Collage vs Montage

When Elizabeth Zvonar began to exhibit her magazine collages (second image), the artist who came to mind was John Stezaker (first image).

For some observers, such a recognition would lead to a dismissal, a declaration that the artist whose work is reminiscent of another is but an imitator, which is often the case with critics who like to keep the world in line (or its artist from colouring outside them).

But rather than go there, I returned to Stezaker, particularly his Mask series, where the artist imposes one petite genre (landscape) over another (portraiture).

What I found in Stezaker's series was not an instance of collage but of montage.

The difference between collage and montage is that the former is a more spontaneous composition, performed on the spot, whereas the latter is contrived: a compositional idea in advance of its material inventory.

With Stezaker's Masks, the artist begins with portraits -- where the lines are as finite as the faces that bind them -- then seeks out landscapes that can be modelled to meet those lines.

Zvonar, on the other hand, often applies abstractions over her figures, images whose beginnings and ends are mutable, irrelevant to the surface over which they are applied. The effect is not a mask but its opposite: a surface that neither hides what lies behind it, nor likens it to something else, but leaves it open to imagination -- the same way Ian Wallace uses the monochrome, or the early, furniture sculpture-era Ken Lum once used the void.

Gone Fishin'

We are attracted to the art of Rodney Graham because it is both intelligent and funny. Not ha ha funny, but funny in a way that Marcello Mastroianni is funny. Which is to say quietly funny, where the grins begin not with anything the artist does, but his presence in a context that often feels incongruous to who we think his subject is.

The only artists I know who engage in this kind of presentation in a "live" improvisational setting are Paul Kajander and Ron Tran, both of whom are known to sneak off at the height of a house party, only to re-appear like ninjas in the middle of the dance floor, having decorated themselves with their host's clothes, linens, umbrellas, handbags, cardboard boxes -- whatever else they find lying around (or in some cases hidden!).

In the above diptych (which Graham shot in his studio and at the entrance to False Creek), the humour does not reside so much in the artist's presence but in a visual gag that brings to mind the necessity of the void space that another artist, Ian Wallace, has made so much of in his photo-paintings, where figures enter and exit monochromatic voids. These voids are imaginative spaces, dérive spaces. In Graham's Fishing on a Jetty (2000), the void is what happens between two of these frames, not within one.

Two Orcas

Like the avant garde, public art has become a genre. When I see a work of public art, I think less of the work's form, line, colour and materials than the suppositions that allow for its implementation.

For what is public art but a monument to that which two out of three people can agree on? (Sixty-six-point-six percent is but one decimal point removed from the beast.) Heaven help us if a member of the public should find the work ambiguous.

Above are two public artworks based on the orca.

The first, by Douglas Coupland, is a three-dimensional figure made of highly-finished blocks that, once digitally photographed, approximate its pixelated two-dimensional self, a work that should become active in this instance, but only under a limited set of circumstances, such as cloud cover and camera-angle. The second, by Bill Reid, is a bronze cast of a carving whose details are composed largely of ovoid motifs associated with northwest coast aboriginal art.

The first orca is caught leaping, like those once trained by Vancouver Aquarium staff to jump for their herring, while the second is further along in its leap, its dorsal fin erect, and placed outside that same aquarium.

West Edmonton Mall #2 (1988)

In West Edmonton Mall #2 (1988), Vikky Alexander does not so much impose her squares, like Cézanne did in Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-04), but implicates those put there by architects. Were these architects aware of what their large glass panels would reflect, prior to their installation? Probably yes -- but not exactly.

Montag(n)e

Cézanne's Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1902-04). A surface built of coloured blocks, not lines. Multiple perspectives on what we know is there.

Or Sew It(s) Seams

Jeff Wall is a contemporary of Christos Dikeakos. However, whereas Dikeakos has staked out Vancouver's inner-city (False Creek), Wall is more interested in its urban/suburban edge, where violence is not what happens when gangs clash, but when developers see market housing opportunities where ducks once laid eggs.

Writing in Ken Lum's 1990 Witte de With/Winnipeg Art Gallery catalogue, Wall had this to say about Vancouver art and artists:

In Vancouver, a "warm" environmentalism set the tone from about 1970 in the work of Liz Magor, Tom Burrows and Marian Penner Bancroft, and was carried on through the 80s by artists like Joey Morgan and Jerry Pethick. This work expressed what was seen as the specificity and essential quality of the local culture, its closeness to nature and its concern for organic life rather than the hostility to nature and the need to dominate it which drives the resource economy of B.C.

Wall's fascination with the urban/suburban edge, as content, finds its formal equivalent in his own "warm" form of composition: montage. In the March, 2001 issue of Artforum, Wall discusses his cinematographic method (bringing together multiple shots to form a single "unifying" event) in relation to The Flooded Grave (1998-2000), at one point stating: "If you could tell [where the seams are], I would have failed."

False Creek

Artist Christos Dikeakos has been making work in and about False Creek for almost fifty years now. He is something of an expert on the area.

The image above is from a presentation Dikeakos gave for Centre A. Note that the body of water near the bottom right-hand corner of the map is not yet filled in. Prior to 1913, those waters reached the shores of what is now Clark Drive.