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.

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. 

    

"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.

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.


    

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. 

"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.

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.