Michael Morris (1942-2022)

I am fortunate to have met most of the original Western Front founders. I was close to Kate Craig (1947-2002) in the years before her passing, and some of her plants continue to thrive in my garden. This morning I received news that Michael Morris passed away. He was 80.

This writing will not be an attempt at a remembrance or an obituary but an announcement of a day to be spent with Michael, someone I was happy to know, learn from and work with; someone who devoted his life to art, its concerns and relations.

The picture up top is a relatively small ink and gouache work I found on the Heffel site. The work is dated 1965 (likely done while Michael was at the Slade, UK) and is untitled.

Of the three sections, it is the middle passage that is closer to a style Michael would become known for, particularly his The Problem of Nothing (1966), an acrylic on canvas painting that Ray Johnson saw reproduced (in black-and-white) in Artforum. Johnson collaged the reproduction and sent it to Michael (c/o the VAG?) under the auspices of the New York Correspondence School. Michael replied, and the rest is art history.

The Art of Parking

I could have scooted around this truck as it was about to back into an entrance no more than a foot wider than itself, but no, my physics nerd was alerted and I stopped to watch. A five point turn as it turned out. Once aligned, down the ramp like a sinking ship.

Mother Earth

A pic I took of one of Jin-Me Yoon's videos at the VAG a couple weeks back. As this was my first visit to the exhibition, I swooped through it, gathering impressions first, details (like titles) on another visit.

Much has been made of holes in Jeff Wall's pictures, but with Yoon, the hole and its extracted medium (soil, earth) are given equal weight. Equal because they more or less share the picture's centre. 

We don't see the complete interior of Yoon's hole, only its extracted space. From this extraction (can we call it a mound, or does that sound too much like a pubis?) we infer the size of the hole's interior. 

Suddenly everything is gendered. Or maybe it is formal. The mound is, after all, pyramidal -- a triangle if you consider it two-dimensionally. (A half century ago, the adult pubis was pictured, if not clothed, with a triangulation of pubic hair. Not long after that, North American women began burning their bras; a decade later, they began extracting their pubic hair.)

Another video in the exhibition features people (an extended family?) digging on a beach. Here we don't see the hole or the mound so much as the labour, the relations.

I will see this show again, though from first impressions everything seemed to snap into place.

Death's Bouquet

The passage from garden door to back gate. South-north, north-south. The death shapes were getting to me -- the clump of lady ferns by the rear foot of the bench, the peony along the east fence, the Solomon's seal between the fence and the converted concrete washtubs. I put on my gloves, grabbed my clippers and there it was -- death's bouquet.

12th Avenue

Those familiar with 12th Avenue's east-west bi-section of Vancouver (from Boundary Road to the extraterritoriality of UBC) will have noticed the gauntlet of trees between Kingsway and Fraser, how they have grown so big that some of them are now over the curb and onto the road.

On Friday CoV engineers closed off the stretch between Kingsway and Fraser to remove a fallen tree, not as a result of high winds but because our dry summer and fall had weakened its base, making it even more susceptible to car and truck vibration. 

I happened upon this removal while walking back from the Kingsgate Mall on Friday afternoon. The fallen tree had already been cut up and loaded onto a truck, but the road remained closed because CoV workers were taking down another. I assumed it was a preventative measure, but asked why nonetheless.

"It's full metals. From all the sideswiping. That one's trunk is encrusted with mirror fragments."

What a beautiful image. 

"After a while the trees absorb the metals and get sick."

"Is that what felled the other tree? Sickness?"

"It's all related."

A Winter Hat Made of Letters and the Spaces Between Them

nothing

justifies a fallacy

more than anger

Tangible Ax

"We don’t demand that art change the world, only that it reflect it – or perhaps transcend it. Most of the work in this exhibition is a retort to colonialism and it may sway minds or provoke thoughts, but it is unlikely to result in tangible acts of decolonization. So why make it? These artists, so certain of their themes, seem uncertain of the answer." -- Kate Taylor, Globe & Mail, November 10, 2022

The Sobey Art Award has been with us for how long? Do I need to look it up, or has it been long enough? Let's just say it has -- and yet for the first time the Globe has reviewed its exhibition of the five shortlisted artists with a critical eye. Though I agree with the conclusion ("Finer form may yet blossom from a generation that has content all figured out"), it's how its critic arrived there that has me wanting.

Words like "reflect" (e.g. Realism)  and "transcend" (e.g. Minimalism) are quaint expectations, and their elevation only blurs art's ability to carry its own critique, resist its utility. Mirrors reflect; drugs and religion offer transcendent experiences. Art would have so much more going for it if its artists and critics weren't so beholden to terms set for them by that which they claim to be kicking against, where anything that threatens the status quo is given symbolic power, and only rarely political economic power (and even then in benign doses).

Replacing a museum's stolen treasure with a bag of sand, as one nominated artist, Divya Mehra, did, only maintains the relationship, adding value to that bag. Critiquing the museum is tolerated, if not rewarded by the museum and its public and private funders. As long as artists participate in the museum's powers of validation, they are in its service. Divya Mehra will be given the Sobey Art Award this year for reasons that will not have everything to do with her art and practice. The jury, made up of the curators who selected the artists, will consider their selection a tangible act of decolonization.