Suppose a Sentence (2020)

This brand new book by Brian Dillon is a thoughtful confection devoted to the pleasures of the sentence. Each of the book's 28 short essays begins with one, from Shakespeare to Anne Boyer. 

Shakespeare's sentence comes from the deathly Hamlet -- "O, o, o, o."   -- as in, "-- the rest is silence. O, o, o, o." Dillon does not mention T.S. Eliot's use of the unpunctuated, all caps string of Os in Line 128 of "The Waste Land" -- "O O O O that Shakespearean rag --/ It's so elegant/ So intelligent" -- but that's to be expected -- even Eliot questioned the staying power of his best known poem.

For my part I played off Eliot's "O O O O" in the second poem of my hole-y O poem sequence from my book 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven (2018). "POtiOn" opens like this:

O O O O that Peruvian rag

the alpaca O O O who stOOd

fOr it O O beside O O the fire

(The attempt here was to do what poets Judith Copithorne and Steve McCaffery regretted of their early works, and that is mix concretist and expressive rhetorics -- the O an uncorked opening of the genie-releasing "Vial" in the previous poem, the first in my untitled sequence.)

Suppose a Sentence draws on a range of styles. Writers from all walks, including visual artists Robert Smithson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (the cover is a montage by John Stezaker). Like the world's population, this book is comprised of slightly more women than men.

No mas(ks)

Why is my head so full of lies

Why is my head so full of lies

Because I’m free, leave me be

-- from “Birthday” (2003), Lucie Idbout

Freedom. As in, unburdened, free to do as we please. Or worse, labouring under its illusions, the kind that only ideology can provide.

Are we free to shirk our responsibilities? Freedom implies we are. Are we free of the consequences? Yes. Because we are free.

America. "Land of the free and the home of the brave." The last line of "The Star Spangled Banner" (1814), one of the few, if only, national anthems that has "bombs" in it -- "bombs bursting in air."

"The Star-Spangled Banner" was written by a lawyer, Francis Scott Key, while watching the British Navy bomb Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. I am not sure where Lucie Idbout was when she wrote the lyrics to "Birthday", but I assume she had seen enough of freedom to know something of its contradictions.

When Jimi Hendrix was invited to Woodstock in August 1969, he said he would appear -- but on one condition: that he could close the festival. Which he did, with an instrumental version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- wordless but for those "bombs" he brought to life with his guitar.

"I want you to ask her stuff that will make her angry so she can tell you real things."

Yesterday I mentioned hearing Lucie Idlout's "Birthday" on CBC's Unreserved. After the post I went looking for more on Idlout and found Alan Zweig's documentary There is a House Here (2017). Idlout and Zweig met on the phone five years prior to the making of the film and kept up a correspondence. Eventually Idlout invited Zweig to visit her in Iqaluit, Nunavit, which she had described to Zweig as "a fucking Third World." There is a House Here is the story of these visits, but of course it is more than that.

I have not read the reviews of There is a House Here, nor do I have any idea how the documentary was received in Nunavut and beyond. I am sure there are those who refuse the film because it was made by a non-Inuk filmmaker, just as there are those who assess it less on its attempt to depict or represent the Inuit and their relationship to the Government of Canada than as a lesson in the documentary form. Idlout is with Zweig throughout the making of this film, taking him and his crew to visit those who Idlout thinks Zweig should be speaking with.

For me the most compelling part of the film comes at 103:00, when Idlout takes Zweig to visit Marie, a woman of Idlout's mother's generation who "always takes good care of me ... we go out hunting together, we go out fishing together ... she's a spitfire and that's why I wanted you to speak to her, because she's real." But when the conversation doesn't go as Idlout wants it to, she intervenes, and in her frustration we see something of Idlout's gyres.

Soundings: an Exhibition in Five Parts

 

Visited Soundings: an Exhibition in Five Parts at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery yesterday. Curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson, the exhibition seeks to "move beyond the mere acknowledgement of land and territory ... [by] ... offering instructions for sensing and listening to Indigenous  histories that trouble the colonial imagery." Participating artists include Tania Willard, Maggie Groat, Greg Staats, Raven Chacon and Cristóbal Martínez (see image above).

The tone of these instructions, both visually and sonically, is generally low-key, almost solemn, consisting of traditional "soundings", be they Indigenous, classical or electro-acoustic. I wish there were more interruptive elements, like what I heard on CBC's Unreserved while driving back from the gallery -- Iqaluit musician Lucie Idlout's gorgeously Hendrixian "Birthday". Too much of this exhibition felt like a sunny Sunday at the Anglican Church of Canada.

Samuel Beckett's Translation of a Poem by Paul Éluard (1895-1952)

Second Nature

In honour of the dumb the blind the deaf

Shoulderings of the great black stone

The things of time passing simply away

But then for the others knowing things by their names

The sear of every metamorphosis

The unbroken chain of dawns in the brain

The implacable cries of shattering words

Furrowing the mouth furrowing the eyes

Where furious colours dispel the mists of vigil

Set up love against life that the dead dream of

The low-living share the others are slaves

Of love as some are slaves of freedom.

Duane Linklater: primaryuse at Catriona Jeffries, October 24 - November 24, 2020

The show is readable, and could have done with more room (it is almost a tradition for the gallery’s artists to test the spatial abundance/limits of the gallery). Which is not to say the show felt cramped, that moving through it had me watching my footing (that, too, is a desirable effect when need be). Any more room and that "third" tipi would have to be erected (too).

The lack of room suggested by the unassembled "third" tipi tells me the artist, like his peeps, needs more land -- as in all of it, as in returned, and that an art gallery is only a symbolic ground, not a literal one -- so a political space (or forum). The "crests" gathered on the "third" tipi's whitewashed Woodland poplar poles demonstrates an awareness of Eurowestern art history (Goya, Ackerman, Marker?), popular culture (Warhol's Edie) and their domestication (exotic house plants).

The passage of red paint and, like forest surveyor tape, pink paint is noted. The arrowheads lie like spent cursors -- the desk-led effort it took to distribute those reds and pinks -- the large spray-painted rectangle supplied under the artist's direction by a non-painting Haida artist and a Musqueam Salish cultural anthropologist(?). The wall-bound canvas tipi wraps are partially unbuttoned because they are ready, in motion, not because they look better that way.

The three-monitor installation primaryuse (2020) was for me the formal highlight, though it is hard to believe the figure walking stiffly through those unclothed tipis is a dancer. Unless that's the point -- that she was performing under duress. Curtis'ed, as it were. A salvage anthropology of the aequalis corporis. But by formal I mean the application of red paint onto the monitor screens, which reminded me of another gallery artist, Ian Wallace, his photo-paintings, the pairing of the pictured body with the painted monochrome. Wallace has urged us to think of the monochrome in his photo-paintings as a flaneurial derive space: where the subject has come from and, once pictured (seen), where they go from there. But no, I was told, the red paint is there to cover the non-pictured black space (made available through the transfer of 8mm film?). To what end, I don't know.

 

These are pretty much my notes, a record of my visit, taken at an opening only because there were people there that I didn't want to talk to. (The best defense a critic has in these situations is to be working.) Happy to report that the show remains inside me, capable of generating more -- and hopefully more thoughtful -- writing.

Moving Statements

 

Friday's Vancouver Sun (online) featured an interview with the Vancouver Art Gallery's new CEO and director Anthony Kiendl. As usual, the focus is on a new building, with a review of what is now a 12-year effort to break ground at the designated site (Larwill Park) and of Kiendl's past work as a fundraiser/builder at Winnipeg's Plug In and Regina's MacKenzie.

There's lots to read between the lines in this interview, but something that stood out was Kiendl's use of language. On the topic of the new VAG, Kiendl is now using the promise of a green building to woo a $100 million in funding from a climate-sensitive federal government, yet in describing the partnership he formed with the University of Winnipeg towards a purpose-built Plug In, he drops a fossil-fuel metaphor: "That's what gave us the gasoline and critical mass to make that project happen."