Myfanwy MacLeod

Some scary Hallowe'en shit from artist Myfanwy MacLeod, whose most recent exhibition, The Private Life of the Rabbit, opened last night at Or Gallery.

For next to no information on the artist, the practice or the exhibition (apart from it being yet another in the Or's seemingly endless collaborations with an institutionally-affiliated curator from Montreal, under the banner of an equally endless thematic), click here.

Jerry Pethick at the VAG

Dear W,

Just returned from Jerry Pethick's unfortunately titled Shooting the Sun/Splitting the Pie. As much as I would like to say how nice it was to see so much of Jerry’s work at once (some of which I am unfamiliar with), it felt at times like I was walking through a warehouse. The exhibition generates no overtone and comes off as less than the sum of its parts.

This could have been remedied through subtraction, or by mounting the exhibition on the floor below it where the bias arrays would have benefited from that floor’s two large rooms. Instead, Wheelbarrow/Cabin (1989) is compromised by an unnecessarily adjacent wall work. What is more, Geoffrey Farmer's (reprinted) text appears in the catalogue without mention of the 2011 SFU Burnaby exhibition that commissioned it -- yet another instance of the VAG forgetting that the city’s cultural ecology continues outside its admittedly too small walls.

Something I have learned from this exhibition: Jerry's arrays are so grand that they need to be displayed in large(r) spaces and in relation to the work(s) of others, not with more of what Jerry does so well. We saw shades of this with the Jerry/Christina Mackie exhibition; less so with the Jerry/Liz Magor/Ron Tran exhibition that followed it (both at Catriona’s). Will we ever see Jerry's arrays in relation to, say, Brian Jungen’s Void (2002), or Jerry's Intersections (1971) with Ian Wallace's photo-paintings of intersections? Hope so. In the meantime, I remain bummed by this cramped and static show.

Nude Descending a Staircase

There are more than a few "naked selves" to be found in Duchamp's too-Futurist-for-the Cubists Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). For the prudes, what better way to obscure nudity than to paint it in motion? For those interested in X. J. Kennedy's ekphrastic treatment, click here.

"My quietness has a number of naked selves…"

Before New York had Kathy Acker (1947-1990), it had Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), a poet who worked at the MOMA and, though he lacked Acker's audacity, actually knew something about art and its history.

From the opening two stanzas of his 1956 long poem "In Memory of My Feelings":

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

My quietness has a number of naked selves,
so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves
from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons
and have murder in their heart!

"…memory's vision…"

In her 1990 essay "Critical Languages" Kathy Acker writes of her hunger for New York's art community ("or rather for my memory's vision of New York's art community"), and how in returning there ("I ran from gallery to gallery") she recalls the "artists from whom [she] had learned so much" (Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer) and the inevitable let-down that comes with "memory's vision" ("I now saw that these works equaled money").

I bring up Acker's essay because people are reading it again, and the quote that rises most often from its dormant ocean floor is this:

"Let one of art criticism's languages be silence so that we can hear the sounds of the body: winds and voices from far-off shores, the sounds of the unknown."

It's a nice quote (or rather it sounds nice). But does it say anything more than I am an art critic, and I have not written any art criticism lately?

Sounds of Silence (1965)

There are two commercially released versions of Simon and Garfunkel's first hit single. The first, "The Sounds of Silence", was released on the duo's first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM (1964); the second, "The Sound of Silence", appeared as the lead track on the duo's second album, Sounds of Silence (1965), with electric guitars, bass and drums added -- without the duo's knowledge. This is the same (hit) version of the song that opens Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967), an opening Quentin Tarantino borrowed for the opening of Jackie Brown (1997).

"…unknown lyrical haze…"

I continue to thumb through the second-hand copy of Clayton Eshelman's Caterpillar Anthology (1971) I picked up at the People's Co-op Bookstore earlier this year.

Last night I came upon Richard Grossinger's review of The Graduate (1967), which opened so gently I couldn't put it down:

When Simon and Garfunkel first sang "Sounds of Silence" and cars in urban night and along dark country roads heard it on their way to other places, and the song was number one, and nothing had happened but everything was about to happen…

It was their destination; it was an unknown lyrical haze into which they were moving,  regardless of where they were or thought they were or were going, regardless of where they parked and continued on foot...

This morning I Googled "Richard Grossinger" and read about someone who sounded like I thought I might sound once to someone looking back on me after all these years. (I too studied anthropology at university, but I am not the father of Miranda July.)