Ironworkers of the World, Ignite!

The Ironworker is adept at taking rebar and entering it into geometries of strength and endurance. For her Fringing the Cube exhibition at the VAG a few years back, Dana Claxton included a photography series (NDN Ironworkers, 2018) that shows us who these workers are and how they prepare their bodies for the job.

To emphasize their identities (beyond what titles do), Claxton shot these workers in a photography studio. Or if not in a photography studio, devoid of a worksite that, as a landscape, might reduce their contribution to ants in the service of the master's anthill.

In the late-70s/early-80s Jeff Wall did a "worker" series of low-angle head shots in the Socialist Realist style (in contrast to the "Employee of the Month" style pics often seen in fast-food restaurants?), presented as back-lit cibachrome transparencies (Young Workers, 1978-1983). The low-angle is a heroic angle that places the viewer below the venerable worker (they are hung to support that angle), as if looking up to them, in admiration.  

Claxton's ironworkers come in a variety of positions (moving towards the viewer at eye level, en masse; or alone, their backs turned). They too are lit. Not as back-lit cibachromes, but what Claxton calls an "LED firebox with transmuted light jet duratrans."

Predator Ridge

Founded in 1968, Hockey Canada is the national governing body for hockey in Canada. It's mission statement -- to "lead, develop and promote positive hockey experiences" -- was called into question recently over the organization's history of covering up sexual assault allegations against its teenage male players.

More recently, news has focused on Hockey Canada's private sponsors, a number of which are pulling their support after the organization's leaders have refused calls for their resignation. One of these sponsors goes by the uncomfortable name of Predator Ridge, a golf resort community between Vernon and Kelowna.

When I was commuting between Vernon and Kelowna to attend classes at UBCO I would drive past the resort, which lay along a ridge high above the highway to the west. The Predator Ridge sign was there, but not the resort. Nothing but a vast, sloping ripple of yellowing grasses, like the body of a sleeping animal -- if I were a mouse and it was a lion. 

"Who lives up there?" I asked a hitch-hiking local I'd picked up outside Vernon Jubilee Hospital one morning.

"Oh, mostly white people, hockey players, their ex-wives," he said, looking past me at the lake.

Lives of Saints

Further evidence that Portraiture has surpassed History Painting as the 21st century's leading picture genre: an exhibition devoted to the singularity of a singular genius.

Uncharacteristically, the visual art exhibition is late to the hagiography game. Scholarly anthologies devoted to the research and writing of academics (e.g. Culture in History: Essays in Honour of Paul Radin, 1960) have been around a while now, as have tribute records (I'm Your Fan: the Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1991, re-popularized tribute records and revived the career of its subject); but now, in our ostensibly one-mind-is-not-enough moment, we get the many (sixty artists, in this instance) paying tribute to the one.

The exhibition in question is divided into four sections that correspond to American author Joan Didion's most significant migrations. Sacramento and Berkeley, where she was born and schooled (1934-1956); NYC, where she did her apprenticeship in the then-glamourous world of magazines (1956-1963); California and Hawaii, where she wrote her greatest books: the essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (1964-1988); and the scattershot that followed, which accounted for the bulk of her life and her greatest commercial success: that grief pour known as The Year of Magical Thinking (1988-2021).

Prior to this appropriately (coyly?) titled exhibition: Joan Didion: What She Means, writer/curator Hilton Als gave us "portrait exhibitions" inspired by the lives and works of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, which has me wondering if this is a thing now, and might we see more of them. Three days ago Sacheen Littlefeather passed away, and my first thought was, What a life! More should be made of it.

Who We Are/ For Trying

accept that you are never seen

as you like to be seen

but that you are

 

in the way

acknowledged as something

to be avoided

 

the difference, too, is something

-- a golem, or a pet to keep you

company

 

                            a cat

indifferent to our affections

who comes to us for feedings

 

given to us, our affections

to remind us that we cannot

control them

 

that cats will decide

who we are

for trying

It Is Written

I am learning to write again, this time with pencil and paper. Taking care with each letter, each word, each punctuation mark; the space between them; slower than how my mind usually works. But that’s the point. It has nothing to do what with what I am thinking, and everything to do with this writing.

 

The journey I am taking with this writing and the journey the person I have hired to type it will differ. Same with those who have read it in its published form. Some of us will never come together to talk about our experiences with this writing, and I can live with that. What I cannot live with is if we did come together how the conversation might strive towards consensus. This is not writing but democracy.

 

For some, the previous paragraph has inflected this writing, made it anti-democratic. But it is not anti-democratic, only not democratic. Nor is it a shoe or a Frisbee. It is not many things, and yet the longer I go on, the more likely I am to write about all that it is not, because that is what this writing is -- a way to bring things to mind, project them, have the reader flash on them. In addition to all the things it is not.

 

One of my favourite lines, ever, was said to me by an Artist & Repertoire Vice-President of a major record label. I cannot remember the context but on the topic of bad thoughts and how difficult it is to steer clear of them, he said: "Don't think of a purple pony." And that of course is what I flashed on -- a purple pony. Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter" brings something similar to mind when he writes about Michael Goldberg's painting Sardines, and his own suite of poems, "Oranges".

 

Since starting this writing my pencil is no longer the fine point it once was. You can see evidence of this in the way the writing has changed, the increasing thickness of the letters and the punctuation marks. I want to say you can see this but of course you cannot, because we are no longer in the medium with which this writing began.

 

Does this matter? Do you feel you are losing something by not having this writing as I first wrote it? Imagine then that I am in the lobby of a grand hotel built in the early-1900s, and kept that way. This was a time when someone writing in a notebook with a pencil

September 9, 2015

Readings

An encouraging view outside my glass door this morning: the grass super-dewy, the seasonally low sun more bronze than gold. Hardly a "third-place" day, as this is extraordinary weather we're having.

I was at a reading at the People's Co-op Bookstore last night, the launch of SOME 5, with readings by four of its five contributors (Elee was ailing). Following that, a couple of very refreshing pints at the Portuguese Club across the street, after which I walked home past huge crowds tucked into restaurants and curb-side extensions that look so awkward during the day but like narrowboats at night. Bikinis! There were young women flitting about in bikinis, and young shirtless men screaming as if on fire. Kits pays a visit to Commercial Drive.

Frightening that today's high is projected to be 26C. Frightening because it is coming at such a cost.

On My Way to Being Early

Prior to killing time at the VAG I walked south from the Granville Street Skytrain Station (the original one -- I can never remember the Line names) to see what's changed and what hasn't. The answer? Not much, and a lot.

The only difference between Granville Street from West Georgia to Drake, and Hastings Street from Cambie to Dunlevy is people, which the latter has and the former doesn't. Access to social services accounts for part of that presence, just as City Council policing directives (tax-base protection) accounts for the absence. You can see why Yaletown residents were so worried about a proposed Overdose Prevention Site, despite the fact that the opiate crisis is everywhere, not just in the downtown eastside. 

Walking back along Howe Street I saw a sign that read B.C. ALLIANCE FOR THE ARTS, a non-profit that was once on Davie Street, but in a more modest, less corporate form. At the northwest end of its diagonally recessed storefront, a glass-protected closet featuring thirteen wall works, with the intriguing exhibition title "Outsiders and Others" below. And below that, in fine print, an orienting definition: "OUTSIDER | NAIVE | SELF-TAUGHT | INTUITIVE | FOLK | PRIMITIVE". 

I was under the impression that the "Outsider" was the "Other" (indeed, it's mentioned a second time in the definition below). If the sign is suggesting there are other Others, should't it read as such -- Outsiders and Other Others? Or rather than get all Rumsfeldian about it, why not risk the dreaded negative conception and call it (a la Roland Barthes?) No Insiders. Either way, the centre-ing of the Outsider is of interest to me, as it speaks to our age old mistrust of anything that is found inside a museum that could be done by one's child, and called Art.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, I visited the VAG's Uninvited show and, amongst some strong or charming paintings, noticed that the curator, Sarah Milroy, didn't use any of the Main Floor's corner spaces for any of her selections, and that the only occupation of a corner space was the lower case "young activist reading room" which, the more I stared at it, the more I thought of Godard's La Chinoise (1967), expecting Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Paul Léaud to plop down on it's ottoman for Omar Diop's seminar.

I'll conclude with a picture I took on my way to the Broadway and Commercial Skytrain Station, where I boarded the train for Granville. The picture was taken from the alley behind East 10th Avenue, one shovel swing away from the complete demolition of the house that once stood there. What struck me in this moment was the glass design of the house's front door, a gorgeous example of the moderne era, which is all but gone in Vancouver. Why someone chose not to salvage this door speaks to the speed with which things change in this city and our inability to keep up with those changes. A shame to see a work like this as rubble.