Monday 19 December 2016

EMERGENT ART

                                                      
     When I look at the current show at NAC  by Justin  Pawson  and  Geoff   Farnsworth, the term "Emergent Art",  which I found quite baffling when I first came across it, begins to make sense to me. These pictures seem to be emerging from the artists' lower depths like improvised jazz pieces, without regard for standard categories such as "representational", "abstract" or "surreal." These categories are mixed.  The representational faces that look out at us from what seems like a rupture in an abstract surface, in Justin Pawson's paintings, seem to belong to the world of fantasy and science fiction, and a very aggressive world at that. The titles are no particular help in identifying this world. Steve Remus compared them to the quite arbitrary titles attached to jazz pieces when I commented to him on this.

     I think the picture by Justin Pawson I found most striking is "Babel" because the title is such an obvious non sequitur. When you hear the word "Babel" it is natural to think of the Tower of Babel, with the builders, stricken by God for attempting to reach the heavens, opening their mouths to offer incomprehensible fragments of speech, the languages having been divided. But the huge dark red face which dominates Justin's painting is alone in quite a pleasant, appealing abstract area, with light, cheerful colors that in no way suggest Divine Retribution, while the mouth is tightly closed. It is such a severe face-- my companion said it looked like Joseph Stalin--that it seems to be expressing condemnation rather than enduring it.

     I said in my last Blog that Amber Lee Williams seemed to be engaging in soliloquy rather than inviting dialogue. Here we seem to be listening to two soliloquys harmonizing with each other. The comparison to jazz comes to mind again. Geoff's paintings are less immediately self contradictory than Justin's, but here too the line between abstract and representational is blurred, the two styles being broken into squiggly fragments, while the titles, such as "Amygdala Unit", are equally disconcerting.

     The one of Geoff's I liked best was "Satori in Red and Blue", which shows a male figure in a red coat and blue  boots standing in a snowy backyard.  The term "Satori", which is applied to a sudden burst of consciousness after Zen meditation, seems appropriate, given the ordinariness of the scene.  "Before Enlightenment you chop wood and carry water.  After Enlightenment you chop wood and carry water."  But for all I know, Geoff's intention may be just to pull our legs.

     But I now have another artist to mention. While I was viewing the above paintings at NAC  I was invited to step round the corner to Melanie MacDonald's sale.  There I picked up the catalogue for her show "Scraps" at the Niagara Falls Art Museum, which I had unfortunately been unable to attend.  The introduction pointed out the sheer novelty of her completely unironic approach to the commercial art of an earlier time as it had been preserved in scrapbooks.  She really elaborates on that earlier vision on a very large scale.  This too can count as Emergent  Art because it is so surprising and unexpected, a completely new departure.

     My final comment comes in the form of a poem I wrote some time ago about an experience of my own.

                                             THE DOOR

     We come to the door and find it locked.
      No answer to our call.
      But picking the lock we think should present
     No difficulty at all.
     However if we with craft
     And cunning machinery come
     To pick the lock,
     The intricate tool refuses,
     The skilled electricity fuses
     And we are forced to stop.

     But then one day we are wandering,
     Lost in a dream:
     The door stands open wide.
     Without volition
     We find we have stepped inside
     And gifts are in our hand.
     The unknown glory lights unbidden
     Our purpose and our land.

Monday 5 December 2016

DISTANCE LENDS ENCHANTMENT, MAYBE


     As I consider  the recent Voix de Ville Extravagonzo and the present show at NAC by Amber Lee Williams, I am left with an impression of distancing.  The foreword by Steve Remus to the little brochure accompanying Extravagonzo talks of resisting attempts to possess and oppress us. In other words, the young people at NAC are Romantic rebels, committed to a work of liberation from prevailing accepted attitudes.

     Part of this falls under the umbrella of atheism, which is what I cannot go along with.  When I was a student at Oxford in the1950s, obstructive, domineering authoritarianism was applied  by atheistic professors who disparaged and even persecuted the Christian creative thinkers J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S.Lewis. Consequently  I found the comedians in this show profoundly alienating.

     I was not alienated, however, by most of this show, which I found fascinating and charming and above all surprising. I felt that I had somehow entered a stranger's dream with all its bizarre twists and turns and sudden leaps of faith, without quite knowing how I got there or what prompted it.

     The distancing in Amber  Lee  Williams's show is rather different.  There is only our own movement, from one  part of her show to another, no sound and very little color.  We remain on the periphery of what Amber chooses to convey.

     To begin with, she superimposes white scribbles on a series of commemorative photographs which explore identity by displacing it. Then we pass to a cluster of used tea bags. Then we are confronted with old children's books which seem to be placed on a rustic base out in the country with twigs overhead. The pages have been  glued together and then perforated  to reveal photographs of the artist's daughter and mother. This is followed by a solidified bag of baby socks and a series of photographs from a family album. Old and young, male and female, are pieced together and surrounded by a diaphanous watercolor haze.

     Altogether we find ourselves listening to a soliloquy rather than being engaged in a  dialogue or swept along on a flood of eloquence. We may in fact be listening to a language spoken before we were born and to which we will return after death.  Amber's show represents a challenge: a challenge to move out of our accustomed reality and cross a strange frontier.  This is very much in keeping with NAC principles.

     The same challenge occurs, in a much more recognizable and welcoming way, in the puppet show in the NAC window, now in its third incarnation   Here we are presented with four tiers of puppets admiring a three ring circus, with a lion and his tamer on the middle level, acrobats above and merry and sad clowns below.  To me it came as a welcome return to my own highly peculiar brand of normality.

Tuesday 8 November 2016

IS OUR ART DISPOSABLE?


     I should begin by apologizing for posting this blog so late.  I was held up by a bad cold.  Two of the exhibits have already been changed.  However I will go ahead and post the blog as I originally wrote it on October 25 2016. 
 
     Is our  Art disposable?  Is anything that we create nowadays built to last at all or even to be taken seriously for very long?  That is the question I was asking myself as I came away from the three exhibits that are currently on display at NAC. 

     The most striking and immediately accessible one is in the window of NAC and takes up the whole window.  It consists if interesting, grotesque looking hand puppets, at least thirty of them, all different.  Most of them are arranged in three tiers on one side of the window, all gazing in the same direction and forming an audience.  They are looking, with wooden fixed expressions, at a terrifying scene that is taking place on the far sider of the window.  A huge monster is griping a helpless puppet in preparation for destruction, while observed by two other puppets, one male and wearing a white jacket, obviously a doctor, and the other a terrified female, presumably his assistant.

     The whole thing has been constructed and put together with a great deal of care and skill and is easy to appreciate as Halloween entertainment, but it is on show longer than that and will be replaced by similar exhibits by the same group of artists.  None of all this will last forever, but, as the French say, nothing lasts like what is temporary.  Perhaps this is actually the least disposable exhibit, the one that best accommodates traditional aesthetic criteria, even though made of perishable materials.

     As we advance into the Dennis Tourbin gallery, we are faced with a spectacle that initially seems quite dull and normal but is in fact disquieting.  The walls are hung with framed photographs from the St. Catharines Museum of public buildings, most of which used to form the architectural background to our lives but are no longer with us.  They were designed with some care by respected architects but have been replaced with buildings that are roomier and more convenient but not remarkable to look at.  There has been quite a drastic change in our streetscape but I doubt whether anyone outside the St. Catharines Museum has really noticed it.  I know I haven't.  Buildings used to be constructed once upon a time with an eye to beauty and durability, like the Parthenon and the medieval cathedrals, but this is no longer the case. 

     Coming to the third gallery, which is habitually more offbeat, I found myself face to0 face with conceptual art.  I had only heard about it before.  For instance, I had heard about an artist who exhibited elephant dung to show his disdain for all previous art.  A museum bought it in order to fulfill its obligation to record all trends in modern art but then became concerned about how to preserve it.  This paradoxical dilemma shows that the curators have not really understood what they were investing in.  In conceptual art it is the idea that counts, to the exclusion of any visible, tactile or audible phenomenon to which it is temporarily attached.

     The exhibit in question is called "Twenty-three Days at Sea."  It was commissioned by Access Gallery of Vancouver acting in partnership with the Burrard Arts Foundation and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.  It wished to support four young artists in residence but was deterred by housing prices in Vancouver.  Consequently it sent them on a twenty-three day sea voyage, each in a separate container ship, from Vancouver to Shanghai.  They had instructions to record their impressions, knowing this would be difficult as container ships are so much more anonymous than merchant vessels used to be.  In an earlier age the artist would have brought back detailed journals and albums.  As things were, they brought back a log book, lists, videos, recordings, barely visible photographic prints and small wooden models.  The small wooden models are the most tangible and creative items, but the other items tend to represent the absence of any Romantic value in this sea trade. 

     This kind of art the Access Gallery's curator calls "emergent," that is, rising from the depths but not yet completely in view.  I can in fact grasp the idea and can imagine doing this kind of thing myself.  I can imagine setting out on a sea voyage with twenty-four empty jam jars attached to pieces of string.  A jam jar would be lowered into the sea on twenty-three consecutive days and its contents carefully preserved.  The twenty-fourth jam jar would remain empty to embody the idea of the project.  When I got back to a galley I would set up a series of microscopes where people would analyze the sea water to enter into the spirit of the voyage. 

     What would emerge would be their reactions in response to my reactions rather than anything strictly tangible, although they might form a feeling for the sea.  It would be a new sensation, quite different from anything previously considered art, which would make it conceptual.  It might be quite fun as a conceptual experiment.  But, speaking personally, the idea makes me sad.  This art is so disposable that it makes me feel that our very humanity is disposable too.

Wednesday 7 September 2016

bill bissett


     Although Bill Bissett is an important figure in modern Canadian literature, I had not heard of him until a couple of weeks ago.  This is probably because, although I got a thorough grounding in British literature, I am much more familiar, as a French teacher, with Canadian literature in French than in English.   I told Bill that when I met him.  He says he has French ancestry and also Micmac and American, so he is not only affiliated with Canadian English speakers.  In fact, although he did not bother to say so because it is such a well known fact, he makes reading his poetry as difficult as he can, since he groups his words into clusters of sounds spelled phonetically. 

     Reading his poetry takes quite an effort, but once you have made that effort, he reveals himself as very lyrical and spontaneous.  He was young in the sixties when he started writing and he seems never to have lost that youthful freshness and exuberance.  There is something so forthright and direct about his expression of his feelings that it seems quite childlike.  Jesus said that we had to become like little children and find the kingdom of heaven within us.  I do not know if Bill subscribes to any official religion and it did not occur to me to ask him, but he did tell me that he attaches great importance to practicing meditation.

     There is no barrier to getting close to his painting.  It is very spontaneous and direct, full of strong, bright colours, especially red, yellow, blue and violet.  He even uses quite a lot of gold.  They are painted full on without any compromise, often in squiggly lines which look as if he just picks up his paintbrush and launches a direct attack on the canvas without stopping to think.  I asked him whether he paints without planning.  He said that he often meditates before painting, but without making any preliminary sketches, and if anything interrupts the flow he stops.  I felt very sympathetic to this approach.

     People are portrayed in his show but there are very few depictions of human bodies.  Instead there are a great many faces in simplified, graphic outlines.  Some bodies under the faces are reduced to masses of squiggly lines in primary colours.  His pictures are quite large, allowing for the full sweep of the painter's arm.  Some of the faces look straight at us and some are profiles looking at each other, but what he seems to prefer is to show one profile impinging on another, forming an egg shape.  Something about this makes me think of Pre-Columbian art in its directness.  He seems very concerned with communication in its most genuine form.

     His use of colour is very strong, direct and emotional.   Besides faces, there are quite a few free hand circles enclosing circles in contrasting colours.  Although these circles do not contain geometric patterns but remain empty at the centre, I take them to be mandalas, which Bill does go in for.  They also make me think of the art of Zen.  But Zen art is freer, airier, less substantial and solid. 

     He also paints what one would be obliged to call abstracts, although they do not use geometric patterns but rather resemble thick tree branches.  However the colours are not naturalistic. 

     The paintings are what first catch one's eye, but there are also a number of small black and white drawings composed of small, circular clumps attached together to form designs that lead one into fantasy.  He uses them to illustrate his poems. 

     I am very happy to have met Bill Bissett who, in spite of being famous, is so friendly, natural and unostentatious in his approach.  He seems like a special human being. 

    

Monday 15 August 2016

"Devolve" and "Scenes from Late Capitalism"


     "Devolve" is very impressive.  Everything in it is labeled untitled.  And yet these works do seem to convey a definite message in spite of the lack of words.  When I came into NAC and saw the array of huge flamboyant pictures, mainly in red, orange and yellow, by Wayne Corliss, it made me think of Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was so suggestive of fire from heaven.  I would like to suggest that Wayne's pictures be reproduced as illustrations to Milton's "Paradise Lost", they seem so much like poetry about Lucifer's fall from heaven.  Light and fire and an awe-inspiring violence are all suggested in swirls of very definite downward movement.  And of course the massive size of these pictures also suggest something truly grandiose. 

     Each picture is different in spite of their basic similarity, like coming again and again to varied expressions of similar emotions in music or poetry.  The same theme is touched on in different but equally glorious ways.  As in the case of Milton's poem, Lucifer, the fallen Light Bringer, is still a glorious angel in his fall.  However the final picture in this series seems to show the calm, peaceful radiance which filled heaven after the rebel angel's departure.  I may be letting myself be carried away, but the two cubes poised on their corners which introduce and conclude this series and contain a lot of dark green and dark blue could represent Lucifer ruling in Hell after serving in Heaven.

     The equally poetic works by Amber Lee Williams follow.  They are much smaller and to tend to run to shades of grey, beige and blue.  They are quite decorous although some are dark.  The poetry they evoke is private, personal and domestic, making me think of Emily Dickinson rather than John Milton.  Amber does say in her artist's statement that she has drawn on her own life experiences in her art.  She works in beeswax, with a blow torch, and says that sometimes she the medium takes over, but to me it all looks very precise.  I noticed several pictures with small light coloured circles like portholes for the artist to look through.  These pictures seemed to be painted with the inner eye, giving the viewer entry into the artist's mind.

     The second show, "Scenes from Late Capitalism" by Nathan Heuer, is quite different from anything in "Devolve."  It is drawn with a great many straight lines, in a reasoned, abstract, understated, somewhat satirical way.  There is a definition of a straight line as "the shortest distance between two points" and Nathan covers the shortest distance between constructing a motel or a factory and letting it fall down.  Nathan says that his object was to show utilitarian buildings set up and abandoned in the spirit of consumerism.  However in his drawings, they still appear intact.

     The works by Wayne and Amber might be described as abstracts, for lack of a better word, but Nathan's work, while strictly representational, is far more abstract from the emotional point of view.  The two shows are a study in contrasts.


Monday 18 July 2016

ARIADNI HARPER: 15 YEARS - PHOTOS IN PAINT



  Ariadni Harper's large, representational images at NAC are solid and reassuring.  They carry a sense of strength, firmness and peace.  She seems to have special interest in nourishment, as witness her pictures of lobsters, both cooked and uncooked, roots and fish ready for cooking.  But she is also interested in living animals, whether goldfish darting about in a lily pond or a pug dog, and also children.

     She is interested in depicting her images, which started out as photographs before being transferred to paint, from odd angles.  One example of this is "Birthday Dinner" in which the entire canvas is filled with cooked lobsters jutting into each other with no sign of any background.  Another is "Reflections" in which the artist has concentrated on reflections in the water from the bow of a boat, while showing very little of the rest of the boat at all.

     A really disconcerting example of this approach is "My Squirrel" which shows the artist's hands holding a very detailed depiction of a creature which doesn't look very much like a squirrel at all but perhaps more like a magnification of a baby bird.  "My Squirrel" may be her pet name for it.  I was completely taken aback by the way she used representational detail in two completely different ways in the same picture so that the two things jolted you out of your expectation of a single coherent picture of recognizable reality.  She seems to have set out to overwhelm us with a realism whose ultimate effect is quite unrealistic and yet convincing.  She is not imitating Magritte at all and yet she makes me think of him.  She makes us doubt the evidence of our own eyes rather than her technical ability.  This must be the picture she is proudest of as she uses it to advertise her show.

     In the midst of all her reassuring solidity she is very inventive and goes straight to the heart of what she is depicting.  For instance, her painting of root vegetables carries the very essence of roots so that it is not simply the expression of their appearance.  They might almost be the Platonic Ideas of root vegetables.  Whatever she paints, it is the essence of that thing.  She is also quite a colorist, as we see in the edible sherbet colours of "Cotton Candy Clouds".  She makes me want to absorb her paintings into myself as part of the structure of my own body.

     These paintings are the result of fifteen years of work and represent a surprisingly coherent  experience, given that they are stretched over such a lengthy time frame.  Solid as her pictures are, the artist seems solidly settled within herself.  Perhaps this explains why she has included architectural details along with her natural objects.  Her natural objects have their own architecture, so these different things blend together quite seamlessly.  Her eye organizes reality so that we can accept it without question. 


                                                  AN APOLOGETIC POSTSCRIPT

     I see I have tried to be too clever and subtle and have actually insulted this artist by what I intended as a compliment.  It has been pointed out to me that what the artist was holding in her hands in the painting "My Squirrel" is not a baby bird at all - indeed it doesn't even look like a baby bird - but a handful of black walnuts.  She is calling herself a squirrel for collecting them.  That just shows how badly a critic can go wrong in bringing depth psychology to bear on what is simply representational and the artist is making no highfaluting claims to be anything but representational.  So please accept this apologetic postscript as a reminder that I am not infallible even if I am an academic.  In fact that turns out to be a drawback.


    

Tuesday 28 June 2016

WILLIAM GRIFFITHS

                                                   
   

     At first glance I took an instant dislike to the abstracts of William Griffiths currently on show at NAC.  They simply did not speak to me, and since I like to take a sympathetic interest in the works of art I review, I really wondered if I would be able to write about him.  This attitude changed when I read his artist's statement.  The statements of young artists, struggling to make their art sound as important to other people as they feel it is to them, are often vacuous and pretentious, but William Griffiths, who is an artist of experience and even some international reputation, comes straight to the point.  He says "I am intrigued by the beauty in the natural world ( landscapes, trees, rocks ), as well as the beauty in man's manufactured masses ( metal, deteriorating structures, forgotten dwellings ).  I photograph overlooked objects, and use them as inspiration for abstract work.  I strive to recreate the moment and express what I see."

     Of course every artist I respect strives to recreate the moment and express what he sees, but William Griffiths and I have very different ideas of beauty.  My ideal of beauty is expressed by Baudelaire in his famous poem, "The Invitation to the Journey." 

"There, everything is order and beauty,
Luxury, calm and deep sensuality."

Baudelaire was thinking of Dutch interiors, for he was inviting his lover to join him in Holland, but I find the same inspiration in other works of art, for instance in the landscapes of George Sanders, with which I have filled my living room.   I cannot imagine covering my walls with the abstracts of William Griffiths, which are austere and uncompromising to the point of brutality. 

      I don't often get excited about abstracts.   I admire the abstracts of Lynette Fast, which have a playful, fantastic kind of beauty, but usually I can take abstracts or leave them alone.  As Steve Remus remarked to me, abstract art has been going on for a hundred years and it's hard to do anything new or shocking in that field, but William Griffiths manages it.  Furthermore, what really struck me when I took a closer, more objective look at his art, is that every picture is different.  That takes some doing.  Usually, once an artist - and that applies to really good artists too - has found a style that suits him, he tends to produce endless variations on the same design.  I know I do it myself.
But in the case of William Griffiths one picture seems to contradict the one next to it, even in the physical way it is put together.  Maybe that is why I found his show so abrasive at first.

     For instance, "St. Peter's" - I am not sure if this is the one in Rome or a parish church of the same name since we see it basically in a vague, misty outline - is completely different from some other pictures around it, which have distinct shapes with little knobs glued onto them.  In some pictures the definite shapes are in distinct, separate layers.  Next to "St. Peters" is a bunch of orangey pink zigzags on a blue background which justifies Steve Remus's praise of William Griffiths as a colorist, but is in opposition to the misty, semi-representational dark and light greys of "St. Peters."  Quite different again is a picture that leads off the show, "Vacant Lot."  When I first looked at it, it just looked dull and drab.  Then when Steve Remus shone a light on it, I saw an interesting jumble of blacks and reds.  Then this in turn turned out to be painted on a pliable panel of some heavy material which, when lifted up, revealed the lighter vacant lot below.  Different again is a pyramid which William Griffiths simply calls "Pyramid."  The more I looked at this how, the more interesting I found its contradictions and varieties. 

Sunday 19 June 2016

"THE KURFUFFLE OF 1902" BY FITZROY WESTFEATHER, ILLUSTRATIONS BY DOYLE O'DOYLEY




     The show that is presently on at NAC is quite disconcerting.  It consists of a number of illustrations taken from a short, unpublished book which purports to be in progress.  The book is lying around for our perusal and was originally presented to the Queen, one of whose ladies-in-waiting politely declined it on her behalf.

     Steve Remus felt I needed some help in writing a blog about this, so he told me that, in spite of the title, the book is a sendup of The War of 1812 and the author, who is using pseudonyms, is schizophrenic.  He invited me to ask the author questions about anything I hadn't understood.  The chief question I asked him is whether he feels skeptical and sarcastic about the diagnosis of schizophrenia.  I do have the impression from reading his book the author is skeptical and sarcastic about the reality around him or what modern Canadians take to be that reality.  I once asked a psychologist to define schizophrenia for me, since it obviously does not consist, as so many people suppose, of having dual personalities, and he said that the split involved was a split from reality.  I told a close friend that, sand he said "Whose reality? What reality?" which is quite a question. 

     I think that we can take it that the mentally ill patient is told that his view of reality is basically mistaken and should be corrected.  Since all we have to go by in discerning reality is our own perceptions, this news is not welcome.  Some mental patients have what is commonly called "insight," that is, they agree that their perceptions are mistaken and try to go along with having them corrected.  But since they are human beings and have egos and rely, as almost all human beings do, on telling themselves stories about themselves, even they put up a certain amount of resistance.  I have personal experience of this myself, so I know what I am talking about. 

     An extreme example of this resistance can be found in the satirical novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey.  I had not read it myself until I saw that the author of the work I am reviewing mentioned it, but it is so well known, if only from the movie based on it, that I hardly have to describe it. 

     Being cuckoo is such a common and derisive term for being crazy that the author I am reviewing has filled his story with cuckoo clocks that are crafted locally and have roused the inhabitants of New Amsterdam (New York) to such a pitch of fury by their total unreliability that they are descending in a body on Shipman's Corner (St. Catharines) to destroy all the cuckoo clocks.  This I take to be the chief allusion to The War of 1812, particularly as a young lady called Laura goes trekking off to get soothing help from what perhaps should have been the British Invasion, but is actually a musical group sponsored by the American Ambassador.

     Absolutely no one on either side is taken seriously by the author.  Laura Secord isn't, Harriet Tubman isn't, the "Injuns" who helped the Empire Loyalists aren't, the Americans, who include Twain and Obama, aren't.  The author is just having a good laugh all round as what we consider the reality of politics and history.  At the same time he refuses to take even the work in which he is doing this seriously.  It is certainly far less serious and convincing than "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

     Where the illustrations are concerned, I asked the author, who is also the illustrator, if he had made a special effort to keep the illustrations simple and childlike.  I think he did, to get a deadpan effect, but he hadn't told me so. 

     I think that we can suppose that he is on the road to recovery because he is in control of the products of his imagination and reaching out to share them with other people instead of being controlled by them.  But perhaps he still has a way to go before reaching out in a way that is totally convincing.

Monday 30 May 2016

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.

Wednesday 25 May 2016

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.

Sunday 1 May 2016

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!

Friday 22 April 2016

Rodman Hall Show

   When I went round the Rodman Hall show at NAC on April 21 2016, Steve Remus, who was showing me round, had to explain to me that each exhibit in the show was a comment on Brock University's move to withdraw from its commitment to support Rodman Hall as a public art gallery for at least 20 years.  These comments were all so subtle that they simply could not be heard by ears used to the loud voices of commercial advertising or indeed to the cutthroat competition  that goes on in any modern university for status, recognition and grants.  So it is highly unlikely that they will be heard by the Brock administrators who are making this decision.
 
   They are certainly not being heard by the general public in spite of the fact that this show was featured in an article in the "St. Catharines Standard."  When I mentioned this move to some friends who are quite lively and aware, they were astonished.  They had no idea of it.  In spite of its appearance in the local newspaper, the news that Rodman Hall, after having been a real centre in St. Catharines for the visual arts, will probably be obliterated, seems very much a private affair between the artistic community and the university.

   I am tempted to speak in the voice of a child and say "The Emperor has no clothes."  But that would be futile when Brock dresses up so much as a patron of the arts and spends so much money to do so.  The projected move will probably go forward with nothing being broken but a few hearts and a few careers and at least part of the future of the visual arts in Niagara.  An important pillar of the cultural community will have been removed with really very little fuss or embarrassment. 

   I feel this shows how little genuine creativity for its own sake is valued in the modern world.  We chiefly want commercial success.  And yet how badly we want creativity in our everyday lives.  Even a little creativity would suffice to save some people from the depression, the addiction, the various types of mental illness and the temptation to suicide which besets so many in the western world today.  Even such a minimal attempt to support the creative urge as keeping Rodman Hall going might be a finger in the dike against the flood of meaninglessness that threatens to engulf us. 

   I imagine what chiefly concerns the Brock administrators is the drain on Brock's finances that subsidizing Rodman Hall might represent.  But Brock did have faith at one point that this might not be a losing proposition.  After all, it did look at one point as if  Brock University itself might be a losing proposition as all the universities seemed in danger.  I remember it because I was on the faculty myself at that time.  One of my colleagues suggested that I might find alternative employment decorating ceramics.  I forget what he thought he might do, but it was nothing very elevated.  This did not come to pass.  We had faith in ourselves at Brock and survived.  Let us have faith in the arts and have faith to the end, not just part of the way.  
  

Sunday 10 April 2016

                                              
Small Feats Sunday April 10 2016 

As always with Small Feats, what really strikes me is the sheer variety.  Given that there are 200 works in the show and on average each artist has submitted three pictures, even I, with my limited capacity for arithmetic, can tell that there must be between 60 and 70 points of view represented.
   When I come to Small Feats each year I like to select a few pictures as my favourite and actually buy one.  I am trying to economise at the moment and in any case I picked up a dozen pictures for free at the memorial service for George Sanders, an artist whom I greatly admire and from whom I bought a half dozen pictures in his lifetime, so I am not buying a picture at Small Feats this year.  But if I were I would have a hard time to make a choice.
   In spite of the variety there are certain themes that tend to turn up.  I was struck by the news, some years ago, that when one monkey starts washing a potato before eating it, pretty soon all the monkeys start doing it, even ones who have no contact with the innovative monkey, although none did it before.  And one of the few things I remember from my course in philology is that when people start making a grammatical mistake it occurs across an entire generation and ends up as accepted usage.  So in any group of sentient beings telepathy is definitely at work and this seems to be the case here.
   The animal kingdom, especially birds, seems to be represented in this show at a level above chance.  There is a whole series of crowned owls poised above excerpts from Machiavelli, there are several brightly coloured parrots, there is a songbird depicted with detailed realism and one young woman is shown cuddling a goose against a background of flowers.  But animals also appear.  The same young woman is shown cuddling a fox against a background of flowers, a bear appears with a Russian hat, there are two charming squirrels back to back, and I particularly liked a picture of a horse's head and mane depicted in a variety of vibrant and quite unrealistic colours and wildly flowing brush strokes.  Also very appealing was a painted skull with embroidered flowers.
   Even so these are not the pictures for which I would have lashed out $200 each, that being the set price.  That accolade would have gone to one of three truly beautiful pictures of sunrise and sunsets over Lake Ontario.  But that is my personal preference and there is something for  pretty well every taste, which is just as well, given that this is a fundraiser.  I hope it is a successful one.


                                                                                                                                          

Monday 28 March 2016

BANANAGANZA: Kristin Stahlman & Co. at N.A.C.

I suppose the root word for Bananaganza is Extravaganza. The artist who organized the whole show, consisting of photographs of banana peels found lying about, is Kristin Stahlman. Because the banana peels were actually found, the show made me think of Marcel Duchamp's Objets trouvés or Found Objects, such as a bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool, a urinal labelled Fountain and a bottle rack not labelled anything but simply signed "Marcel Duchamp."  For this reason, I though of giving my review the title, "Pelures de banane trouvées" or "Found banana peels."  But that would be a misinterpretation of the purpose of this show, which is simply to have fun.

Dada, the group which influenced Marcel Duchamp, was not out to have fun.  In its efforts to undermine the seriousness of the ideals, including artistic ideals, which in their opinion led to world-wide war, the Dada artists were quite seriously subversive.  Reason and logic were their enemies and they were deeply pessimistic.  Duchamp wanted to shock and succeeded.  Compared to him, this group of photographers gathered together from as far away as Venice, Italy, are a bevy of childlike innocents, celebrating banana peels in the same way in which, I suppose, they celebrate life.  I am told that on their Opening Night, they did not open NAC's doors to the general public, but instead held a banana-themed party, eating and drinking bananas in every shape and form and holding a competition to enact slipping on a banana peel.

This banana peel art is quite disposable, but only because they do not consider it important.  I don't suppose that anyone who contributed a photograph of a banana peel to the show expects to go down in the pages of art history as striking a blow against consumerism and materialism, as most of the exponents of Found Art have done.  They can't even be said to be going in for conceptual art as the quirky labels they put on their photographs, such as "Banana in the crotch of a tree" for one phallic, only partly eaten banana, do not illustrate ideas but are only added after the event, by the power of suggestion.  Any connection with ideas is based on their associations and nothing more.  All those people with an axe to grind were "so much older then."  Kristen and her friends are "younger than that now" (with apologies to Bob Dylan, whose fervent fan I was in the sixties).

The one thing that was lacking, as Steven Heinemann of the Write Bookstore pointed out, was a trompe-l'oeil rendering of a banana peel, such as a street artist might draw, to make people afraid of slipping.  But they were, after all, photographs. Perhaps if Kristin puts the show on again, she might think of this suggestion.  In the meantime she has already included a banana peel on a shelf of toys and a banana peel in a washroom.  Banana peels may crop up anywhere. 

Perhaps there were banana peels on Jacob's Ladder and that's what put his hip out of joint rather than wrestling with an angel.  Perhaps they eat bananas in Heaven, throw the peels in Purgatory and those that slip on them end up in Hell.  Long live bananas!  So says Kristin Stahlman and so say I.  Down with serious intent!

Sunday 13 March 2016

Show by Strong Brock Art Students at N.A.C.

Show by Strong Brock Art Students at N.A.C., First week in March, 2016

This show includes some pieces by Brock Art students who were in the previous show, but also includes more that weren't. I saw the previous show as tender and poetic and also inclined to fantasy, but this is not the case for this one. Variety is what really characterizes this show. I was rather taken aback by it at first and didn't quite know what to say about it because it didn't have an overall feeling tone like the previous one.

There is one striking picture that might be seen as fantastic because it uses Chinese symbols, that is the animals that stand for the various years, depicted in a fanciful kind of way, but to the student who painted it, these animals would seem quite familiar and belonging to the domestic world rather than to the world of fantasy. This was the picture I liked best. It was called "Nine Years in Canada" by Yuta and includes a somewhat dreamy, melancholy self-portrait. It is in fact a mixture of melancholy and humour because the animals are depicted in a way that is playful and full of fun. I feel this ambiguity lends it depth.

Two other pictures really impressed me but they were quite different. They are both quite powerful and in your face. One is a large, anatomically correct male nude, a young man lying on his front but with genitals exposed. Once more it is in "the X-rated corner." THere is not much colour contrast. It has a rather evocative title, "Pasture Parts" and is by Sarah Bryans. The title suggests that the artist likes to feel free to graze on this young man. The other is "Barren Rainbow" by André Gascon. It is a riot of colour --all the colours of the rainbow plus white. I suppose it is a barren rainbow because all the colours are dislocated and not in a rainbow shape, but that makes it so much more interesting. A hose pipe next to it suggests that the colours are sprayed on.

Two other pictures I also liked and which were quite humorous in a sardonic kind of way were "Transmigration" by Kaia Toop, which shows the subject of the painting developing from a jar of preserves and some vases of flowers to curled up fox, and "The Comfort of a Rubber Duck" by Kerry Ann Murphy, which shows a woman in a bath tub entirely surrounded by rubber ducks.

There were also two abstracts which have undeniable merit but are a little too austere for my personal taste. They are "Not Seen" by Matt Caldwell and "Fiber" by André Gascon.

I thought it was a pity that the various pieces seemed to have been selected more or less at random, and didn't show each other off better. For instance, an untitled abstract by Jessica Wright which was very similar to one in the previous show didn't show up nearly as well and looked rather out of place.

Wednesday 24 February 2016

Million Dollar Pink at N.A.C.

Million Dollar Pink is the current show, February 17 to 27 at the Niagara Artists' Centre.  It is a juried show put on by sixteen students from the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University and includes digital/analog photography, installation, painting, and video.  There is a rumour going around that the neon pink colouring a stairwell in their building was selected by Marilyn Walker herself -- hence the title of the show -- but Steve Remus assures me that it was actually selected by the architect.  At the end of the show, prizes will be awarded.

I feel I can empathise with this show since so much of it is poetic, verging on fantasy and definitely not to be taken literally.  The most literal paintings are a portrait of Frida Kahlo by Danielle Ruiz and a series of twenty self-portraits by Alex Chorny, but they are not entirely literal because the portrait of Frida is rugged and abrasive, hardly recognizable, and some of the self portraits by Chorny are fragmentary or else totally abstract.

Some of paintings are completely fantastic, such as the one of Goliath taking Manhattan by Kerryann Murphy or the picture of an upside down deer in a dark basement, disconcertingly titled "Where the river used to flow" (just in case you might take it literally) by Kaia Toop.

Also completely fantastic is the male nude with the hand turning into a fish biting his penis by Fraser Brown.  In the same "X-rated corner" (Steve Remus' term) is a series of photographs by Lauren Mucciarone of a man and woman in bed, but they are so chaste, tender and poetic that it takes away from their literalness.

On another wall is a painting in a similar vein of a naked woman cuddling a chimpanzee by Lu Liu but again this is so tender and poetic that it is not disturbing.  An abstract, a mixture of painting and collage, with a lot of flowers and circles in tender shades of red, yellow, and green with a face appearing between them, "Untitled" by Jessica Wright, is also very poetic.

Finally, I should mention an installation of what looks like dust bunnies, is rather a sardonic comment on the way words get scattered and thrown away, by an unidentified artist.  It made me think of Hamlet's reply when he was asked what he was reading: "Words, words, words."

Of course these are not all the items in the show, but these are the ones that made the greatest impression on me.