"Rooted" by Sandy Middleton at NAC

When I went to the reception for Sandy Middleton's show "Rooted" I did not know very much about her. I had just heard that she is a very interesting photographer, but I know very little about photography. The only other photographer I know is Derek Richards, who does a lot with very bright colour and with people moving around in exotic locations. He is nothing like her.

As I sat down and rested from my walk to NAC, my eyes rested on photographs of trees that were greenish-brownish and quite hazy. They were dreamy, poetic, not quite distinct, thoughtful, and very treeish. No human or animal figures appeared -- just expanses of fields or water with a few trees. The trees seemed to have been singled out for special, loving attention, and some of them you could see through, like the ghosts of trees. However the scene did not look like a graveyard but rather like a well loved place that the tree had come back to haunt because it was so fond of it.

When I asked the artist about this, she said that she had not intended anything psychological. She was simply interested in the effect of double exposure. These tree scenes had all been taken in Port Dalhousie and the one gnarled old tree taken with double exposure had been superimposed on a scene with a younger, less individual looking tree because it was so representative. It summed up the whole history of the trees in that neighbourhood.

This is what first caught my eye when I glanced around. But when I stood up and started looking more closely, I was quite overwhelmed by a photograph of tangled tree roots with only a few leaves and branches sprouting from them which led off the exhibition, and which Sandy Middleton connected in a note to her own roots. It immediately made me think of Ents, Tolkien's treelike shepherds of the trees and of my first excited discovery of The Lord of the Rings in my last year as a student at Oxford.

I have never read a book which excited me so much. It all seemed so beautiful and fresh and new, such a change from the dreary, nerve-wracking work of trying to meet the impossibly high academic standards of Oxford. And it had been written by an Oxford professor! So there was hope and joy and magic and life after all! I had just sat down and reread the chapter "Treebeard" in The Two Towers and it is just as I remembered it. Yes, that tangle of tree roots conjures up the image of the toes of Treebeard, guardian of the Forest of Fangorn, which he always put down first when he went walking.

I asked Sandy Middleton about it and she said yes, she had been thinking of Ents. She told me about a huge Ent costume she had devised and that had towered over the onlookers for the NAC Festival of Wearable Art a couple of years ago. She said there is bound to be a photograph of it in the archives.

As I went through the show, I found a series of little circular segments of wood with photographs of leafless branches printed on them upside down so that they looked like roots instead of branches. On an adjoining wall were sheets of paper treated with beeswax showing the same thing. Sandy said she intended the shock of surprise created by showing the branches upside down but the people who bought them would probably want to show them right side up. Not everyone likes novelty and invention.

At the very end of the show there was an autumnal scene -- the one definite touch of colour, but even so rather muted. The avoidance of definite colour made the whole show seem like a stroll through a dream -- or rather like a poem about a dream.

"Remnants" by Kristi McDonald at NAC

I am puzzled to know what to say about "Remnants." Judging by her Artist's Statement, Kristi McDonald has really thought about her show and worked on it, and yet it does not speak to me. Furthermore, there must be other people to whom it speaks, or her work would not be hanging in NAC and she would not have won awards, but even so, I still don't see it.

In an earlier era of art criticism, I would have set myself up as an arbiter of taste and listed my reasons for condemning it, like Ruskin accursing Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." But as things are, I feel all I can do is try to state the limitations of my own mind which prevent me from responding to it.

There there is a h ierarchy of the arts is a long since exploded theory. Years ago a former colleague of mine invited me to his home and pointed to a reproduction hanging on his wall of "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer." I forget which Great Master painted it. It could have been Rubens in a quite unusually sentimental mood. As he pointed to it, my colleague said, "This is the greatest painting in the world." I said nothing, but I was dumbfounded by the idea that this academic should think a) that there is such a thing as the greatest painting in the world, and b) that it is possible to identify it. Of course from there, it is only a step to thinking you can identify the worst painting, on a sliding scale of values.

André Malraux famously claimed that the 20th century was the first era in which every possible kind of art of every time and place could be appreciated as being of equal value. Even so, although Malraux did not say so, some artists such as Pablo Picasso can be seen as outranking everyone else as demonstrated by the prices people are willing to pay for their paintings.

I have discussed art with my brother, Malcolm Bucknall, more than anytone else and he was outraged to hear me say that I can paint as well as Picasso. He got me to admit that I could never have pained "Guernica" but that doesn't mean I want to live with it. To take another famous painting by Picasso as an example, I would not like to have "Les Demoiselles d"Avignon" hanging on my wall. But I do love and admire Picasso's drawings, particularly those of his old age.

Even though my brother does have a scale of art values, he repudiates what he calls Dogma and disliked being given art lessons. He is all in favour of risking sailing off the edge of the world, like Christopher Columbus. I am much more academically inclined than he is, and although I can be quite eccentric in my judgments I do bring a certain amount of cultural bagage to my appreciation of an art work.

I looked at Kristi McDonald's show and thought, "Ink blots! They must be Rorschach ink blots! But what are they doing combined with what look like fashion magazine illustrations? They don't go together at all." As a result, I was out of sympathy with her work. But that was a case of being limited by my own cultural preconceptions, which I am sure do not apply to her.

She may not even that that Rorschach ink blots exist as a means of psychological testing, since they were popular before she was born and she probably has no reason to consider fashion magazine illustration inferior. Consequently, she must have approached her ink blots and her graphite drawings with a degree of unprejudiced innocence, which I cannot hope to emulate. I am simply not the right person to be looking at her show. I throw the field open to those who are.

Randy and Friends at NAC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SMALL FEATS 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[accelerate] art as game as machine at NAC

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice in Plunderland at NAC

A review of Alice in Plunderland by Steve McCaffery with illustrations by Clelia Scala and also of the original collages for the illustrations currently on display at the Niagara Artists’ Centre (NAC) in St. Catharines.

I first thought of writing this review as my current contribution to “Once Upon A Time,” a Newsletter on Teen and Children’s Fantasy issued in Minneapolis by an APA – amateur publishing association – and restricted to a small group of fans of this genre, mainly children’s librarians.  Although based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice in Plunderland is definitely not intended for children, since it has much to do with the contemporary underworld and drug scene.  But the original “Alice” is such a standard children’s classic that I think my fellow contributors should be interested.  I mentioned this project to Natasha, who helps run the office at the Niagara Artists’ Centre, and she has asked me to leave off copies of my review as a way of starting an in-house dialogue.

Clelia Scala's illustrations were my introduction to Alice in Plunderland, which I have bought and read.  The blurb on the back of the book says that Steve McCaffery is a "multi-award winning poet and scholar" whose "innovative poetics ...transform this classic story according to McCaffery's theory of  'palindromic time' by which the past is contemporized and the present historicized" and open new vistas for "fans of experimental writing and linguistics."  I know very little about experimental writing in the 21st century, having limited my scholarly endeavours to the study of 20th-century French literature in general and of Marcel Proust in particular.  That gentleman died in 1922 while working on his novel, A la recherche du temps perdu ("In Search of Lost Time") on which he had been exclusively engaged for years and to which he was so committed that he used his own first brush with death as the basis for a death scene in the novel.  Insofar has his work is experimental, it is an experiment in challenging and transforming sexual and temporal and social identity.

Proust said that including theories in a work of art was like leaving the price tag on a present, and in any case Steve McCaffery’s theories on poetics are largely unknown to me, since I’d never heard of him before, so I shall simply attempt to explain my own immediate reactions.

I do know something of Surrealism, under which rubric Steve McCaffery may be shelved, although I agree with its founder, André Breton, that it is not a literary movement.  Its chief aim seems to be to innovate and disconcert, and an example early Surrealists often gave was the placing together of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table.  The purpose of this seems to have been to shock the viewer out of all his or her accustomed responses and make him or her see customary objects in a completely novel way. 

In my opinion this is more successful in art than in literature.  The reason for this is that there is no necessary connection between the sound of a word and the mental image of a thing, so that when you set out to destroy usual connections, words tend to lose a lot of their meaning, whereas it is not so easy to destroy the meaning of a visual image.  For instance the word "apple" becomes "pomme" in French, "Apfel" in German, "manzana" in Spanish and a variety of things in other languages, while an image of an apple always remains recognizably an apple despite differences in context.  It could keep the doctor away or be an apple for teacher or an apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or from the Garden of the Hesperides.  You can have a lot of fun with all these different apples, which is why I responded much more enthusiastically to Clelia Scala's illustrations than to the book, which chiefly interested me because of the illustrations.

Certainly the illustrations are inspired by the book, which in its turn is inspired by the original “Alice,” just as the illustrations always retain the original Alice as drawn by Tenniel.  And they do take their point of departure from McCaffery’s text.  At the same time they go beyond it.  There are some of her illustrations which show Dante meeting Father William while exploring his Inferno.  This is a situation which McCaffery does not name, but his acidhead Alice does seem to be in Hell as she searches constantly and desperately for yet another fix, a search which could easily become repetitious and monotonous—one of the points Dante makes is that this is what Hell is like—if it were not for the extreme variety in McCaffery’s use of drug users’ slang.  As things are, from the little I know of the drug scene, I imagine it is repetitious and monotonous, exactly as Steve McCaffery describes it, and it takes Clelia Scala’s visual imagination to give it real variety.

The original Alice was accused of being mad and by no less an authority than the Cheshire Cat.  It is easy to forget that the Victorians had a horror of madness which for them was ultimately evil.  You have only to think of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester’s mad wife in her attic to realise the fear which which it was surrounded.  Due to more successful therapies, as they have been developed since then, we have learned not to look down on the “mentally ill.”  But we have no such scruples about drug addicts.  So it would seem that Steve McCaffery has actually restored some of the more sinister connotations of the original “Alice”—connotations that seem connected to the complete freedom and joy Charles Lutwidge Dodgson felt on forgetting with his childhood friends that he was a respectable academic in Holy Orders and allowing himself to make a mock of the moral teachings imparted to them by their governesses and mammas.  Steve McCaffery may actually have taken fewer liberties with “Alice” than at first sight it seems.  For all I know, he is fully aware of this.

But I still maintain that Clelia Scala takes a step beyond him.  I have bought one of her framed illustrations and plan to look at it every day for a while.  It is quite heartwarming for me because it shows Alice’s reduction of all the people who’d bullied her to a pack of cards—and a pack of cards in complete disarray.  It may be relevant to point out that this is a passage taken over almost completely unaltered from the original “Alice.”  The only thing that has been changed is that the cards, instead of being the usual court cards we see in the original “Alice” have become Tarot cards.  This appeals to me because I learned the Tarot from a gypsy master and take my bearings from it early in the morning every day.  This underlines the fact that what is truly worthwhile in Alice in Plunderland owes its status to its close association with Lewis Carroll’s original work.  If it were not for that, Steve McCaffery’s Alice would be nothing but a screwed over victim I would not care to identify with.  “Screwed over” is in fact an idea that occurs again and again in Steve McCaffery’s book in a variety of guises.

In closing, I should mention that André Breton actually introduced Lewis Carroll to the French reading public as an early and benign example of Surrealism.  The other examples, such as Kafka and the Marquis de Sade, represented black humour, but Carroll’s humour, so André Breton said, was rosy pink.  Steve McCaffery, or so it would seem, has brought it more in line with the main trend of Surrealism by turning it black.  Maybe Clelia Scala’s illustrations are, in terms of metaphor, an interesting shade of violet.