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.  
  

                                              

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.


                                                                                                                                          

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!

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.

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.

"On Site" by Mori McCrae at N.A.C.

The latest show at NAC, put on by Mori McCrae, carries the title "On Site: Visual Poetry from the Tyrone Guthrie Centre." I suppose "On Site" is a reference to the actual site in Ireland where Mori McCrae spend a three-week residency, together with a recreation of her experiences there at the site of NAC. When Sir Tyrone Guthrie died he bequeathed his home, just as it was, to the Irish nation as a haven for artistic people to develop their creativity. Mori qualified both as a visual artist and a poet and had the joy of foregathering with other creative types every evening over a delicious dinner.

One of her poems, inscribed on a NAC wall, is about a typical evening when they would go out for a walk, chasing away a neighbour's dog who hung around the kitchen looking for handouts. She has very warm memories of her stay. She says, "The paring down of the basic daily acts of working, eating, exercise and sleeping, under the watchful care of an unobtrusive staff, left me with the impression of being a resident at a 'benign asylum,' in the very best sense of both words. By installing at NAC the poetry written there, she wants to bring this "benign asylum" to St. Catharines.

The words "benign asylum" really resonate with me because in the late seventies I had what used to be known as a nervous breakdown.  I received very little sympathy from my colleagues at Brock for the state I was in and was forced to seek refuge in the hospital.  It turned out to be a real refuge where I was able to relax and paint as I hadn't done for some time.  I expressed my pleasure and gratitude to one of the mental health practitioners by saying, "This really is an asylum!"  She was quite shocked and said, "Surely it can't be as bad as that!"  "No, " I said, "what I mean is that it's an asylum in the sense of a refuge."  Finally I had found a place where I could find peace and quiet and relax with what gave me joy.

It is always a good idea -- in fact it is absolutely essential -- to pay careful and exact attention to the words a poet uses, although Mori demurred when I called her a poet and said she wasn't a poet yet.  Maybe she means that she is not the kind of bard who can stand on an eminence and declaim, because her poetry, so far from being declaimed, is inscribed, and not always legibly, in a visual context.

One of her installations represents an open book with apertures cut out to reveal the heart and soul of the person penning the message, conveyed in an illegible scribble.  Another, which is quite a favourite of mine, represents a scattering of three-dimensional rocks rising from the ocean with an individual word inscribed on each.  You get the message by hopping from rock to rock, at some risk of being swept away by the water of the emotions.

Mori says she works a lot with water.  Of course water is one of the four traditional elements -- earth, air, water, and fire -- present in magic alchemy and folklore.  Water is important as a medium because it flows over and around and under, wearing away what seems so much harder than itself.  The Taoist philosophers of ancient China stressed the importance of this, as Ursula K. Le Guin once pointed out.

The one poem directly about the Tyrone Guthrie Centre is painted directly on the wall, some of it too high up to read without the help of a ladder.  The most legible poem is written on a couple of parallel blocks and is, at least initially, about Snow White awakening not to a physical prince but to the idea of one.  Mori says that the idea is what is most important for an artist.  Other installations vaguely resembling a loosely draped pelvis, do not have anything written on them at all.  "Thoughts that do lie too deep for words?"

I came away from this show with a line from Emily Dickinson resonating in my mind:  "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant."  Not being a bard like Dylan Thomas, Mori is allusive and indirect.  Maybe that is why she says she is not a poet.  Her least reticent poems are painted on the NAC windows and are deliberately contradictory.  She invites and leaves us with a contradiction.  She says herself that she finds inspiration in what is unplanned and accidental.  As we have already seen, in this she is not alone.

I talked to her about the Quaker idea of a "leading," which is important to me because I am a Quaker.  A "leading" is an inner prompting which arises from the depths of one's psyche and which the rational ego is inclined to deny but which can lead one in the right direction if one will only listen to it.  She said that was her experience too.  So I suppose that Mori, like so many young creative people is on a Vision Quest.  It is a pleasure to be invited to share it.

"Suffused" by Judy Graham at NAC

The latest show at NAC, "Suffused" by Judy Graham, is not at all easy to pin down in words, and Judy herself does not make too much of an effort to describe it in words that convey and immediately accessible meaning. In her artist's statement, she says, "These images are most often a projection of memory, a memory that recalls the biological. They have taken up residence where the medical laboratorial self left off, or where research into human anatomy only exists now in the stacks. These drawings are meant to recall organic abstraction and the such-ness of biotic potential."

What really threw me in this oracular statement was the word "such-ness," which I have only come across before in a Buddhist context and is there used in a metaphysical sense to refer to what one can otherwise call "the nature of things as they are" -- the irreducible nature of reality which cannot be changed but only overcome.  We live in "Samsara," that is material existence which is characterized by suffering, and the aim of the Buddhist is to rise above it by refusing to let oneself be dominated by it.

How does that apply to lab samples, since what I suppose Judy started out with were slides of cell structures, dyed and magnified for scientific analysis?  For an answer, all one can do is look at the ink and pastel drawings on the walls of the Dennis Tourbin Gallery, since the function of the words in an artist's statement is to refer one back to the visual art they attempt to define.

These drawings are all quite large and essentially similar, since cell structures cannot vary dramatically and the colours were originally chosen to throw these cell structures into relief.  A less metaphysical term than "such-ness" would be "a given."  The given in this case seems to be a bean.  Each of these remembered and consequently simplified cell structures, reduced to an abstraction, somewhat resembles a bean.  Perhaps when I think of these cell structures as the building blocks of a human being with its potential for physical and emotional expression indicated by such titles as "Seeing Red" and "Repulsion," I might make a childish pun and call that bean "a human bean."

Each human bean or group of human beans is surrounded by a contrasting shadow which conveys in pastel much the same effect as a watercolour wash, throwing it into relief.  The word "such-ness" comes back as no more precise word can serve as a technical, scientific definition of what Judy Graham is attempting to convey.  It can only be an allusion, bearing the same relation to words as aboriginal smoke signals do the messages they convey.

In the end the words send one back to the pictures, which is what visual art is all about.  Its "such-ness" consists of shapes and colours and whatever meaning they convey directly through the eye.  In other words, are these drawings worth looking at?  And I think I can safely say that they do have that worth to a considerable degree.  What is ultimately Buddhist about them is that they can serve as a focal point for meditation.  You may ask, for meditation on what?  Insofar as meditation implies contemplation of a particular topic and not simply staring into space in order to cultivate detachment, I might say that its object is "the human condition," the state of being a human bean.  In other words, I think I have ended up saying exactly the same things as Judy, only at greater length, as I try to explain her few, carefully chosen words to myself.