Pattern Recognition

The first three sections of the Wednesday November 29th, 2017 print edition of the Globe and Mail all lead off with a hug!

From Ecology to Infrastructure

I was a young anthropology major in the early 1980s when I first heard the term cultural ecology. Later, as a writer interested in the symbolic production of the city (Vancouver), I noticed the Western Front included "cultural ecology" in its mandate: "To promote and encourage the role of the artist in determining the cultural ecology."

In the early 2000s, people began to speak less of an ecology than of economies.

Today, with the Canadian Federal Government budgeting money for "cultural infrastructure," I worry that artist-run centres will become less interested in "the role of the artist in determining the cultural ecology" and more accepting of the neoliberal state in the determination of the artist-run centre -- an artist-run centre reshaped by that state in its own image, to the point where the erasure of the artist-run centre -- its []termination -- can be justified in that most digestible of bureaucratic terms -- redundancy.

Tomorrow, Artspeak celebrates 30 years as a force in what I still refer to as the cultural ecology. For me, Artspeak and its collaborator the Kootenay School of Writing were important to my development as a thinker and a maker. Serving on Artspeak's board in the late-1990s was one of the highlights of my professional career.

Thankfully, Artspeak has retained its self-reflexive (and strategically ambiguous) sense of humour. In celebration of this, it is offering up an anniversary joke book, which can be had tomorrow (December 1st, 7pm) as part of its 30 Years of Laughs fundraiser at the Russian Hall. A membership will get you in, get you entertained and hopefully get you closer to an eccentric institution that always thought twice about joining a club that would have it as a member.

Reunions

When Tom whispered to me in August that Slow (1985-1987) would be performing at the mid-November opening of the new Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, my eyes widened -- "Cool!" -- but I assumed it would be a surprise one-off.

Then there I was, at the Vorizo Cafe on Hornby Island in early November, looking for something non-electronic to read with my borscht, when I saw a copy of the Georgia Straight -- with Slow on the cover. And then last week, Taras Grescoe's email on behalf of the Globe and Mail asking what I remember of the band, but also of Vancouver.

As it turns out, this past month has seen a number of articles on Slow, who have officially reunited. Not only is the band writing songs and preparing a tour, its members are speaking clearly and critically about how Vancouver has -- and hasn't -- changed in the intervening years, that what is bearing bad apples today was but a neoliberal seedling in the early-1980s.

Below is a 1990 unplugged performance by the last reunited band to get my attention, the Cowsills (Barry, John, Paul and Susan), with John "Hal" Mackie on drums.



Here is what the Cowsills looked like lip-synching to the same song 21 years earlier (and yes, I am sure that is partly why the late Billy parted ways with the band to do his own beautiful thing):

Word(s) of the Year

Dictionary.com has chosen complicit as its word of the year.

I had my money on conflation.

The National Gallery of Canada

Like all e-flux subscribers, I receive the usual three e-flux announcements a day, sometimes with an art-agenda announcement riding shotgun, other times with an e-flux Architecture doing the same. As an aspiring reader I have learned to distinguish between the three, and that those labelled e-flux generally announce an exhibition, not stand on the other side of it going, See! See!

So what to make of yesterday's announcement, whose subject line reads: "Geoffrey Farmer's A way out of the mirror, a success at the Venice Biennale 2017"?

Clicking on the message I see that it was issued by the sponsoring institution -- the National Gallery of Canada -- whose immediate measure of "success" is derived from a "Global Art Market Newswire" article. Are there not more thoughtful sources to cite? Why cite a market publication when you can cite a source that places criticism before publicity? I ask because there are many. Why not shine a light on Momus? Or is it too Canadian?

Following the announcement's opening quote comes a recognition of the artist who, we are told, played a "large part" in making "Canada's participation at the 57th Venice Biennale...one of the most successful since its inaugural exhibition in 1952." This "large part" includes the work itself ("laboriously crafted projects of epic proportions," the NGC tells us in the following paragraph), but also the potential humiliation of the artist who has no choice but to suffer an infamously capricious director and a curator whose inability to shepherd the project can be measured in part by an inability to prevent quotes like the following from being issued:

“In A way out of the mirror, Geoffrey Farmer imagined belonging to the nation-state, in terms at once celebratory and mournful; not as a well-bounded or monolithic identity but as fluidity and loss. Transforming the pavilion into an open-air stage for his fountains, he also opened a space for renewal and reflection that literally exploded the intersections of personal and national histories.”

I mean, forget the grammatical train wrecks here (I am guilty of them too) -- it is this very conflation of "personal and national histories" that had the artist called out by indigenous communities for whom "intergenerational trauma" is non-transferable to those whose privilege both created its conditions and protected those same privileged people from its residential schools. And yes, this too is something the curator should have foreseen and dealt with in consultation with the artist. Is there not a way for the NGC to "choose" the artist and the curator together, as opposed to this more recent habit of having the artist choose the curator? Having the artist and curator on equal footing would allow for a more balanced relationship, no?

The announcement ends with the NGC announcing that Canada's 2019 Venice entry will be announced next month. Which means the NGC and its consultants are currently sitting around the table trying to agree on who this artist and curator might be -- and whether or not they say yes. Let's hope that in choosing the artist and curator the artist and curator can find a way to work together that benefits not just the both of them, but also improves the institution that brought them together to so proudly share with us their work.

The Spiralling of Meanings

While scrolling though my phone yesterday I found a picture of the July 2016 issue of the South Asian Post that I took at the Surrey Public Library shortly before the start of my "Poetry of Place" class for the Southbank Writers Program.

"Ethnologists and other experts"

Boas is known. Better known to those over fifty are his students: Margaret Mead especially, for her landmark book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), but also Ruth Benedict, whose nicely written Patterns of Culture (1934) features a memorable chapter on the "Dionysian" Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) and the "Apollonian" Zuni.

Another student of Boas was Paul Radin, whose The Trickster (1956) was for the longest time the go-to book on that topic.

Like many scholars with "popular" impulses, Radin wrote a book for a "general" readership. The Story of the American Indian (1927) includes chapters like "The Capitalists of the North" (on the Kwakiutl) and a final chapter entitled "Can There Be an Indian Renaissance?" in which he suggests that if such a renaissance were to occur, it would require "a common homeland," and that homeland, to his mind, would be Mexico.