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.

PASSAGE AND RECALL BY KRYS KACZAN

                                      PASSAGE AND RECALL BY KRYS KACZAN


Restored to memory,
As the dawn breaks upon my sight,
I recover meaning
From the shadows of the night.
Memory, open the door
To so much and so more,
Hold the door open,
Now that I have awoken;
Not that I slept much at all.
I have lain awake
More than half the night,
Wondering how we gather meaning
From all the vestiges of seeming,
So we read our life like a book.
Again and again we look
For the meaning of a smile,
A tear, a laugh, a cry.
And memory, careful memory, supplies the answer why.
Open Sesame,
You have to say,
But it is no use forgetting
The word to unlock the hoard.
As the pen is mightier than the sword
Because it is able to record,
So the paint brush can do this as well.
The memory is one of sight,
Born fresh and new upon the light.
Krys, a Niagara artist, has been able to recall
Across the passage of the years,
That time when she was a child
And when she first smiled
To see the apple blossom break
Into snowy clusters to burst forth and shake
Along the gnarled and twisted boughs
Of the many orchards on her family farm.
Away and away the trees rolled
In green clumps and ridges,
Quite green again, once the blossoms fell,
After having burst forth in such an orgy of white.
She remembers it so well
That she has been able
To tell it like a fable
Of Creation on its first days,
When God turned His gaze
On the world He had just made
And saw that it was good.
That is its meaning
Contained in shape and seeming,
In every shade and hue,
Old, preserved in the mind,
And eternally fresh and kind.

FOUR RESCENT GRADUATES - FOUR MEDIUMS

     Modern art really began when Diaghilev brought the Russian Ballet to Paris in 1909.  His message
to the musicians, choreographers and dancers who worked for him was "Amaze me !"  They rose to the challenge in ways that astounded, mesmerized, disgusted, fascinated or shocked their audiences at the time, and creative types have been trying to produce the same effects ever since.  The artists in this show, judging by the elaborately impressive way they describe their own works are no exception.

     My brother, the painter Malcolm Bucknall, once told me that when he was reviewing another artist's work, what he tried to do was not so much to express a final objective judgment as to evaluate the work in terms of the artist's intentions.  He said this seemed to work and he advised me to do the same.  So, taking a stab at the idea that these four artists, like so many others since 1909, want to amaze us, I ask myself, "How did they go about it?"

     The work that struck me immediately as most amazing, so that I wondered when I first saw it if it was a work of art at all and not a curtain hung to signal the absence of a work of art which would appear later on, was the first of two works labeled "Ornate Fiction" by Alexandra Muresan.  Looking more closely at it, I perceived that what looked like a drape carried a picture in ink that was quite detailed but not a depiction of reality.  It also afforded glimpses of drawing on a panel underneath.  Both works labeled "Ornate Fiction" reminded me of successful works of speculative fiction in the way they combined the representational with the inventive and imaginary.  The title suggests that this was what was intended. 

     "Play Food" by Katie Mazi was what my eye fell on next.  Digital photographs of breakfast or snack foods which, as the artist explains, might appear in an advertisement, are, she appears to say, intended to disconcert rather than tempt us to consume, unsettling our notions of reality and what we can generally expect.  The fried egg that just sits there, enjoying its state of being, is a striking example of this. 

     The bunches of patterned textiles hanging from hooks and labeled "Untitled" by Jennifer Judson are also disconcerting.  We look at them and wonder if they are intended to be pot holders, cleaning rags, dish towels and so forth but they refuse to be identified as any of these things.  I was tempted to take them off their hooks and see what they could be used for, but because of the respect we have been trained to show for a work of art, I didn't dare.

     We see the influence of people like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp in some of this, but when we come to the three quite pleasant large abstracts by  Matt Caldwell we see them in a different light, largely because we have become quite used to abstracts so that they no longer shock or surprise us.  Judging by the artist's statement, they count as amazing because they turned out to be so different from what he was used to doing.  First of all, he amazed himself.

     I suppose this is true of all four artists, who are quite self reflective and appear to have started with an idea at least as much as with an image.  Maybe this is typical of recent graduates and they will become quite different later on.  That should be interesting to watch.

Puppet a-go-go

     As you look in the window of NAC, you see five enormous grotesque heads which seem to be made of painted papier-mâché.  Two are placed on the floor on either side of a rotating pole displaying the other three.  This gives you fair warning that tremendous effort and ingenuity has been expended and you are in for a surprise. 

     The participating artists do not tell you much about themselves.  No names are attached to the grotesques in the window and there is no indication of what they represent, what is meant by their huge size or what will happen to them once the show is taken down.  Visitors to the show are simply handed a little card informing them that four artists, Christine Cosby, Alexa Fraser, Trisha Lavoie and Clelia Scala, are responsible for the whole show, bringing together 1,000 finger puppets from far and wide in Canada and also showing an installation of four life size puppets, dressed but with animal heads.  They include a deer, a bear, a leopard and a lion.  There is also a crash derby featuring toy cars.

     No names of artists are attached to anything in the gallery anymore than to the heads in the window.  The participating artists are just out to have fun rather than to go down as movers and shakers in art history.  Making finger puppets is such a modest form of artistic activity that even children can join in and some of the finger puppets look as if they had been made by families for Halloween.  The grotesque heads in the window, now that I come to think of it, would be a good installation for a front garden for Halloween. 

     Ingenuity is on display and quite a few of the finger puppets are cunningly crafted in some detail.  I particularly noticed one set showing Little Red Riding Hood, her Grandmother, the Wolf and the Woodcutter.  A couple of other really striking sets were the Greek gods and the planets.  I also noticed the complete alphabet and a great many animals.  But what blew my mind was the sheer impact of the variety and quantity. 

     More and more artists are invited to join in, whether they think they are qualified artists or not, and free finger puppet workshops are being held throughout the "In the Soil" art show, which is running concurrently in downtown St. Catharines.  The organizers of this finger puppet show obviously feel that art is for the people and everyone should join in.  Too many people say "I have no artistic talent.  I can't even draw a straight line."  But if you are making finger puppets you don't have to draw straight lines - just lines that will fit over your fingers.  If you have fingers you can do it, and the organizing artists hope to set up an entire finger puppet festival in five years' time.  Good Luck to them!

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.