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.