POSTCRIPT NUMBER ONE

     I have decided to include a few musings of my own by way of a postscript to my reviews of shows at NAC.  My tenant Andrew, who has been posting my Blog for me recently, suggested I do this.  He is quite a movie fan and has been getting DVDs from the library for the two of us to watch.  It is so long since I have been to the movies that they are quite new to me.  The latest one we watched was "Fame" ( the original 1980 movie starring Irene Cara amongst others ) and Andrew asked me to review it.

    I took a lively interest in it because one of my Southern nieces attended Julliard School of Music and when last heard from was playing in the Houston Symphony Orchestra.  She had plenty of encouragement from her father, the musically gifted pediatrician Bill Bucknall, who made her her first viola.  In a similar way, my librarian nephew, Tim Bucknall, is getting  his daughter Carolyn trained for an artistic career.  He has all the more reason to do this as she is dyslexic and has no skill in handling words.  But his primary motive is to follow the trail blazed by his father, Malcolm, who opposed an adamant resistance to our father's attempts to divert him from art and shunt him off into what that man thought was a more lucrative career.  Although his father called him a fool, Malcolm had done very well for himself and even has fans in Australia.  So I was interested to see what all these lively young people in New York were doing with their talents.

    The first thing that struck me about this movie was the title "Fame."  I immediately thought of what the poet John Milton had to say on this subject. 
"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
( That last infirmity of noble mind )
To scorn delights and live laborious days."
All these young actors, dancers and musicians may not have scorned delights because they certainly enjoyed what they were doing to the extent of its containing the whole meaning of life for them, but they did lead most laborious days and scorned any attempt to divert them from it.  Milton speaks of the desire for fame, from a Christian point of view, as "an infirmity," a weakness, but as an English critic has remarked, although the poet Gray talked of a "mute inglorious Milton" lying in a country churchyard Milton himself would never had tolerated a life that was mute and inglorious.  Otherwise, why would he have described his poetic talent as "that one talent which is death to hide?"  Like all creative geniuses he opted for fame, although his Christian conscience told him to prefer humility.

     But part of the truth to reality of this movie is that only some, no matter what their talent, actually end up getting fame.  They risk everything to end up waiting tables, perhaps,  The movie is fiction, but as Jean Cocteau put it, this fiction is a lie that tells the truth.  This is what makes this movie supremely worth watching, unlike the remake.

PASSAGE AND RECALL BY KRYS KACZAN

                                      PASSAGE AND RECALL BY KRYS KACZAN


Restored to memory,
As the dawn breaks upon my sight,
I recover meaning
From the shadows of the night.
Memory, open the door
To so much and so more,
Hold the door open,
Now that I have awoken;
Not that I slept much at all.
I have lain awake
More than half the night,
Wondering how we gather meaning
From all the vestiges of seeming,
So we read our life like a book.
Again and again we look
For the meaning of a smile,
A tear, a laugh, a cry.
And memory, careful memory, supplies the answer why.
Open Sesame,
You have to say,
But it is no use forgetting
The word to unlock the hoard.
As the pen is mightier than the sword
Because it is able to record,
So the paint brush can do this as well.
The memory is one of sight,
Born fresh and new upon the light.
Krys, a Niagara artist, has been able to recall
Across the passage of the years,
That time when she was a child
And when she first smiled
To see the apple blossom break
Into snowy clusters to burst forth and shake
Along the gnarled and twisted boughs
Of the many orchards on her family farm.
Away and away the trees rolled
In green clumps and ridges,
Quite green again, once the blossoms fell,
After having burst forth in such an orgy of white.
She remembers it so well
That she has been able
To tell it like a fable
Of Creation on its first days,
When God turned His gaze
On the world He had just made
And saw that it was good.
That is its meaning
Contained in shape and seeming,
In every shade and hue,
Old, preserved in the mind,
And eternally fresh and kind.

FOUR RESCENT GRADUATES - FOUR MEDIUMS

     Modern art really began when Diaghilev brought the Russian Ballet to Paris in 1909.  His message
to the musicians, choreographers and dancers who worked for him was "Amaze me !"  They rose to the challenge in ways that astounded, mesmerized, disgusted, fascinated or shocked their audiences at the time, and creative types have been trying to produce the same effects ever since.  The artists in this show, judging by the elaborately impressive way they describe their own works are no exception.

     My brother, the painter Malcolm Bucknall, once told me that when he was reviewing another artist's work, what he tried to do was not so much to express a final objective judgment as to evaluate the work in terms of the artist's intentions.  He said this seemed to work and he advised me to do the same.  So, taking a stab at the idea that these four artists, like so many others since 1909, want to amaze us, I ask myself, "How did they go about it?"

     The work that struck me immediately as most amazing, so that I wondered when I first saw it if it was a work of art at all and not a curtain hung to signal the absence of a work of art which would appear later on, was the first of two works labeled "Ornate Fiction" by Alexandra Muresan.  Looking more closely at it, I perceived that what looked like a drape carried a picture in ink that was quite detailed but not a depiction of reality.  It also afforded glimpses of drawing on a panel underneath.  Both works labeled "Ornate Fiction" reminded me of successful works of speculative fiction in the way they combined the representational with the inventive and imaginary.  The title suggests that this was what was intended. 

     "Play Food" by Katie Mazi was what my eye fell on next.  Digital photographs of breakfast or snack foods which, as the artist explains, might appear in an advertisement, are, she appears to say, intended to disconcert rather than tempt us to consume, unsettling our notions of reality and what we can generally expect.  The fried egg that just sits there, enjoying its state of being, is a striking example of this. 

     The bunches of patterned textiles hanging from hooks and labeled "Untitled" by Jennifer Judson are also disconcerting.  We look at them and wonder if they are intended to be pot holders, cleaning rags, dish towels and so forth but they refuse to be identified as any of these things.  I was tempted to take them off their hooks and see what they could be used for, but because of the respect we have been trained to show for a work of art, I didn't dare.

     We see the influence of people like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp in some of this, but when we come to the three quite pleasant large abstracts by  Matt Caldwell we see them in a different light, largely because we have become quite used to abstracts so that they no longer shock or surprise us.  Judging by the artist's statement, they count as amazing because they turned out to be so different from what he was used to doing.  First of all, he amazed himself.

     I suppose this is true of all four artists, who are quite self reflective and appear to have started with an idea at least as much as with an image.  Maybe this is typical of recent graduates and they will become quite different later on.  That should be interesting to watch.

Puppet a-go-go

     As you look in the window of NAC, you see five enormous grotesque heads which seem to be made of painted papier-mâché.  Two are placed on the floor on either side of a rotating pole displaying the other three.  This gives you fair warning that tremendous effort and ingenuity has been expended and you are in for a surprise. 

     The participating artists do not tell you much about themselves.  No names are attached to the grotesques in the window and there is no indication of what they represent, what is meant by their huge size or what will happen to them once the show is taken down.  Visitors to the show are simply handed a little card informing them that four artists, Christine Cosby, Alexa Fraser, Trisha Lavoie and Clelia Scala, are responsible for the whole show, bringing together 1,000 finger puppets from far and wide in Canada and also showing an installation of four life size puppets, dressed but with animal heads.  They include a deer, a bear, a leopard and a lion.  There is also a crash derby featuring toy cars.

     No names of artists are attached to anything in the gallery anymore than to the heads in the window.  The participating artists are just out to have fun rather than to go down as movers and shakers in art history.  Making finger puppets is such a modest form of artistic activity that even children can join in and some of the finger puppets look as if they had been made by families for Halloween.  The grotesque heads in the window, now that I come to think of it, would be a good installation for a front garden for Halloween. 

     Ingenuity is on display and quite a few of the finger puppets are cunningly crafted in some detail.  I particularly noticed one set showing Little Red Riding Hood, her Grandmother, the Wolf and the Woodcutter.  A couple of other really striking sets were the Greek gods and the planets.  I also noticed the complete alphabet and a great many animals.  But what blew my mind was the sheer impact of the variety and quantity. 

     More and more artists are invited to join in, whether they think they are qualified artists or not, and free finger puppet workshops are being held throughout the "In the Soil" art show, which is running concurrently in downtown St. Catharines.  The organizers of this finger puppet show obviously feel that art is for the people and everyone should join in.  Too many people say "I have no artistic talent.  I can't even draw a straight line."  But if you are making finger puppets you don't have to draw straight lines - just lines that will fit over your fingers.  If you have fingers you can do it, and the organizing artists hope to set up an entire finger puppet festival in five years' time.  Good Luck to them!