//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I Am Woman (1972)

It would be difficult to overstate how important this song was when it came out in the spring of 1972. By Xmas of that year it had topped the Billboard charts, and could be heard blaring from every third house in my neighbourhood the night Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in what was known as "The Battle of the Sexes".

Nadja (1928)

The opening lines of André Breton's Nadja (1928):

"Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt." I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am."

Click here for a reading of this book by Karin Cope.

The Brand Academy

In yesterday's post I hyperlinked to a Georgia Straight article on Bob Rennie's lecture to Killarney High School students, where he said, among other things: "Everyone in this room is a brand...[a]ll that you have is your name."

For $2,500 the cultural brokerage house of Cause + Affect will admit you into their Brand Academy, where you will receive four in-office group sessions of three hours in duration and a private session with C+A "tastemakers" Jane & Steven Cox, who "will give you the ability to define not just 'what you do', but 'who you are.'"

A more direct route can be found here, and here.

Selling Emptiness

Klein's Zone works continue to be played out long after the artist's death, albeit grotesquely. A local variation is provided by real estate agent Bob Rennie, who sells emptiness in the form of condominium apartments, along with a lifestyle that parallels that emptiness.

Rennie's version also differs from Klein's in that instead of gold he accepts money, which he collects for the developers who hire him to do their selling. In return, the developers throw a percentage of that money at him.

Like Klein, Rennie is aware of the imbalance that comes from selling emptiness. In an effort to correct that, he buys art, displays it in his home/office and throws parties to demonstrate his own sense of balance.

But Rennie has proven himself unbalanced of late, so whatever balance he is offering should be considered in that light. For those in the visual arts (artists, curators, directors, critics, collectors and audiences), Rennie has sought respect through acquisition, patronage and dealmaking, the effect of which has artists and institutions reluctant to criticize him, or to be seen supporting people and projects that he has spoken out against, like the Vancouver Art Gallery's current director and her efforts to better share with the public the gallery's massive collection.

The original mandate of the Western Front, one our city's oldest artist-run centres, is "to promote and encourage the role of the artist in determining the cultural ecology." Rennie has done the opposite: he has indentured artists by de-accessioning the work of those whom he perceives to be against him, as well as making those who would benefit from his patronage frightened to say anything that might limit their prospects. The same applies to institutions to whom he gives money.

And now Rennie is initiating a city-wide exhibition of one of our best-known, most-respected senior artists, an exhibition that will involve some of our finest public institutions, led by Rennie's private gallery.

Is this something that will benefit our cultural ecology, or will it represent a more literal expression of Rennie's administration of it? If this exhibition should come to pass, it has the potential to mark yet another turning point in our city, where artists and the institutions that serve them are less an autonomous presence than co-opted agents of emptiness, motivated not by curiosity but by its opposite: fear.

Monogold

Yves Klein is known for his exploration of painting, performance and space. Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatériale (Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Impossibility) is a work Klein created in 1959 that had the artist offering empty spaces in the city (Paris) in exchange for gold. Proof of the exchange came in the form of a certificate derived from the eight chequebooks Klein had made for the occasion. If the purchaser agreed to set fire to the certificate, Klein would throw half the gold into the Seine (in an effort to "restore" the imbalance created by selling emptiness). With the other half, he made his monogolds.

Ondre and Rae

Nicole Ondre's decision to title the source of her monoprint and the monoprint itself as a single work suggests how she might like us to experience Cadmium Yellow Window, particularly as we find our bodies in-between these two related gestures.

For me, being in the midst of a work is what Michael Taussig attempted last week during his self-consciously performative lecture at SFU's Goldcorp Centre for the Arts -- a talk that tried a little too hard to merge the lyrical composition of a Walter Benjamin essay with the proprioceptive poetry of Charles Olson.

However, where Taussig's lecture eventually succumbed to its form, Nicole's activation of the physical space between source and print contributed to our appreciation of the larger exhibition, allowing After Finitude its overtone.

Back in 1997, Vancouver artist Charles Rae began a series of similarly constructed works entitled Institutions, where he painted what might be called a Benjaminian arcade on one side of the canvas, only to fold the canvas over and complete its picture in the form of a print. A crude attempt at mechanical reproduction, but a reproduction (and an "original" work of art) all the same.

The image above is a painting (oil on vinyl, diptych 43" x 81") entitled Harmonic Reverie (2000). I am not certain but I believe this work was made using the same process as the Institutions series.