Randy and Friends at NAC

Four artists, Christine Cosby, Rob Elliott, Ernest Harris Jr. and Melanie MacDonald, have collected together items that might just possibly have been found in any Canadian home and set out to play games with them.  These consist of two egg cups from East Germany in the shape of hens, a set of fishing lures, an empty plastic squeeze honey bottle in the shape of a bear, an otter statuette stamped with the name Randy, and a rabbit puppet head.

The artists say they feel affectionate towards these objects, so it seems that the games they play with them, on which Rob Nunn commented to me, are such as imaginative children might play with their favourite toys.  The artists’ handout says that “Melanie MacDonald made breakfast, served soft-boiled eggs in the egg cups, then photographed and painted the scene as a monumental landscape  Ernest Harris Jr. has painted formal watercolour studies of each of the objects.  Christine Cosby and Rob Elliott have invented a 40-year history of the rabbit puppet head and have designed a parody of big museum retrospectives, complete with costumes and timeline.  A pair of over-sized textile fishing lures will also hang in the gallery.”

This statement tells us the facts, and we also learn that the artists "set out to surprise and challenge each other," but I think I can add something in my blog about the whole spirit of the thing.  I remarked to Natasha when I went in to see the show that it reminded me of the Theatre of the Absurd, which was a big thing in my youth, and she agreed.

In my late twenties I was in graduate school at Northwestern University surrounded by a very lively group of young French people.  One of the things we got together to do was to record a reading of Eugene Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano."  TO give you an idea of this play, there are two English couples, the Smiths and the Martins, who converse entirely in clichés and platitudes.  These destroy any attempt the audience might make to make sense of their conversation.  They are the incarnation of the absurd, to the point where it would be impossible to treat the play as anything as serious as a parody.  Absurdity is engaged in for its own sake and follows its own laws, as in the case of the Smiths' clock, which strikes any hour it is not (I took the part of the clock).  We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and made no attempt to interpret the play in any serious way.

Critics were of course lurking in the wings, determined to say something that would sound profound.  I have read some critical essays that were written at the time linking Ionesco's absurdity to the existential anguish of Sartre and Camus, who talked about absurdity in a tragic kind of way.  Two other plays by Ionesco can be used to bear this out.  One is "The Lesson," in which an elderly professor is in the habit of raping and murdering his students.  The other is "Rhinoceros," which is a parody of the rise of the Nazi movement.  But it would be quite impossible to interpret "Randy and Friends" in such a serious way.

There is a kind of fake seriousness about it, like a group of girls acting men in a psychodrama and drawing mustaches on themselves with eyebrow pencil.  This fake seriousness is apparent in Melanie MacDonald's breakfast scene, which is presented as monumentally as a Chardin still life, and in the straight-faced series of watercolours depicting the various objects.  This kind of seriousness is of course an integral part of any children's game.  As Michel de Monteigne put it, way back in the sixteenth century, games are children's most serious occupation.  For a moment, when I looked at the account of Rabbit Head's progress as a celebrity, I thought the artists really were making a serious political statement about the former East Germany -- as serious as anything in "Rhinoceros."  But I quickly realised that since East Germany no longer exists as a political entity, this was not to be taken as anything but a lighthearted spoof on the whole notion of political importance and celebrity.

The only serious message these four artists have for us is "Enjoy!"  And it is a serious message because it is something we all too often forget to do, caught up as we are in the things we imagine are serious.

On the outskirts of this show is a window decoration, lit up at night with lights, representing the Columbian rain forest.  We should all of course get serious about the rain forest, and yet the way it is presented does not contradict the show's integral atmosphere of play indulged in for its own sake in a spirit of creative freedom.  It was set up by Gustavo, an artist acting independently of the four.

SMALL FEATS 2015

I was privileged to be allowed into NAC for a preview of its current Small Feats show.  The show will actually take place on Saturday, April 11, 2015, starting at 8 p.m. with a VIP preview at 7:40 p.m.  Over 200 works of original art, each one foot square, will be on sale at $200 each.  These works are all donated by the artists as a fundraiser.  They are traditionally of such excellence and variety that people come from far and wide to purchase them.  I myself was struck by the excellence and variety in this show, for which far more works were submitted than could be accepted.

When I arrived at NAC in the afternoon of Tuesday, April 7, only two thirds of the show had been hung.  Hanging is important to bring out the way pictures complement and contrast with each other, but even so I was impressed.  Beauty and originality one can expect in a NAC show but what really struck me was the variety.  First of all, there is variety in theme, subject matter, and approach.  Secondly, there is variety in media and physical format, even bearing in mind the stipulated dimensions.

What first caught my eye were some geometrical abstracts in acrylic and gouache that were rich in colour but so sparse in shape that they made me think of Muslim sacred non-representational art.  But I had got hold of the wrong religion, because one I liked particularly, by Dylan Bond, was called “Flower of Life-Mandala” and mandalas tend to be Buddhist.

Looking around among other abstracts, I found much thicker, heavier pieces in a variety of media.  Some were actually modelled in relief in one basic colour, owing their depth and variety to the inventiveness of their texture.

I start with the abstracts because surprisingly little of the show is representational.  And what is representational tends to be both detailed and minimal.  My eye was caught by a giclée print, modified with pastel and chalk, of a silvery fish with nothing around it.  Rather than a glimpse of reality including incidental details from the background, it seemed that we were being offered the Idea of a fish as a subject for meditation in an uncluttered, Zen-like way.  This picture, called “Compense,” was by Brian Yungblut.

Some of the more surprising pictures were semi-representational in that they looked like children’s book illustrations.  But they too were largely devoid of irrelevant details in the background.  I was so struck by “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Paul Gosen that I wanted it for myself.  It just shows the Owl and the Pussycat in their beautiful pea-green boat but with no attempt to depict the sea.

I said to Steve, who was showing me round, that there was something about this show that made me think of the Religion of Art as I had tried to define it in my doctoral thesis on Marcel Proust.  Proust wrote a very long novel, which has often been translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past, and in which a not very likeable narrator is shown wandering round a varied social and sexual scene making lots of mistakes.  However he is saved from his rather dreary, unenlightened state, which seems both depressing and comic, by moments of grace in which he leaves mundane time and enters eternity.  These often come to him through the arts, whether church architecture, music, literature, painting, drama, or even cooking, but sometimes seem to come out of nowhere like a gift from God (whose existence is not actually asserted) and give meaning and value to his life.  They even show that he too can be a creative genius, as the writer of the book you are reading.

The artists in this show reminded me of Proust in that they are so obviously focused on beauty, value, and meaning without reference to any kind of creed.  We often hear that with the Death of God, meaning and value have gone out of life, but this does not seem to be the case here.  I said to Steve that I thought that they had a religious attitude to life that I would empathize with as a Quaker.  He replied that they were secular humanists with a sense of the transcendental.  Perhaps we were saying the same thing, since Quakerism doesn’t actually have a creed.

[accelerate] art as game as machine at NAC

Since reviewing Alice in Plunderland, the question of Alice as she relates to contemporary life has been very much on my mind.  I do not think anything drastic has been done to put her forward as a role model where current attitudes are concerned.  To demonstrate this, I would like to take her on a tour of this show at NAC and listen to her comments.

On the wall to the right of the entrance to the back room, you see a series of probing, invasive questions devised by Brian Kent Gotro.  Steve, who was showing me round this exhibit, said they were intended to mirror the way we are constantly invited to give information about ourselves in all kinds of mundane circumstances.  I asked Alice for her comment.  She said that they called to mind several passages in the “Alice” books, starting with the one where the caterpillar smoking a hookah asks her “Who are you?” in a very contemptuous way and is not impressed by her reply.  Other similar passages are the ones where Tweedledum and Tweedledee refuse to believe that she has proved her reality and the Unicorn calls her a fabulous monster.  Already way back then we were being asked to prove ourselves.

The next item we come to is a table made ready for a game at Happiness High, devised by William Robinson, where you are dealing with people with various perceived handicaps, such as being poor, ugly, gay or stupid, and you have to relate to these people in one of three ways.  You can make a friend, bully them or kill yourself.  Alice would have no difficulty with this game.  After her initial faux pas with the Mouse on first entering Wonderland, she makes a real effort to be considerate and polite, and she is even capable of making a friend out of the disconcerting Cheshire Cat.  Other people set out to bully her a lot of the time but she refuses to give in.  It looked as if she was risking killing herself at the beginning by falling down a rabbit hole, but Steve told me it is possible to kill yourself and still win the game.

Next, on two opposite walls are feminist messages from Hannah Epstein, who is interested in showing how women who stand up for themselves get attacked by men in power, condemned as evil and immoral, and put in jail where they are systematically ill treated.  Again that is not all that far from Alice, who is constantly ordered about and insulted, this it quite possible that she might go to prison if her punishments were saved up for long enough, and is threatened with having her head cut off.  Even when she achieves her goal of becoming a Queen, the barrage of bullying and insults reaches a peak where she is forced into an act of violence to defend herself.

Finally on the far wall there is an installation by Andrew Roth that appears to be a campsite lit by artificial moonlight.   After studying Andrew Roth’s statement I think I can understand him too in terms of Alice. What springs to mind is the claim by the Gryphon and Mock Turtle to have learned “the different branches of Arithmetic -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” These quite untruthful distortions of the actual branches of Arithmetic, coupled with the fact that if they went to an English public school these reprehensible activities probably were what they were studying, seems to fit in with what Andrew Roth shows about a mixture of truth and lies in current language. Or one might refer to Humpty Dumpty’s statement “Impenetrability, that’s what I say!”, meaning “there’s a knockdown argument.” I would almost suspect Lewis Carroll of being able to predict the approach of the French Postmodern philosophers when he comes up with this example.

The French (the ordinary French) say that the more things change the more they stay the same, and these four artists are using the most subversive, innovative methods to uphold certain traditional values: self respect, respect for others and respect for the truth.  Right on!