I. Excelsior! 1975-2015 A Survey of Forty Years of Artwork by Dave Gordon II. Just like a buggy whip by Kevin Attic Daddy Richardson

There are two shows currently on at NAC and both are very pugnacious and in your face, although I think it highly unlikely that the two artists got together to plan this.  They are both reacting to cultural pressures and refusing to fit into a prescribed mold.  Neither wants to be popular in terms of what they perceive to be popular nowadays.

Kevin Richardson is a musician who refuses to agree that the sixties are old hat.  So much of the music of the 20th century is now looked down on, in his opinion, in the way the maker of the buggy whip was put out of business by the horseless carriage.  He has a picture of this, in fact, as well as pictures of other trades that have been rendered obsolete.  Obsolescence and his refusal to consider the music of the 20th century obsolete are very much themes of this show.  He refuses to make any concessions to present day popular taste, not only in his musical preferences but also in his painterly style, which is as pugnacious as his opinions.  When he memorializes the official end of the hippies' era with the tragedy at the Altamont Free Concert, it is with real bitterness.  It was an ugly event and he records it, like so much else, in an ugly way.

Dave Gordon has a great many perceived heroes and enemies, whether cultural or political.  Some of his heroies and heroines are also mine, such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo, Margaret Atwood and Arthur Rimbaud.  I am not sufficiently au fait with politics to recognise all of his villains, although I agree about Stephen Harper.  He even mocks the Group of Seven and plays games with Cézanne's renderings of Mont Saint-Victoire, which he reduces to a wood pile, even while he obviously admires Cézanne.  He scoffs at the National Inquirer as wholeheartedly as he scoffs at more culturally prestigious phenomena such as conceptual art.  No one is exempt.  He even scoffs at himself with the James Thurber cartoon of his chosen motto, "Excelsior!"  Sarcasm comes naturally to him,  whatever the target.

Both artists are determined to be very much their own men.  But Dave Gordon has already spoken up for himself at some length in an interview with Steve Remus published by NAC.  They make me think of the Siamese in the old song:

"We are Siamese
If you please.
We are Siamese
If you don't please."

On Expanding my Consciousness with Tony Cepukas

Recently I had to put Belinda to sleep.  She was a cat I'd had for 20 years and who wouldn't allow any other animals in the house.  But she was in rapid decline.  Just a few days ago I went to the Court Animal Hospital to replace her and came home with two adult cats who are too fond of each other to be separated.  I called a friend and said, "I'm living with two black gentlemen."  He said he would have to tell an acquaintance of ours who's an inveterate salacious gossip.

On Saturday, August 22, 2015, I called NAC to ask when their next show would be.  I was told it had just started and featured mosaics.  I said I would be right over.  I was glad to get out of the house in order to give my two black gentlemen a chance to settle in, as they have been hiding under my couch.

I took an indirect route to NAC, once I got off the bus.  First I went to the bank, as I am short of cash.  Then I went to the Arts and Crafts shop at 7 James Street and arranged for a small showing of some of my latest pictures, which have a connection with Goddess worship.  Then I went across to Christopher's, where I got an occult magazine, "Watkins Mind Body Spirit," and a horoscope magaine.  Next I got a Senior 10 Ride Card and bought two books at the Write Bookstore.  One was on French New Criticism, which by now is at least 50 years old, and the other was on the Druids by a Greek contemporary of theirs.

Altogether I felt that I had a very wide range of interests and was reaching out to the world around me in many directions, without leaving my comfort zone.  But when I got to Tony Cepukas' show, "Shine On, You Crazy Mosaic," I found that the artist was living in a completely different world from mine.  We have this much in common, that we are both self-taught artists who took up art in retirement, but most of his cultural references are to rock stars and cult cinema -- a world into which I had never ventured and which I was hardly even aware existed.  When I spoke to him I felt I almost had to apologise for my ignorance.

On entering the Dennis Tourbin Members' Gallery, I was startled to see a series of mind and body baring portraits in mosaic with names inscribed on them, but the only name I recognised was Obama.  I had to ask the artist who the other men were -- mainly rock stars and one cinema actor.  With my cult of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Handel, Mozart, and Wagner, I go in for a completely different kind of music, and I had never even heard of cult cinema.

I was impressed by the passion bordering on violence he put into these portraits but felt more at ease with his mandalas and depictions of flowers, which are more like what I do myself.  There were two mandalas I particularly liked and wanted to buy.  One had a pair of cherubs at the centre and the other a rooster.  In contrast to the portraits there were quite serene -- "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

I asked the artist where he got his art materials and how he put them together.  He said he'd ordered his boards from an art supplier in Montreal who does free shipping, which as a piece of information I was glad to get.  To get his mosaic chips, he buys dishes at such venues as garage sales and breaks them up.  My cherubs and rooster must have come from commercially produced plates, as they are quite traditionally realistic, insofar as that can be said of cherubs.

I can't seem to get away from collage, in one form or another.  I like its combination of the realistic and the fantastic, however it's put together.  Of course his chips were stuck together with grout and white glue.  Where Tony Cepukas says "Shine On, You Crazy Mosaic," allegedly with the song "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond" in mind, my message is "Dream On, You Crazy Approach to the Real World, and Take Me Into a Fairy Tale."

"Far From Ordinary" by Emily Andrews at NAC

 The latest show at NAC, August 8 to 21, 2015 has been put on by Emily Andrews. If I may quote from her artist's statement, she wishes it to be known that she is "a Niagara Falls based visual artist, actress and musician who has been involved in various artistic projects in the community over the past six years. A graduate of Brock University with a B.A. in Visual Arts, Andrews was one of the artists in residence chosen by the Ontario Trillium Foundation in 2012 and was last year's recipient of the Allister Young Arts and Culture Endowment Fund."

This show's full title is "Far From Ordinary: A Series of Dreamscapes Made with Very Precise Slices." It is Andrews' second solo exhibition and "includes a collection of Surrealistic scenes in the form of hand-cut photo collages. The intricately crafted pieces explore a whole new level of phantasmagoria that balances on the line of reality and imagination."

At this point, I go on with my own perceptions. The picture by Emily Andrews with which I am most familiar is also called "Far From Ordinary" and first appeared in her earlier solo shows. She makes and sells prints of her collages as well as showing and selling the originals and I bought a fairly large print of this picture and have it hanging in my house. It is based on a couple of the Tenniel illustrations to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and I am always a pushover for anything to do with Alice.  The Alice books were the first two books I read as a child and they made a deep impression on me.  I am sure I must have dreamed and fantasized about them.  The picture "Far From Ordinary" presents the viewer with such a dream or fantasy.

In the front to the left, we see a startled Alice growing unexpectedly tall.  To the back of the picture we see a quite untroubled Alice, unperturbed by the vagaries of her existence, standing with her back to us and looking into a window fitted with impossibly large stars.  Or are they snowflakes?  Both interpretations are possible and in a dream you don't have to choose.  Various animals lurking around -- a dog, an owl and one and a half llamas -- do not owe their provenance to the Alice books but that need not disturb us.  Doubtless they have their own dream reasons for being there.  However the Cheshire Cat is also there, grinning from a large mirror to the left of the frontal Alice.  Also to her left is a large clock which suggests that Time itself, having stopped, as in the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, has entered the dream.  The only difference is that it is not teatime but may be one of the early hours of the morning when one is likely to be asleep.  The background to all this is a well-appointed Victorian living room waiting for well-heeled residents to relax with a glass of sherry.  The title of the picture is spelled out in acrobatic script above the window and all seems quite lucid and matter of fact, with one exception.  A cupboard in the background seems to contain a brightly coloured modern abstract painting.  Is this an intrusion from the workaday world?

I have described this picture in detail as it is fully representative, but there are twelve pictures in all, quite different and intricately detailed.  Perhaps I should mention a few others that caught my eye.  One is another Alice picture showing the White Rabbit running up a flight of stars while consulting his watch and exclaiming, "Mary Ann!  Fetch me my gloves this moment!"  Below him is a rather lackadaisical young woman propped on a couch, again in well-appointed surroundings.  She obviously has no intention of fetching his gloves or paying him any attention whatever.  The picture reproduced on the invitation and which may therefore by supposed to be a favourite of the artist, shows a marina in the foreground with a series of bathing beauties and a dog all packed into may equally well be canoes or coffins.  Since the title of the picture is "Celestial Paradise," either interpretation might fit.  But the most striking and even majestic picture is "The Butterflies of Versailles."  This shows a gallery in Versailles with lit candelabra, a beautiful black girl in a fancy dress, a flying gull, a dog, the back end of a donkey and a much smaller cat chasing a mouse.  Gorgeous large golden butterflies are scattered all over.

Andrews' framed collages are not unduly expensive but she also offers them as much cheaper prints, even on T-shirts.  Altogether a very rewarding show with something for everybody and everybody's wallet.

"Downbeat Downtown" by Dan Brown at NAC

The current show "Downbeat Downtown" at NAC consists of a series of photographs, mainly in black and white and quite straight forwardly representational, illustrating performances presented by the Twilight Jazz series and the newly founded TD Niagara Jazz Festival. Dan Brown, who took the photographs, says he “aims to capture moments of transcendence when the performers have lost themselves in the music.”

I am not a big jazz fan because I came to music through a mixture of folksong and opera and my tastes simply weren’t wide enough to take in jazz as well. I have heard it said that in the field of light reading people can take in fantasy and science fiction but not mysteries as well. Operating on the same principle, my capacity for musical enjoyment just can’t vast enough. “Had we but world enough and time”, as Andrew Marvell said to his coy mistress.

But there is no doubt in my mind that the jazz performers in these photographs are enjoying themselves, especially in two coloured photographs, one of singers singing their hearts out, and one of wind players taking over a vineyard. Among the black and white photographs I was particularly struck by one where his trumpet has completely covered the face of the player so that the player and trumpet form one entity. From what i have heard jazz this is actually what happens. There is so much improvisation, with players and singers abandoning themselves to melody, that it is as if the music were playing itself. This must be what Dan Brown means by “transcendence”.

I’m sorry I won’t be around for the reception and the screening of Jazz on a Summer’s Day, but I can’t stay awake between 6 p.m. and midnight. There’s a lot I miss that way but I can’t help it.

"We've Forgotten Where Our Hearts Have Been" by Carrie Perreault at NAC

When I went to see Carrie Perreault’s show at NAC I was struck first of all by the emptiness of the room. It became quite clear very rapidly that this artist is not interested in producing beautiful objects to decorate private or even public rooms.

As Carrie states in a couple of barely visible statements isolated in the middle of large framed sheets of white paper, absence is itself a form of presence or presence is a form of absence or maybe one might say that the best way of being present is to be absent or to be absent is to be present. I failed to make a note of which way round this was put, but all the interpretations would be equally valid.

Next to these two framed statements were a pair of fringed flat cushions in a rather dull colour embroidered with the message that the artist did not expect to make much money by her art but if she did she would purchase more feathers to compensate the people who purchased the cushions. The precise nature of this message apparently escaped the artist as she was recording it, for she embroidered the word “life”, put a slash through it and substituted the word “live”. As Alice’s White Knight would put it, meaning trickles through her and our brains like water through a sieve.
Next in line came a series of small, unassuming photographs which, while in colour, did not seem to be recording anything in particular in at all a striking kind of way. This series was interrupted by two things and continued on the opposite wall. The first interruption consisted of the legend ‘We’ve Forgotten Where Our Hearts Have Been’ painted in large black letters on the wall. This seems to present the basic meaning of the show, but where in fact our hearts have actually been may or may not be indicated by a procession of marching modelled white feet that fills up the rest of the wall, or else by the photographs.

Natasha had told me that Carrie was also a performance artist. I asked her about this and understood her to say that at the reception Carrie had performed a one person show called “Impossible Conversations”, moving about to different parts of the gallery. I was sorry I hadn’t been able to be there. As I was cogitating over all this, a light dawned: Carrie was trying to produce the same effects as Samuel Beckett by naming the things it is almost impossible to express.
I was unable to speak to her face to face but was able to leave a message on her answering machine asking if she really did have an affinity with Beckett as I thought she had. She called back very interested in Samuel Beckett for a long time.

We went on to have a pleasant chat about him. I reminisced about my first encounter with him. At the end of my last year at the University of Illinois, before coming to Brock, I had to teach “Waiting for Godot” as part of a course in French literature in English translation. When it came to the point, I was unable to think of anything to say about it so I just read out a critical essay to someone else had written. When I finished one of the students remarked that he had come across “Waiting for Godot” in another course, where the professor had not attempted to say anything about it. Instead he had instructed the students to spend the hour meditating in silence.Carrie remarked that one of the reasons why Beckett is difficult to talk about is that he is often funny but in such a grim context that to laugh would be like laughing at a funeral. I said that that reminded me of a Freudian slip I had once made. While on a trip I turned up at a Catholic funeral and the priest asked me if I would be staying long. “No”, I said, “I’m just passing on”. Carrie asked if the priest had laughed and I said “No, he just didn’t know what to make of it”.
In a Beckettion context that is the usual reaction, which is why Carrie Perreault’s show had me think of Beckett. For a while I had been reduced to silence by her show, just as we two professors had been by Beckett.

Not that Carrie would claim for one minute to have attained his stature. As she said to me as soon as the subject came up, “Those would be very big shoes to fill.” When she talks about herself she says she’s “an advocate for human witnessing” which takes the form of “meditative gestural acts”, perhaps this is a little too serious and when she makes and artist’s statement she might do well to be more like Beckett and lighten up a bit. I understand that although Beckett’s critics were initially stricken dumb, he has now been analyzed more than anyone but shakespeare, but on the subjects of his own work Beckett was always very modest and unpretentious.

"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.