation for the second half of the exhibition. Or perhaps a review of what preceded it? Indeed, I see something of those curled leaves in the peeling letters of the book shop’s sign, a suggestion that the book shop, like many book shops these days, is headed for what might be its final winter. Like the hole-digging worker, and unlike the other pictures before it, the book shop is shot at some remove. But while the worker in the sixth picture is viewed with Waddellian admiration, there is something menacing about the book shop, where behind its counter sits a mean old man staring balefully at bursting shelves, with no signs of life between them.

Distance from the subject is both resumed and collapsed in the seventh picture (Blind, 2010). The focus here is not on what hangs in a smudged and dusty window but whatever is on the other side of the house that surrounds it, above which the sky is reduced to a small patch of blue and the house itself is a “blind” between photographer and subject, predator and prey. Are we disappointed, then, to find that the eighth picture (Coat Suspended from a Tree, 2008) is not worthy of such secrecy, that the union of a beige coat wedged neatly into the V of a tree looks as natural as the leaves at the base of the second picture, so natural in fact that it does not seem out of place and therefore hardly worth noticing? Of the tenth picture (Purity, 2011), a rain-soaked window sends us back to the grid between photographer and worker, and again we find the photographer on the inside looking out (or do we?). The eleventh picture (Surveillance Tower and Palm Tree, Livingston, CA, 2010) has the photographer outside once more, only this time he is looking up (for the first time in the exhibition) above a grassy knoll to a bright blue sky, before which stand traffic signs, light standards and a surveillance camera, all instances of social control, all aware of each other in this most constructivist of compositions. Of the final picture (Arroyo, 2010), the energy, though hidden, is gravitational: water pours out of a dusty mound into a creek hidden by brush. This work, to my mind, is the finest of the twelve pictures in the exhibition. A haunting composition, and a fitting end to an intriguing sequence.

What to make of this narrative? Given the photographer’s penchant for science-fiction, I am reminded of Philip K. Dick and his interest in the unraveling of the ordinary into the otherworldly, like that which lies on the other side of the aforementioned house (“Blind”). Maybe what “Ragle Gumm” sees (or thinks he sees) in Time Out of Joint (1959). Either way, after walking through “Into Thin Air”, I could only walk through it again.

But the artist is also an art critic, and this is significant too. Many of the pictures in this exhibition are reminiscent of the artists he has written on and curated. I mentioned Stephen Waddell in relation to the sixth picture (An Excavation), but that same picture also evokes an artist obsessed with holes and those who dig them: Jeff Wall. Cacti (specifically gardens) feature prominently in the work of Scott McFarland, while the coat in the tree looks like a "Roy Arden". Mike Grill also makes an appearance. But rather than see these works as derivative, what comes to my mind is not homage but a writer out for a walk with his camera, where the thoughts that occur to those who mull over what they write about are sometimes best expressed not in words but in pictures. I think Christopher Brayshaw – and curator Steven Tong – have reminded us of that with this thoughtful and worthwhile exhibition.

2011-11-30T16:24:00.000-08:00

Cliff Barney's review of Kurt von Meier's free ebook A Ball of Twine: Marcel Duchamp's "With Hidden Noise" (1997):

Encouraging Words

Readers encountering A Ball of Twine for the first time may be pardoned for wondering whatever led Kurt von Meier to write some 350,000 words about a single piece of sculpture, and a ready-made sculpture at that, not even a piece of "fine art"; and further, how they can ever be expected to read the damn thing, given the pressures of the onrushing millenium.

As to the first question, it must be admitted, even forthrightly proclaimed, that Prof. von Meier is a man of many words; in mitigation, let it be said that even a cursory glance will reveal that they are quite interesting words, well-chosen and deftly combined.

Further, the words in A Ball of Twine are not all the author's; the pages linked in the Table of Contents at the left are overflowing with generous quotes and meticulous citations. Here you will find great gobs of Joseph Campbell, James Joyce, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound, Helen Caldicott and G Spencer Brown, as well as material from the Tarot, the I Ching, Hopi elders, art historians, politicians, Monty Python, the daily press, the comic pages, and anywhere else that von Meier finds ornaments for the thread of his argument.

That argument itself purports to be an investigation into the identity of the object that Walter Arensberg slipped inside a ball of twine on Easter Sunday, 1916, and that Marcel Duchamp then sealed away by bolting two plaques of brass around the hole.

Duchamp never knew what the object was (or so he said), and the secret died with Arensberg until curator Walter Hopps was granted permission to take a peek, thus reviving it. Now Prof.von Meier claims to have guessed the secret on his own.

Good for him, one might say, but 350,000 words? Surely that is a bit much. However while A Ball of Twine is structured around this process of divination, guessing the object is not the real burden of the book. Rather it is to provide a structure by which art and art history can be shown as not only relevant, but essential, to preserving a globe that is currently being poisoned by manmade pollutants. Readers of this book will eventually come to a realization of what it is that Prof.von Meier thinks is inside the ball of twine. They will also learn a lot about secrecy, about civilization, about number and mathematics, and yes about art history, including specifically about Marcel Duchamp and his extraordinary emergence as an important influence on the 20th Century art world. Most important, they will be shown a new vision of art and human existence.

Not bad for something that starts with a simple ball of twine. This is a rich, informative, thought-provoking book. You don't have to read it all; dip in anywhere (by clicking on the TOC entries), and you will find something of interest.

A Ball of Twine is a publication in progress. The text was written in 1989-91 and prepared for Internet publication in the summer of 1997. In this initial electronic version, the material appears as text only. Illustrated pages and lists of weblinks will be uploaded as they are prepared.

2011-11-29T19:59:00.001-08:00

On Saturday I visited two exhibitions: Roy Arden at Monte Clarke Gallery and Damian Moppett at Bob Rennie and Carey Fouks’s Wing Sang. Both feature mobiles (sort of).

Although best-known as a photo-based artist, Arden’s recent outing, like last year’s voluminous “Against the Day" exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, is comprised of drawings, paintings, sculpture and collage. As he has demonstrated with his “landscape of the economy” photos, and his long-running blog, Arden is a thoughtful composer, a master of paranoiac association, something that takes years to achieve, in any medium.

Aside from his collages, Arden has given us two large painted reproductions of 1950s country music posters -- one black-on-white, the other white-on-black. Why these surfaces are hand-painted and not screen-printed (a la Warhol) is really what’s playing at the Opry tonight. Another question concerns the juxtaposition of these reproductions: white-on-black (like the photo-negative, like Kosuth’s definitions) requires more time and resources than black-on-white. So: same concert, two opposing (yet unequal) performances.

At the centre of Arden’s exhibition is a "mobile" constructed of rusted rebar, wire and old pop cans, a kind of Terminator version of his “landscape of the economy” project. At the bottom of the mobile is a rubber sole that presses gently against a low-rise plinth -- a “touching” work of sculpture that knows exactly what it isn’t. Bravo!

Moppett’s mobile is closer to Calder’s definition, a monumental work of red-painted aluminum that carries within it a series of weigh scales, while on the ground below what looks like a fallen element. I say “looks like” because the element in no way detracts from the mobile above, a delicate balancing act that has justice (and aesthetics) served. What is Moppett saying with this fallen piece, particularly when there is no evidence (apart from its colour and form) that it belongs to the mobile above? Does it lie there in advance of a broken element, or despite it? An apocryphal element, or a gesture in search of an idea?

In the adjoining room, over 150 of the artist’s “autobiographical” drawings that date from the early-1990s to the present. Moppett has always been a skilled draftsman and colourist, comfortable in any style, yet an artist whose content, ranging from redrawn covers of Artforum to caryatid still-lifes, never strays far from the studio in which it is rendered. Downstairs, as you enter, eight large black ink figures, not unlike those found in the pre-Alfred E. Neuman Mad Magazines of the 1950s, float against their white paper fields.

In a 1969 artscanada essay, Kurt von Meier writes how the experiments of the 1960s have given way to questions not about the art but the artist and who s/he is, questions that relate to the “roles and styles rather than the goals of wealth and power or even just ‘making it.’” We know who Roy Arden is. But who is Damian Moppett?

2011-11-28T09:38:00.000-08:00

As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
--Hermann Hesse

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
--Erma Bombeck

2011-11-27T18:51:00.001-08:00

A review of a new biography on Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in today's New York Times Review of Books.

Along with Herman Hesse and Erma Bombeck, Vonnegut was someone I read a lot of in my teenage years, everything up to Breakfast of Champions (1973). After that my reading habits shifted to poetry and what I was assigned by my professors.

While reading the Times review I was reminded of Vonnegut's crisp plain-spoken prose, something his critics took issue with, as if a literary writer must always make more of opening a door and walking through it.

I keep thinking I should go back and reread some of those Vonnegut books that meant so much to me as a teen. I have always liked the "Preface" to Breakfast of Champions and his dedication of the book to Phoebe Hurty, who wrote a "sad and funny advice-to-the-lovelorn column for the Indianapolis Times."

Erma Bombeck began her column-writing career with the Dayton Journal Herald.

Herman Hesse, as far as I know, did not write a newspaper column.

2011-11-26T19:55:00.001-08:00

2011-11-25T19:02:00.001-08:00

2011-11-24T19:56:00.000-08:00

2011-11-23T20:26:00.000-08:00

2011-11-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

Mother Nature at work in her studio:

2011-11-21T19:22:00.000-08:00

In the early-1950s, while living in Petropolis, Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) met Clarice Lispector and became enchanted by her stories, a few of which Bishop translated and sent to the New Yorker, who were "interested."

Bishop also sent letters to her friend Robert Lowell. In a June 1963 letter, she wrote (of Lispector):

"...she's the most non-literary writer I've every known, and 'never cracks a book' as we used to say. She's never read anything that I can discover -- I think she's a 'self-taught' writer, like a primitive painter."

Below is a poem by Bishop:

ARGUMENT

Days that cannot bring you near
or will not,
Distance trying to appear
something more obstinate,
argue argue argue with me
endlessly
neither proving you less wanted nor less dear.

Distance: Remember all that land
beneath the plane;
that coastline
of dim beaches deep in sand
stretching indistinguishably
all the way,
all the way to where my reasons end?

Days: And think
of all those cluttered instruments,
one to a fact,
canceling each other's experience;
how they were
like some hideous calendar
"Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc."

The intimidating sound
of these voices
we must separately find
can and shall be vanquished:
Days and Distance disarrayed again
and gone...

2011-11-20T19:18:00.000-08:00

A small room above 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.

Ah, the mail has come. A cheque, a bill, and what's this -- the book I ordered?

Benjamin Moser's new translation of The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, published by New Directions Press.

"All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born."

2011-11-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

2011-11-17T18:46:00.000-08:00

2011-11-16T21:55:00.000-08:00

Things to do when it rains:

2011-11-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

Evidence of Warhol (Screen Tests), Bill Viola, Yoko Ono (Cut Piece), A.A. Bronson (Evidence of Body Binding)...

2011-11-14T11:46:00.001-08:00

2011-11-13T21:52:00.001-08:00

2011-11-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

Stairs are what happens to the feet when the hand is reaching for the keys.

2011-11-11T19:59:00.000-08:00

2011-11-09T08:19:00.001-08:00

2011-11-07T19:56:00.000-08:00

A cold wet November night, the kind of night I think about on warm dry July nights, sitting on my porch, pecking out words like I am doing now, watching the neighbourhood mums push their prams up the incline that is East 19th, the heat and their effort combining to leave behind the faintest trace of perfume.

Tonight it is not those moms I am thinking of but those who have braved the elements, not to mention their critics, to sleep in tents on the north lawn of the Vancouver Art Gallery in an effort to show people that the world we have made of ourselves is not one we should continue to take at face value.

The second time I visited the Occupation Vancouver site was on a similar, though slightly warmer night like tonight. What I saw amazed me. Not the cinema or the library or the open air study sessions but three figures working quickly and efficiently between tents, carving into the Earth not destruction but a drainage system so that they, and perhaps us one day, might sleep more comfortably.

2011-11-06T22:17:00.000-08:00

This morning's return to Pacific Standard Time was the worst advertised, ever.

2011-11-05T22:12:00.001-07:00

2011-11-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

2011-11-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

2011-11-02T21:25:00.001-07:00

2011-11-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

A small room above 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.

Last night was louder than Hallowe'ens past. Seems a new kind of firework is making the rounds.

M80s, also known as salutes, have been in use since the early twentieth century. They were created by the U.S. military to simulate artillery fire, presumably for training purposes. M80s pack between three to five grams of pyrotechnic flash powder and have been known to take off the finger tips of those who don't know what they're doing.

My biggest concern about fireworks is what they do to pets. I saw evidence of this after breakfast when I tried to coax a cat out from under my car.

2011-10-31T22:25:00.001-07:00

2011-10-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

2011-10-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

2011-10-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

2011-10-26T11:13:00.001-07:00

2011-10-25T15:43:00.000-07:00

On November 5th SFU Gallery (Burnaby) will open Jerry Pethick: Works 1968-2003 from Collections on Hornby Island. The exhibition, whose theme is more or less explained in the title, will be accompanied by an image-rich catalogue, with essays by curator Bill Jeffries, Geoffrey Farmer and myself (see below):

BOTH TOTAL AND OPEN

Distance is not an evil that should be abolished. It is a normal condition of any communication – Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator[1]

Descriptions of Hornby Island often begin with directions on how to get there. That the island is described as a destination, and not a place where people live, has bearing on our perception of it. Although many Hornby Islanders began as tourists, some were born there and never left. Descriptions of Hornby as a tourist destination render its residents invisible.

Jerry, Margaret and Yana Pethick were familiar with Hornby before moving there in 1975, enough to know that the sparsely populated island would allow Jerry room to make his art. Jerry’s practice was the impetus behind this move. What was not evident to those who did not know them was that the studio was disproportionate to the size of their living quarters: Jerry's studio was immense, their Hornby home much smaller.

On the south wall of Jerry’s studio is a map[2]. Those familiar with Jerry’s work will know that this map is comprised of concentric rings, text, and is quartered by an “X”, within which lies the artist’s reckoning of space, time and locus, a grand theory devised by someone who grew up with grand theories concerning everything from political economy (socialism) to science (relativity), aesthetics (modernism) to gender relations (feminism).

But for all its totalizing, for all its Blakean circumscription and personal history, Jerry’s map is a formal pattern that relates to the means by which most of us travel to and from the island, and that is by propeller.

At the beginning of her 1994 Stadtgalerie Saarbrucken catalogue essay on Jerry’s bias arrays[3], Barbara Fischer quotes a passage from an article Jerry wrote 18 years earlier for Vanguard magazine [4]. I am unsure whether it was Fischer’s intention to arrange this passage as poetry, but in doing so she suggests a parallel between the propeller’s function (to lift up like a helicopter or to push forward like a ferry) and the mutability of language through form.

Boats in motion on the still water,
skimming across the sky.[5]

Earlier in the Saarbrucken publication, gallery director Bernd Schulz provides an anecdote that begins with Jerry’s placement of a Spectrafoil propeller shape on his Vancouver Art Gallery catalogue, then relates it to Jerry’s appreciation of Brancusi, Duchamp and Leger’s visit to the 1909 Paris Air Show, where Duchamp was alleged to have said: “Painting is dead. What artist can make anything better than these propellers?” From there, Schulz connects “the image of the rotating propeller…to the concept of transparency that plays such a great role in [Duchamp’s] work,” the propeller a “programmatic sign of a bridgehead between philosophy, science, and art” in Jerry’s. [6]

Like Jerry, I am intrigued by any form that erases itself in the act it is designed to achieve. Returning to Duchamp, it was four years after the Paris Air Show that the French artist gave us one of his first readymades, what many consider to be the first instance of kinetic art: Bicycle Wheel (1913/1951). “I enjoy looking at it,” said Duchamp of the wheel spinning atop its stool. “Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace.”[7] Who among us has not experienced a similar sensation when, as children, we stared at the spinning wheel of an upturned bicycle, resisting the temptation to stick our finger into that which has been rendered invisible?

*

Although many of his artworks contain movement -- activated, as it were, by the circling viewer -- Jerry would not have considered himself a kinetic artist. Indeed, the question of the viewer and their relationship to three-dimensional art was a popular one when Jerry was majoring in sculpture at Chelsea Polytechnic (1957-1960), and later at the Royal College of Art (1961-1964). Another question concerned materials.

An emergent voice in the sculpture conversation was Anthony Caro. A former assistant to Henry Moore, Caro is known for opening up the sculptural object -- eschewing the plinth, employing “found” materials and placing the resultant object in a one-to-one relationship with the viewer. Ideas such as these seem commonplace today, but in the mid-1950s they were considered radical.

Even more radical was a questioning of the medium itself. After a 1967 viewing of Dennis Gabor’s holography, Jerry turned to the inventor and said, “Maybe you’ve made sculpture obsolete!”[8] a statement that implies the insufficiencies of the medium, but also sheds light on what Jerry aspired to as a maker of art. Not unlike Duchamp, when faced with those propellers.

In 1970, Jerry’s fascination with Gabor’s work in “spatial vision” led him and Margaret to San Francisco, where he and physicist Lloyd Cross co-founded the San Francisco School of Holography. From there he continued his research, notably in the development of sand table holographic technology. Modern sculpture, by then, was a contested affair, with Donald Judd arguing for a non-metaphorical anti-sculpture that gave primacy to materials and their spatial arrangement[9], while art historian and critic Michael Fried accused Judd and other “minimalists” (Judd loathed the term) of having abandoned the modern sculptural project for an art experience reliant not on “presentness” or “absorption” or “grace” but “theatricality”[10]. Although Jerry would have condoned Judd’s abandonment of capital “S” Sculpture, he would have disagreed with Fried’s proscriptive stance, having by then transcended the medium in pursuit of broader questions concerning the interface of perception, bio-physics, eastern mysticism and (like Caro) “found” materials, areas neither Judd nor Fried were particularly interested in. Indeed, as Jerry’s practice progressed, more specific inquiries into phenomenology, panorama, Cezanne’s flattened picture plane, Boccioni’s attempts at temporal and spatial synthesis and Lippmann’s integral photography would become evident in his work.

By 1975, Jerry’s holographic research had come to an end -- partly due to endless hours spent in darkened rooms, partly due to inconsistencies in funding. Ironically, it was the collapse of a related project in three-dimensional photography that resulted in Jerry receiving two thousand plastic lenslets from a Michigan-based group with whom he had been working, material with which he constructed the first of his arrays. Jerry describes what he did with these lenslets in his essay “Animals Dream”:

One night, I used one of these lens sheets and placed a piece of black and white film behind it (a crude, light-tight little camera); I then exposed the film through the lens sheet with an electronic flash, developed the negative and replaced it in the camera, registering it as well as I could to its original position. On looking at it through the lens sheet, instead of there being all the little black dots created by the negative film exposed by each small lenslet, those little black dots formed one enormous black dot. This astonished me; it was a first real comprehension of viewing a composite image and of what it might lead to. The exciting realisation lasted until I was able to make my first small array of "Margaret, Yana and the Century Plant" [1972] in the backyard of our house on Sixth Avenue in San Francisco. The large format arrays, such as "Homeship/Faux Terrain" [1990-92] followed with the finding of the right lenses and with the existence of the new and now ubiquitous automatically-run machine prints.[11]

When Jerry arrived on Hornby, the array, whether he knew it then or not, would become the defining work in his oeuvre, a space (and time) machine comprised of high and low technologies, new and “found” forms, serial photography and expressive and conceptual rhetorics through which “ideas that push and pull one into creative commitment” could travel [12]. However, even in its earliest stages, the array (or “bias array,” owing to the particularities of the pre-conditioned viewer) was unlike anything being produced on the island. Which leads one to ask: How were these works, these ideas, received within the local conversation, let alone three ferries rides away in Vancouver?

*

Hornby Art, if one can say such a thing with any authority, begins with an understanding that anyone who defines themself as an artist contributes to the cultural ecology of the island, from those who design their homes to those who produce objects and gestures based on a set of aesthetic decisions, whether intuitive or informed by an ongoing conversation. A broad spectrum, but one with which islanders are in polite agreement.

Within this spectrum is a conversation that came to Hornby via Vancouver, beginning in the late-1960s. Artists and writers such as Tom Burrows, Annette Hurtig, Gordon Payne and Doris and Jack Shadbolt were Hornby home-owners familiar with international modernism’s storyline, its local variants, interdisciplinarity practices and Art as Life expressions. Theirs was a conversation Jerry fell in with, one that provided him an early audience and a connection to the Vancouver scene, where most had residences and held jobs, and where Jerry would soon be exhibiting.

Yet of these conversationalists, none were born and raised on the west coast. Like Jerry, they came west as adults, in search of new opportunities, new surfaces. And they brought with them their distance, ideas formed elsewhere, which they applied to the landscape, awed by its natural forms – the way light animates the oak and arbutus, the Pacific’s silver sheen, the way herring milts tint her waters and where ravens and eagles engage in a burlesque of what lies below. Artist Tom Burrows was born in Southern Ontario and studied in England before coming to Hornby from Vancouver; writer and educator Annette Hurtig came from the Prairies and began her curatorial career as an exhibitor of Jerry’s work; artist Gordon Payne came from the British Columbia Interior; Jack Shadbolt, who succeeded Emily Carr as the region’s leading abstracted landscape stylist, was born in England; while Doris Shadbolt, an art historian and authority on Carr, came from Southern Ontario, a town (Preston) later amalgamated into the town in which Burrow’s was born (Galt). Though it was not often mentioned, the group’s migration to the island was as much a unifying bond as the artistic and intellectual pursuits that brought them together.

Jerry’s arrival on Hornby also marked his return to Canada. Indeed, not only was he returning to the country he was born in but to a region as far removed from his London, Ontario birthplace as London, England was to San Francisco. Something that had not changed, no matter where you where in Canada, was a belief in a monolithic Canadian Art, an at-times over-administered mosaic made up of regional elements, not unlike the federal government’s (now-defunct) multicultural policy.

Despite the west coast’s reputation as a site of experimentation, ideas about west coast art were still being determined in Central Canada, as evidenced by a Ministry of Supply and Services textbook entitled Introduction to the Arts in Canada (1977), whose author, Robert Fulford, has little to say about west coast sculpture apart from passing remarks about Iain Baxter’s use of “plastics” and Robert Murray’s “work at the Vancouver Airport,” a high modernist non-representation by a “first-class artistic talent.”[13] Worse (for its lack of hindsight), a 1983 Canadian Pacific Railway-bankrolled publication called Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada, which includes a rather formless discussion of three-dimensional work, ranging from Iain Baxter’s Bagged Place (1966) to Murray Favro’s Synthetic Lake (1973), where an image (of a lake) is projected onto a motorized bolt of fabric (contrast this with Jerry’s more proprioceptive arrays, where the image is both inside and outside the apparatus)[14]. Like Jerry, Favro has a connection to London, Ontario. Yet while Visions celebrates London’s artists, Jerry, who was born there, goes unmentioned.

So it was within this context that Jerry returned to Canada, a context that, if not necessarily important to him, was real by its consequences. With that in mind, and with participation in a Canadian Art no longer an aspiration for certain west coast artists, nor a legitimate category apart from the imperatives of the National Gallery and the Canada Council, it was the burgeoning relationship between west coast practices and their equivalencies in international urban centres big (New York) and small (Dusseldorf) that would give the Hornby-Vancouver conversation its rigor.

And what was that conversation? First off, any discussion of Vancouver art after the mid-1960s is complicated by an increasingly ambivalent relationship between artist and medium, just as it was for Duchamp after the Paris Air Show (re: painting) and for Jerry after his encounter with Gabor (re: sculpture). Among younger artists, no longer was it accepted that painting and sculpture were the means by which one asserted oneself artistically. Although artists such as Roy Kiyooka, Gary Lee-Nova and Michael Morris continued to paint, they also explored writing, performance, music, film, photography and installation, interrogating those mediums, looking for equivalencies, exploring previously unheard of notions of interdisciplinarity, Art as Life. How could one talk of sculpture after Iain Baxter’s Bagged Place (1966) or musician Al Neil’s flotsam assemblages? Yet as much as the disintegration of capital “S” sculpture opened up possibilities for the reception of Jerry’s work, it also created the conditions by which it would be read through that medium.

In an effort to make a case for a new west coast sculpture, the Vancouver Art Gallery mounted Mise en scene in 1982, a group exhibition that featured Kim Adams, Mowry Baden, Roland Brener (Adams’s teacher), Al McWilliams, Liz Magor and Jerry -- all of whom were considered to be among the region’s leading sculptors, none of whom were working in the high modernist “tradition” of Vancouverites such as David Marshall, nor engaged in anything resembling Baxter’s consumer-wrapped environments or Neil’s bricolage.[15] Nor were they adherents of Judd or Fried. Though it could be said that the works in Mise en scene were receptive to the “kinesthetic demands placed upon the body”[16] -- from the body engaged (Adams, Baden, Brener and McWilliams) to the body represented/implied (Pethick/Magor) -- of greater significance was the vast array of materials that these artists were drawing on, from audio recordings of VAG board meetings found in the museum’s basement (Brener) to silicon (Jerry). A vast array of materials, but no array from Jerry.

It would be eighteen years after his first experiment with lenslets that Vancouver audiences would see one of Jerry’s arrays. Wheelbarrow/Cabin (1987-89), included in the Contemporary Art Gallery’s 1990 group exhibition arbora versa, is comprised of two elements: the first is a profile of a wheelbarrow form made of large glass bottles held in place with silicon and loaded, as it were, into a stack of cord wood; while the second is comprised of a lens field (also held together by silicon), behind which is a photo series of a cabin in a field with trees. Despite its inventive composition and arresting physical presence, the sculptural element acts as an inversion that sets up the ocular reorientation provided by the array. It also relates to other works in the exhibition, especially Rodney Graham’s inverted photographs of trees.

Unlike the Mis en scene exhibition, with its emphasis on sculpture, arbora versa was a thematic show that sought an (inter)relationship between “nature, language and perception”[17], one involving the mediums of painting, photography, printmaking, writing and sculpture. Though curator Bill Jeffries is right to refer to Jerry’s contribution as “photo-sculpture,” the democratic inclusion of mediums, conscious or otherwise, allowed for the perception that Jerry was there as a sculptor. This might seem like a quibble, but if one considers that the local conversation concerning photography was developing at an inverse proportion to sculpture, one might understand how a reading of Wheelbarrow/Cabin in purely sculptural terms might preclude it from being seen in relation to photographic projects such as Graham’s Camera Obscura (1979), a site-specific plywood camera obscura shack installed at a Fraser Valley ranch; or the montage photographic tableaux of Jeff Wall; or, given the distance between Jerry’s lenses and his serial photos, the monochromatic “derive” surfaces of Wallace’s photo-paintings and the “theatrical” voids of Ken Lum’s furniture sculptures. To extend this notion of the void, one might include the last line of March 31 (1966) by Dan Graham, who reminds us that “.00000098 miles to cornea from retinal wall” is where the image that enters our eye is, like Graham’s trees, inverted.

A clue to why Jerry’s work was absent from the photography conversation might be found in what then Vancouver-based visual artist Robin Peck says in a lecture delivered the same year as the arbora versa exhibition. Here, Peck refers to the medium as having a “lower-class status;” that it is “a poor cousin to painting, architecture and photography,” and has “largely exhausted its premise as a reaction against the negative impact of twentieth-century industrialism.” In short, “an art of the tomb.”[18] Also that year, Wall published his “Four Essays on Ken Lum”, where he contrasts artists who “concentrate on the conflict between the city and its natural setting” (himself, Rodney Graham and Lum) with a “hippy ethos” that seeks a “closeness to nature and its concern for organic life” (Burrows, Magor and Jerry)[19] -- a conservative (if not misleading) argument that has less to do with Jerry’s work (coming as it did in advance of Wall’s montages, but also Brian Jungen’s repurposed consumer goods) than the need to reassert mediums whose boundaries had been challenged in the 1960s. With apologies to William Carlos Williams, perhaps too much depended on a glass bottle wheelbarrow.

*

Jerry had been a resident of Hornby Island twenty-eight years when he passed away in 2003. During that time he had designed and realized a number of works, some of which, particularly the larger ones, are in museum collections and installed in public space, while smaller pieces have found their way into private homes, some of them on Hornby. A recent tour of these island works revealed the compositional and material tendencies we have come to associate with Jerry’s practice. Among these works is the magnificent Light, Smoke, Le Chemin de Fer. The Dark, Daguerre (1987), an omnibus wallwork (based on a train station cigarette machine) of enameled steel, “Payne skin”[20], silicon, Sectrafoil, mirror, plastic lenses and aluminum, much of it sourced at the island’s Co-op store, as well as its recycling depot. Other works, such as Easel Shadow (1985), are two-dimensional pieces that take up structure and material composition not as the means by which the art experience is mediated but as the painted subject.

During these visits I heard many stories of Jerry, all of which attest to a man of intelligence, passion, humour and insight, someone who brought – and kept – people together, whether at a community work party, such as the building of Joe King Park (a keep-your-shoes on counterpoint to the more refined Hornby Community Hall), or in installing an exhibition, where, when asked by a French museum director to join him for dinner at the end of the work day, Jerry showed up with the institution’s preparators. Indeed, in hearing stories such as these it occurred to me how the bonds Jerry formed found their material expression in one of the world’s most basic elements, one that Jerry used to unite glass, metal, plastic and wood, a material that worms its way across the south facing window of Jerry, Margaret and Yana’s kitchen, and that is silicone [21].

But as much as Jerry liked to bond, as much as he was interested in the synthesis of ideas and things, he was, like many of us, resistant to that which narrowed the conversation. Although I have read nothing on what Jerry thought of the art and writings of Caro, Judd and Fried, the closest I have come to ascertaining his thoughts on Sixties sculpture is derived from stories concerning his late-night visits to the home of another Hornby-based artist, Jeffrey Rubinoff. Like Jerry, Rubinoff trained in sculpture (with Caro) and is a longtime island resident; unlike Jerry, Rubinoff is a high modernist, the author of a 50 hectare sculpture park featuring 95 of his welded and cast steel works which, in his words, “extend the ancient narrative of art and consequently rekindle the historical spirit of modernism.”[22] That Rubinoff has created a Kane-sized Xanadu is his business[23], but to restrict oneself to a conversation whose time and place has passed makes Rubinoff something of a ghost, as much a spectre of high modernism’s closed system as its “historical spirit,” one that might have haunted Jerry.

Which leads to another metaphor, one that speaks to yet another material Jerry had use for, and that is Vaseline. Unlike silicon, a bonding agent that remains visible in his work, Jerry made a number of drawings with Vaseline on Spectrafoil, which he then treated with lye. While the lye de-silvers (or etches out) the Spectrafoil, the Vaseline resists the lye and can be removed later with the wipe of a cloth. A notable work in this series is Light Dispersal – Vienna Suite (1982), a Bonnard-like bathtub scene, sans figure (a pun on figure-ground?). Had Jerry worked with only one of these materials, either silicon or Vaseline, his compositional skills were such that he would always draw us in, hold our interest, encourage our “creative commitment.” However, that he worked with both, with an awareness of their contrasting qualities, their distance from each other (from silicone’s binding presence to Vaseline’s protective disappearance), allows for the kind of overtone important to any artistic practice, one that remains, like the map in his studio, both total and open.

Michael Turner

FOOTNOTES

1. Jacques Ranciere, “The Emancipated Spectator,” 5th International Summer Academy, Frankfurt, Germany, August 20th, 2004

2. Known as “Marking Time,” this map was created in 1998.

3. Barbara Fischer, “Jerry Pethick: Bias Arrays,” Notion of Nothing, Saarbrucken, Germany: Stadtgalerie, 1994

4. Jerry Pethick, “Bias Arrays: Un process sans cesse,” Vanguard (December 1976/January 1977): 4

5. Fischer, ibid., p. 32

6. Bernd Shulz, “Foreword,” Notion of Nothing, Saarbrucken, Germany: Stadtgalerie, 1994: 5

7. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, 1996

8. Robert Amos http://www.artistsincanada.com/php/article.php?id=352

9. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8, 1965

10. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, 1967: 12-23

11. Jerry Pethick, “Animals Dream,” Collection, Open Space, Victoria, BC, 1999 http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/wavefront/jerrypethick.html

12. Jerry Pethick, ibid.

13. Robert Fulford, An Introduction to the Arts in Canada, Copp Clark Publishing, Toronto, 1977: 84-85

14. Robert Bringhurst, et al., Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver/Toronto, 1983

15. Mis en scene was curated by the entire VAG curatorial staff – Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker, Lorna Farrell-Ward and Scott Watson.

16. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2”, Continuous Project Altered Daily, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993 (originally published in Artforum, October,1966)

17. Bill Jeffries, “Introduction”, arbora versa, CAG, Vancouver 1990: 5

18. Robin Peck, “Sculpture and the Sculptural in Halifax and Vancouver”, Vancouver Anthology, Stan Douglas, ed., Or Gallery/Talon, Vancouver, 1991: 207-223

19. Jeff Wall, “Four Essays on Ken Lum”, Ken Lum, Witte de With/Winnipeg Art Gallery, Rotterdam/Toronto, 1990: 39

20. An invention of Gordon Payne, “Payne skin” is made from the application of layered acrylic paint to polyurethane and backed by black painted cheesecloth. Once set, the “skin” is peeled off its polyurethane surface and re-applied.

21. According to Margaret, Jerry used a manufactured product called Silicone Sealant, which Jerry referred to as “Silicone seal.”

22. Jeffrey Rubinoff, http://www.rubinoffsculpturepark.org/

23. Another of Hornby’s sculpture parks can be found in a forest at Downes Point, behind the home of Gordon and Mary Payne.

2011-10-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Vancouver/Vancouver exhibition has been held over to November 4th. Below is an early draft of my curatorial essay:

VANCOUVER/VANCOUVER: TWO EXHIBITIONS FROM THE COLLECTION OF RICK ERICKSON

“Collecting is an addiction. Once acquired there is no remedy or cure – but still, I love it.”
--anonymous collector, quoted in Vancouver Collects [1]

The above is a complicated statement that conveys, rather naughtily, a passion for art collecting and, rather arrogantly, the privilege of those who can afford such a passion, one without criminal or mortal consequences, in a city where intravenous drug use and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome have claimed untold lives. That a statement so insensitive to the plight of our city’s drug addicted could be included, without challenge, in a publication by our city’s leading art institution speaks less of the ostensible neutrality of language than our willingness to accept in words what we would never accept in pictures. (No wonder the collector wishes to remain anonymous.)

Most of Vancouver’s private art collections are known by the names of their collectors. J. Ron Longstaffe, who initiated the VAG’s Vancouver Collects exhibition (and has a gallery at the VAG named after him), amassed a substantial modern Canadian collection, much of it left to the VAG when he passed in 2003. Longstaffe was an older kind of Vancouver collector, one who believed that public institutions are the best place to share one’s collection, but also one’s time, sitting on her boards and taking an active role in her exhibitions, as he did when he wrote the “Introduction” to the Vancouver Collects publication. Also in that category is former VAG board chair Michael Audain, whose collection of British Columbia art will be the subject of its own VAG exhibition this November.

Vancouver has many more modern and contemporary art collectors today than it did when Longstaffe began collecting in the 1960s. Some, like Longstaffe and Audain, have forged ties with our city’s public institutions (the O’Brian Family and the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology also comes to mind), while others have created spaces of their own, from the art-first home of Laing and Kathleen Brown to the exhibition wing at the residence of Brigitte and Henning Freybe; from Ross Hill and Jane Irwin’s repurposed Fraser Street church to Bob Rennie and Carey Fouks’s multi-level Chinatown palais. And now Vancouver builder Rick Erickson, whose Gallery 1965 on Main Street will open this September.

*

Vancouver/Vancouver is a two-part exhibition comprised of art works from Erickson’s collection. When asked if I would be interested in curating this show (the collection’s first public outing since Erickson began collecting some thirty years ago), I had doubts as to whether I could represent the collection’s range, and whether representation (a troublesome word for artists and curators) was indeed something to aspire to. What I had seen of the collection prior to leafing through its catalogue was on display at Erickson’s former Dunbar Street home. Some of it, like A Chen’s Title Unknown (Cityscape) (1980) floated comfortably above the wainscoting, while other works, such as an untitled Charlie Robert’s “dance” sculpture, looked as though it had kicked aside the love-seat that had stood there before it. But that was the work in the context of an out-sized Edwardian house. Gallery 1965 is a modern space, designed by the collector with the public in mind.

There are over 400 works in Erickson’s art collection, much of it acquired directly by Erickson, some of it on the recommendation of friends and advisors. While these latter works include attractive pieces by Terry Frost, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, Kenneth Noland and Andy Warhol, it was decided that an exhibition featuring the work of Vancouver artists – drawing, painting, photography, sculpture; both figurative and abstract; some of it given as gifts – would be a fitting way to celebrate Erickson’s new space. And because of its range, two shows, divided not by medium or genre but by something that might present itself after the selection process was completed, a process that began with an eye to formal recurrence, but also to serendipities that would allow for further exploration.

One pattern that occurred during my earliest viewings concerned the many works with holes. The hole is not a new subject in Vancouver art (one could, if permitted, mount an entire exhibition on the holes of Jeff Wall). However, in Erickson’s collection, the frequency of holes gives way to that which looks like holes, such as circles, loops and spirals. Thus the drawn and painted holes of Neil Campbell, Charles Rae, Derek Root and Peter Schuyff are met with the circularity of Tim Barber’s The Burner (2002), Khan Lee’s Placemats (2009) and Judy Radul’s photo-montage of her and poet Deanna Ferguson’s nipples. From there, another theme – doubling – which can be found in George Clutesi’s The Whale (1960) and in Rodney Graham’s Grimms Brothers’ studies, and is, of course, related to the exhibition’s title: an allusion to Erickson’s eastside (Vancouver) roots and his westside (Vancouver) homes, but also the ongoing dissolution of a social divide that had, until the mid-1980s, the eastside as ethnic working-class and the westside as Anglo middle-class. Which of course suggests another category, the divide, something that can be seen in the works of Dana Claxton, Terry Ewasiuk, Ken Lum, Esther Shavez-Gerz and Ian Wallace, to name a few.

Additional patterns reveal a tendency towards alphabets, taxonomies and mapping. Paul Wong, who is well-represented in this collection, gives us a serial photograph where flora from the Flower Factory below his Main Street studio is framed by its corresponding letter-shapes (A for Alstroemeria, etc); while Eric Metcalfe, a participant in a local LIP grant supported alphabet project from the early 1970s, has abstracted letter-shapes into sperm. Not unrelated are a selection of germs etched by Marc Rudis, an annotated intestinal tract by Graham Gillmore, an anonymous tattoo flash from the 1950s and a sociological fashion-and-attitude work by Charlie Roberts. Works based on mapping can be found in Antonia Hirsch’s formal re-alignment of political boundaries and Ewan McNeil’s chart boats. These tendencies, along with Erickson’s interest in portraiture, will be featured in the second exhibition, while the first exhibition will focus on holes, circles, loops, spirals, doubling and divides.

*

When speaking of art collections, words like taste, theme and coherence often come to mind. Unlike 17th portrait painting, where the flattened subject appears surrounded by the subject’s equally flattened holdings, an art collection, once installed, takes the form of sculpture, perhaps suggesting those words I mentioned earlier, but also a record of activity, or a map, given the collector’s passage through the places where the work was purchased.

As someone who has visited numerous exhibitions, private collections and auctions, and has written reviews and catalogue essays on the work of local artists, I see not only what is made and displayed in Vancouver but also where, and with whom, the work “ends up.” While much of what is acquired by private collectors comes from commercial galleries, auction houses and artist studios, a significant portion is from fundraising dinners held by public institutions such as the VAG, the Contemporary Art Gallery, Presentation House Gallery, the Western Front and Centre A.

What excites me about Rick Erickson’s collection, besides the work and its various interrelationships, and besides Erickson being one of few local collectors to have grown up with artists (the “Main Streeters”), is that map. Erickson’s collection, more than any Vancouver collection I know of, has achieved the distinction of having turned time into space, returning us to where its works were purchased: to private galleries, auction houses and artist studios, but especially to those fundraising dinners where, in our increasingly privatized world, “the public” is not only celebrated but defended; where anyone who has ever contributed to one of these events – be they an artist, a curator, a director, a board member, all of us patrons in one form or the other – would never be mistaken for anonymous.

1. Vancouver Collects (Vancouver Art Gallery: Vancouver, 2001), p. 116

Michael Turner

2011-10-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

An exhibition of early-1960s David Mayrs oil paintings opened at Trench Gallery last week. Below is my exhibition essay:

THE EARLY-1960s OIL PAINTINGS OF DAVID MAYRS

“…a sort of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack flows out of the hole.” – Malcolm Lowry on Vancouver, 1947 [1]

Advances in temporal reckoning have allowed the early-1960s to enter the realm of “historical drama.” With television programs such as Mad Men and Pan Am comes a conversational interest in the era -- realism for those who lived it, science fiction for those who did not. Central to both programs is an essay on gender relations and sexual expression. Less relevant to Pan Am than Mad Men are issues that face the creative individual. How can I make art when I spend all my time jobbing to pay the rent? How can I paint using representational imagery when the critics are pre-occupied with abstraction?

A studio practice and a salaried position were slightly more manageable in 1961 than they are in 2011, and for a time David Mayrs attempted both, eventually leaving advertising in the late-1960s to teach at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), a job that allowed him to paint in the same clothes he went to work in. Although it would be incorrect to focus solely on occupational and aesthetic tensions in Mayrs’s paintings, one can find traces of each. Where there is representation, there is abstraction; where there is illustration, there is expressive painting; where there is archetype, there is ambiguity; and where there is liberation, there is of course repression.

Mayrs’s Trench Gallery exhibition brings this last tension to the fore with liberation narratives such as La Dildo (196X), The Queens (196X) and St George Ten Minutes After Slaying the Dragon (196X) on the east wall and repressions such as The Bachelor (196X), The Eunuch (196X) and The Old Maid (196X) to the west. Alone on the south wall is the first painting one sees upon entering the gallery, a work that manages to both complicate and explain the logic of the exhibition layout -- Mirror, Mirror (196X).

Like La Dildo, Mirror, Mirror contains within it a hard-edge grey-scale field. While this field floats improbably under the blanket in La Dildo, in Mirror, Mirror it is the wall on which floats a mirror and its reflected subject. That this subject is reminiscent of de Kooning’s “Woman” series speaks to Mayrs’s recognition of a new and emergent female subject, one more complex and ultimately more powerful than her 1950s predecessor; that she is wearing a life-like penis (as opposed to a gender neutral appendage) has her less a lesbian “top” than a woman performing her strap-on agency (whether this performance is an affirmation of her empowerment, or its burlesque, is debatable). However, what is operative is not the female subject but the unlikelihood of the room in which she is painted, where the hard-edge wall upon which her mirror is placed stands in opposition to the abstract expressive wall behind her. Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882) come to mind. So too does the relationship between the paintings on the east and west walls.

And what of that west wall? In the Baconesque Eunuch a chubby figure dressed in blue shorts, a red jacket and a pointed yellow cap (a primary schoolboy in primary colours) stands ramrod. His body, like the air around him, is rendered in lashes, not strokes, over which fall drips similar in colour to his shorts. Although tempted to see these drips as tears, there is nothing in the eunuch’s posture to suggest that he is crying, despite a castration that has forever chained him to his pre-pubescent youth. So the tears are the viewer’s tears, and they are shed for someone who cannot repress that which he does not desire. Thus repression is imposed, not by the artist but by the empathetic viewer. Whether the eunuch’s emasculation resulted from a world that had begun to question male privilege, or is a reflection of the artist’s frustration with a criticism that has figurative painting passé, is also for the viewer to decide. Suffice it to say, Eunuch is less a portrait of someone for whom castration occurred over time (use-it-or-lose-it atrophy) than an advertisement for a condition that has our decisions made for us.

The repression found in The Bachelor and The Old Maid is also imposed, this time by the artist’s titles, which belong more to a “puritan” society than the subjects’ relationship status (unmarried). A fourth painting, Peggy & Pauline (196X), is something of a departure. Although the most abstract of all the west wall paintings, Peggy & Pauline is still a work of expressive figuration, and only after consulting its title does a second (and perhaps third) figure appear. Indeed, upon first looking at this painting I saw not a coupling (two women whose faces meet in profile) but a transformation, where one does not intertwine herself with another but becomes another, a new person, a road out of the repressive cycle that characterized what was until the end of the decade a British Vancouver, one that received its culture, as opposed to generating it. While the title and composition of Peggy & Pauline suggests a particular, if unspoken, relationship between two women, it is on the east wall that we find it consecrated.

In The Queens, a “femme” in a wedding gown and a Stein-like “butch” stand at the altar while a third figure (a witness?) looms behind them. While the wedding of two women would have shocked viewers in the early-1960s, it is the archetypical (stereotypical?) pairing of “femme” and “butch” that viewers today would have trouble with. But the pairing is a wash when compared to the third figure, who is painted in a manner closer to Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) than the cartoon couple, someone many early-1960s women looked up to -- Jacqueline Kennedy. But what is “Jackie” doing at a same-sex wedding, other than to say that a woman marrying another woman is something she would sign her name to? Also worth noting is that it is “Jackie”, not the “butch”, who arrived at the wedding in pants. That the shadow cast by all three resembles a piece from a jigsaw puzzle speaks to their role in what advertisers today refer to as the “bigger picture.”

The best known of Mayrs’s paintings is St. George Ten Minutes After Slaying the Dragon. Like La Dildo, this is a work that, when first shown at Douglas Gallery in 1966, drew the attention of local media, but also the police, who insisted that the gallery place a “restricted” sign in its window. While not as explicit (and ironic) as La Dildo’s “male frontal nudity,” St. George’s offense was that it showed not a sexual act but a sexual act involving an English military saint, something that would have galled British Vancouver, and did. Narrative content aside, what is notable in this painting are the many styles Mayrs employs, not merely illustrated figures foregrounding an expressionistic landscape, but a saint in cartoon profile and an anonymous maiden who, despite her nudity (or because of it), is more realized than her lover.

Art in the early-1960s depended on where one lived. The art of Vancouver was the abstracted landscape painting of Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith, a pragmatic blend of our province’s scenic beauty and a recognition of abstraction as the dominant international style. In the United States, the blend began with artists who had emerged from the commercial field – Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles and Andy Warhol in New York. But where Ruscha and Warhol used photography and screen-printing to make their everyday serial artworks, Mayrs combined multiple drawing and painting styles -- from the expressionism of Beckmann and de Kooning, to the hard-edge fields of Noland and Stella, to the Playboy cartoons of Interlandi and Sneyd. And while all three were familiar with the role of sex in advertising, it was Mayrs who took it the farthest.

Looking back on Mayrs’s paintings I am struck by the courage it took to make and display them. Although a well-managed controversy can do wonders for an art career today, that was not always the case in the early-1960s, where the conflation of high and low culture (the kind Ruscha and Warhol would become famous for) was not looked upon favorably in Vancouver -- to say nothing of the insertion of psycho-sexual imagery. Indeed, it was another twenty years before Vancouverites would cheer the expressionist canvases of Attila Richard Lukacs, a reception that could have only come about with the liberation of those once referred to as “bachelors.”

1. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lipincott Company, 1965), 121.

Michael Turner

2011-10-22T17:22:00.000-07:00

In the pornography that is Moammar Gadhafi’s final minutes we see the Colonel led by militia men as he is kicked, punched and photographed then mounted on the hood of a truck before his body is delivered to a rabid mob. It is a horrific montage, made more so for its jerky cubist assembly. Of the versions I have clicked on, all are derived from at least three still and moving sources.

Gadhafi’s final minutes brought to mind the capture of other recent newsmakers, such as a Saddam Hussein, who we first meet outside his "spider hole” before his clean-shaven court appearances and a final walk to the gallows. As for Osama bin Laden, the closest we get to his demise is watching it on the faces of Barack Obama and his advisers, who in turn watched it via the helmet cam of a U.S. Navy SEAL.

While Hussein and bin Laden were captured by U.S. armed forces, Gadhafi was given the Sebastian Venable treatment, perhaps for no other reason than to advertise to the world that the new Libya is in need of a taming only Big Oil and her host nations can provide. Heaven help anyone with crude in their pockets.

2011-10-21T18:07:00.000-07:00

2011-10-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

"Guys, lets just get one thing straight: this is a simulation. I understand everyone has there own view on things, but this is not the place to argue politics. I just put this up to give you guys a little look at one of the many machines the Air Force uses. And before anyone asks, I'm actually in the army. PFC Stanford, MOS-13D. I'll be going to my first assignment soon."

2011-10-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

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2011-10-18T17:07:00.000-07:00

This just in from e-flux:

Released on October 8, the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal included an editorial note entitled "No list of demands," responding to the perceived absence of strong messaging offered by the movement. The note specified that:

"The exhausted political machines and their PR slicks are already seeking leaders to elevate, messages to claim, talking points to move on. They, more than anyone, will attempt to seize and shape this moment. They are racing to reach the front of the line.   But how can they run out in front of something that is in front of them? They cannot.   For Wall Street and Washington, the demand is not on them to give us something that isn't theirs to give. It's ours. It's on us. We aren't going anywhere. We just got here."

It is a sophisticated defense of a movement deliberately weak in language and growing strong in numbers. While the movement has made declarations, the statement suggests that nothing will be demanded of those who have perpetuated and legitimized a system that has repeatedly worked to consolidate a society's wealth in the hands of 1% of the population. In place of heroic ideology, an ostensible silence evades recuperation and maintains an opening through which collective sentiment can take the time to formulate its own terms without having to acknowledge the current regime as a necessary precedent.

Here it becomes clear that, in place of making demands, the project of the demonstrations will be to gradually reconstitute society itself through its sheer numbers—a claim to both the right and the capacity to project a new world in broad, open-ended terms.

In this issue, Jan Verwoert finds in the work of Stano Filko a means of articulating totality by claiming the world as his medium and mode of address; Jalal Toufic posits the elusiveness of messianic time against the possibility for contemporary events; Antke Engel looks at the chronopolitics of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz's work No Future / No Past; Sotirios Bahtsetzis considers nihilism, repetition, and notions of taste in a depoliticized and fiscalized society; Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall reveal mobilization in architecture as both an economic imperative and a mannerist response to classical ideals, and Joshua Simon concludes his three-part "Neo-Materialism" series by recognizing how the commodity speaks the language of our world.

—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

In this issue:

Jan Verwoert—World as Medium: On the Work of Stano Filko
"So, when it articulates a world, a diagrammatic drawing or simple gesture in principle has the same status as a fully designed room installation. Even the smallest thing can show the big picture. These are conditions of autonomy produced within a material practice: Filko creates the freedom to define the value of any artifact or sign according to his own terms, that is, according to the terms of the world systems that he constructs."

Jalal Toufic—The Contemporary Is Still Forthcoming
"There can be no museum of contemporary art since while now we can have museums but not contemporaneity, with the coming of the messiah we are going to have contemporaneity but no museums—there is going to be no need for a museum in the redeemed world, a world where one finds only what is willed to eternally recur."

Sotirios Bahtsetzis—The Time That Remains, Part One: On Contemporary Nihilism
"The perverted, late capitalist version of such an engagement with art—the disinterested attitude, Kant's definition of aesthetic experience—always demands its pre-validation not by the historical Other (for Kant the ahistorical, subjective-universal judgments posed by the genius), but by contemporary society's proper neosovereign rule: that is, the globalized and institutionalized managers of taste, the individuals nurtured by a depoliticized and fiscalized society. It is through this perversion that the contemporary "homo aestheticus" is born."

Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall—Eupalinos and the Duck: Conceptualism in Recent Architecture
"Today, skyscrapers are designed to be viewed not at 120, but at 500 kilometers per hour from an airplane. Whether or not they sing is of little importance, because they are too distant to be heard. Furthermore, they are less products of an architectural culture of late capitalism than they are the products of a few major capitalist players."

Antke Engel—Queer Temporalities and the Chronopolitics of Transtemporal Drag
"This ethics remains bound to violence—the violence of crime and normalcy—and thus confronts the punk archive with the challenge of facing heteronormativity, postcolonialism, and the impossibility of remembering that these produce."

Joshua Simon—Neo-Materialism, Part Three: The Language of Commodities
"The commodity is the form in which things come to be in this world. Beyond any concept of alienation in relation to labor, we can see that the commodity's material is constituted by our very social relations. This composition gives the commodity a subjectivity that is not particular to any one of us, but is rather one in which we all participate in forming."

Letters to the Editors: Responses to Jon Rich's "The Blood of the Victim" by Jessica Kornheisl and Natasha Llorens

2011-10-17T21:01:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, after a sun-filled brunch at the Waldorf Hotel, I entered the body count that is Occupy Vancouver. Not sure what I was expecting as I made my way west from the library parkade, though the three young men in front of me, one of them in the throes of his own open-to-outcome curiosity, had me reflecting on last April's hockey riot. Everything this guy saw was a source of wonder. "Fuck man, a fire hydrant! Fuckin' fire hydrant, man! Just poking out of the ground like that! Fuck!" He applied a similar sentence structure to a bicycle rack and a stop sign.

No sooner had I arrived at Howe Street when I saw a crowd gathered behind a Scientology banner. Then a parade of animal rights activists. Only after crossing the street did the numbers that have become so familiar to us appear with any frequency -- a sea of ones and ninety-nines. Amidst them, an orderly row of tents; and on the art gallery's north-facing steps, a public address system that had, according to Wayde Compton, momentarily lost power.

After milling through the crowd I sat down on the lip of the gallery's fountain, turned off in honour of the occupation. Overall the crowd seemed happy, many of them, like me, trained to look for someone in charge. Maybe that is what is so particular about an event like this: the lack of such a person.

Over the past couple days I have heard endless (corporate) media reports downplaying the Occupy project, accusing the non-Wall Street version of lacking focus, egged on by financial analysts such as our ex-premier's brother Michael Campbell who have been ridiculing Canadian Occupistas, gleefully reminding us that Canadian financial institutions have been more responsible than their U.S. counterparts, and that occupations like Vancouver's are "unnecessary."

But I disagree. I think there is a focus. Whether or not that focus has been articulated is only a matter of time. What is at stake here is not the ends (what Michael Campbell likes to call the "bottom line") but the means; not what will happen but how it will happen. Seems to me we are living at a time when the issues have less to do with who has the material wealth, and who does not, but the values that have allowed for such disparities. That is what I take to be the focus of the Occupy project. Values -- and who shares them.

2011-10-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

A small room above 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.

While waiting for my tea to steep I removed a button near the collar of my work shirt and sewed it to the spot where the middle one fell off. I am not certain how I lost this middle button, but it was there this morning when I stepped outside to collect some leaves.

Nothing I did while collecting leaves could have dislodged this middle button. Like the leaves, it must have fallen off on its own.

2011-10-15T23:41:00.000-07:00

2011-10-14T21:46:00.001-07:00