POST pacific POST.COM

Image credit: Ibghy & Lemmens, vtls 004518389-79-1 (Fred Carpenter), by permission
of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales.

With Intangible Economies still very fresh on my brain as I finish off the edits for an upcoming review in FUSE Magazine, the questioning of cultural value in an economic framework reared its head again as I met up with some people at the opening of The Space of Observation at 221A.

Curated by Mandy Ginson, one of 221A’s current curatorial residents, and featuring the collaborative workings of Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, the exhibition appears to be based on recent research from a residency in Wales, where an interest was taken in archival photographs of boxers from the 19th century.

Striving to literally connect the dots between economic basics such as supply and demand in the writings and drawings of British economist William Stanley Jevons, the Industrial Revolution’s demand for coal, and tying that to the popularity of boxing in working class Wales and their corresponding promotional portraits, the scope of the project seems to hinge on mental and abstract leaps from economic analysis of data to a musing on the the speculative successes of gambling on boxing.

I recognize the use of economic language, but the language fails to communicate anything to me. While some of Ibghy & Lemmens’ past works seem to be more fleshed out, this appropriation of economic language feels stretched beyond significance.

The exhibition did not inspire much exchange between the group who met to view it, with one comment lamenting that she just had no idea what the show was about. I had heard a similar comment about Intangible Economies shortly after the November conference with both comments made from different educated arts professionals, but there is a difference noted.

Unpacking the economic metaphor to get to the heart of the ideas, the vision was there in Intangible Economies and the concept could withstand critical engagement to continue the dialogue. I can’t say the same for The Space for Observation, as on a second consideration of the show, I still can’t sense anything more than a few half-interesting bits of research loosely strung together. The most resonating spark was the text copied from Jevon’s letter to his brother, expressing his commitment to keep drawing his graphs. There is a glory in the tone of his letter that was more inspiring and exciting than the exhibition as a whole, and unlike the show, actually meets at the intersection of language, economics, and research.

The Space of Observation continues until February 26 at 221A

Image credit: “Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech” presented by Chelfistch (Photo: Toru Yokota)

The unstoppable laughter coming from the gentlemen next to me throughout Toshiki Okada’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and Farewell Speech couldn’t help but imbue my perception of the play. Because my neighbor was laughing so hysterically, I didn’t have to. It’s an inversion of the feeling one might experience during a sombre funeral, when no one is laughing, so you have to, because you never really knew the person whose funeral you’re attending and crying then would be morally wrong, so to release something, anything, to cut the tension building up inside, you start laughing. Small giggles to start, but then it bubbles uncontrollably, coming in waves that seize you and you’re blinded by your own tears and your face hurts. 

Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and Farewell Speech is a loose continuation of monologues and movements. The inane conversations we have with our co-workers, the nervous physical gestures we each embody when we’re uncomfortable, the exaggerations of our pathetic problems — these forgettable moments that make up the bulk of our lives are blown up by Okada into an euphoric trance of awkward movements matched with a banality of the highest poetic order.

Repetition is here used in loops and never-ending cycles to parallel the monotony of everyday office life. Lies and innuendos peek out from the self-absorbed rambling of dialogue, speech patterns that resemble monologues rather than any form of a dialogue. Possibly broken down into issues of class, gender, and death, the real home run of the work was its take on Japanese corporate culture and the crumbling ideal of the salaryman and careerwoman.

If anyone thinks that The Office is dead-on for human behavior in corporate culture, times that by 1000 in intensity of human behavior at the peak of Japanese corporate life. Okada here manages to imbue a sense of the personal into the dusty stoic system of corporate patterns, helped out by a stellar soundtrack and mood lighting.

As I watched the exaggerations of the smallest of movements, the push of one’s glasses up the bridge of the nose, the rocking back and forth from toe to heel, the uneven way one stands, or walks, or talks, I became self-conscious of my own twitches in uncomfortable social situations. Immediately following at Centre A for the post-show reception, I found myself in such a situation making inane and awkward chatter with peers, pushing up my glasses and shifting my balance from left to right, and noticing how other people display the oddest little gestures as we stood talking about ourselves. I had to leave before the public conversation began with Okada, as already I was appreciating his efforts on multiple levels.

Chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and Farewell Speech plays through January 28 as part of PuSh Festival 2012. Click here for more details.

Image courtesy of RPM. Read their coverage by Christa Couture here.

As the kick off to PuSh Festival’s Aboriginal Performance Series, Beat Nation Live was the result of a three day residency between artists Kinnie Starr, Ostwelve, Cris Derksen, Jackson 2Bears, Corey Bulpitt, Gurl 23, and JB The First Lady. Stemming from this larger project (Beat Nation) by Grunt Gallery that “focuses on the development of hip hop culture within Aboriginal youth communities and its influence on cultural production,” the evening epitomized the celebration of voices rising from urban street culture.

Hip hop bass beats were the predominant undercurrent of the evening, to stage right Jackson 2 Bears mixed live and to the left a digital graffiti wall was being marked throughout the night by Gurl 23 and Corey Bulpitt. Senior Curator Sherrie Johnson took her cue from New Zealand and Australian festivals that programmed contemporary Aboriginal works alongside their international programming, and PuSh is now doing the same with a five part series.

Of the evening, Ostwelve was the most vocal of the bunch by proving his street cred now and again, which as an action is completely in line with his music and message, but there was something not quite right about the execution. As I sat amongst the rows of chairs in the make-shift club that was undeniably still a black box theatre, at times it felt like a staging of urban culture was unfolding. Michael Greyeyes may speak more to this in a broader context, but throughout last night, I did find it difficult to enter the experience.

When you displace graffiti or hip hop into settings like a black box or a white cube, the significance becomes about the medium rather than the content. I felt at times like I was witnessing the performance of hip hop rather than a hip hop performance, and maybe less chairs would have helped to lessen the voyeuristic atmosphere (as really, why would anyone sit for a hip hop show or sit by and watch someone do graffiti, actions which by nature are of dissent rather than passive spectacle).

Not sure how Beat Nation or Beat Nation Live will exist with the upcoming exhibition Beat Nation at the Vancouver Art Gallery, but I am personally curious to see what comes of this hip hop as Aboriginal identity exhibition especially following the praise and criticism of Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years as being the future of Aboriginal contemporary art and of not being Aboriginal enough. The persistent desire to pigeon-hole and define Aboriginal culture into genres is maybe not as proactive as some intend, as with identity-based programming, there really can be no one way or wrong way to proceed, as already, the frame from which you are operating from is going to exclude someone. Johnson’s curatorial initiative is a good step, but a great step we can all strive for is to move beyond expectations and boundaries of contemporary culture and Aboriginal culture while not losing the context that respectfully distinguishes our differences and praises what we do share on common ground.

Image credit: Rabih Mroué, The Pixelated Revolution, 14 January 2012, lecture-performance. Walker Art Center. Photograph by Cameron Wittig.

Taking the performance-lecture format to an unnerving height of paradoxical implosion, Beirut-based Rabih Mroué’s The Pixelated Revolution begins from the point of how we record the image, or more specifically, how we perceive the image.

Giving a rather pleasurable analysis in the language of film and media studies, Mroué walks us through his reading of Syria’s civilian uprising and the corresponding proliferation of uploaded images produced from cell phones to social networking formats such as Facebook. Never a doubt about the consciousness of aesthetics, Mroué performs a lecture on the aesthetics of ideology, all the while suggesting at the complexities of understanding an image, and spirals down image production analysis to techniques and equipment such as the use of the tripod in creating a stable and unstable imagery from which to either cradle the viewer into safe submission, or alternately, rock them into the unknown.

The lecture format has many strengths from which to carry his cause, and his scrutiny of the camera lens’s conflation with the eye, and how unflinching it remains as canons and snipers direct their weapons toward the lens/camera person was perhaps the most pressing point. Here the argument proposes that the royal we, meaning we who record and we who watch the recording, all collectively see the same image. In addition, the paradoxical subtheme is that we are also seeing and analyzing images as mediated through the language of fiction (ie. film, television, and video games), where a gun pointing at you/the camera is non-threatening to “real” safety, and so we keep on looking. The cameraman who recorded his own death is not dead, because we are still seeing his image, the camera’s image, and so he is not dead. The logic is flawed, but it is meant to be so, as it is a mediation on our own accountability in seeing such images.

The underlying argument supporting the analysis of the image is the persistent belief in the power of the image, especially of the unknown elements, as after all, the revolution is still unfolding. At one point in his performative lecture Mroué’s refers to Sophie Calle’s inability to find meaning in the footage of her mother’s last living moments, a gesture perhaps to strengthen his argument in the importance of acknowledging what recordings are unable to transpire. His comparison of Syria’s protestors to Dogme 95 is less convincing, as the purity of shooting “realistically” is a luxury of choice for the Dogme folks.

Mroué’s pedantic format is a double-twist as it plays on audience submission to the lecture format, giving a lesson on how to read images as fictionalized or real, but brilliantly done, the framework of the lecture remains a performance, an inherently fictionalized format to dramatize the real. Feeling critically engaged, yet completely duped, I have only praise for Rabih Mroué’s performance, while remaining skeptical of his lecture.

Presented at the CAG. Catch Mroué’s three-night run of Looking for a Missing Employee from Jan 26 - 28 as part of PuSh Festival 2012 

Like most post-it notes around my desk, the collection of ideas, dates, and numbers on them are barely legible at best, and more often than not, they are missing key information to unlock their relevance when found. Such was a post-it that gave an address, a date, and a time that’s been pasted to my calendar for sometime. I no longer recall the source from where I got the information, but I trust I must have written it down for a purpose, and so on that date, I went to the given address at the given time — and I’m very glad I did.

Image courtesy of Not Sent Letters Project

For the first time of all of my previous times in Vancouver, I actually felt like there was something actually interesting AND interested in the local going on. As a casual series of mixed performances that rolled out in waves throughout the evening, the night was a celebration of the website launch for Not Sent Letters Project, and featured one of their loosely defined Cabarets.

Organized by Jeremy Todd, who gives an immediate impression of affable patience, the Cabaret leaps out of a shoestring budget and defies all the pre-qualifying nonsense of needing to know who’s performing and who’s presenting. The night clicked not because of the range or the caliber of performances (which was expectedly mixed), but because the evening was mostly void of such pretenses, offering a relaxed and supported atmosphere for new works and works-in-progress. It is in this moment of risk where an exchange occurs that affects only those who are open to it.

Ranging from short sets of songs, readings, and performances, the common denominator in each of the grab-bag surprises was an inherent vulnerability to try out something new. The evening reaffirmed for me why this type of mixed and experimental show works best when the venue remains intimate, as here, the lines between audience and performers are less static and therefore less precious to expectations of spectacle. The format is the tried and true structure of the interdisciplinary cabaret and salon that are probably most active in Montreal within Canada’s live art scene. I was privy to some good ones in Edmonton under Mile Zero Dance, but I was also privy to them growing too big, too fast.

Personal highlights include the sheer presence of Lady Dragu, better known as Margaret Dragu, aka Lady Justice, who I’ve seen over the years during past Visualeyez Festivals. Her collaboration with Todd and Graham Meisner left an imprint in my mind in the moment the Lady D pivoted forward and circled around Todd. If it was a film, this would be a moment of cinephilia, but in the arena of ephemerality, I think it’s just called a good show. Other highlights include the stare down by Elizabeth Milton and the captivating sing-songs of Zuzia Juszkiewicz.

Check out Not Sent Letters for more information on the project and news on future Cabarets

I found myself on West 4th buying a terracotta pot from the excess wonder that is Kitchen Corner Store. The clerk made a remark about how don’t I know it’s suppose to be the coldest winter and did I think buying a flower pot would mean it was Spring?

I said I just moved here from Alberta and he said no more. But while I can recall past winters and hating every single second of scraping my windshields, I know I am already losing grip of what those winters also brought, namely, an unrelenting sense of perspective.

Image taken from Howdee

For example, on the first day of the year, I walked by the Polar Bear Swim on English Bay and waded into the crowd as a spectator for that moment of collective release. The first thing I overheard was someone saying, “I guess if you’re going to do this in Canada, Vancouver is the place to do it. My thoughts are with the people in Winnipeg today!” At first I thought, how nice, a kudos to Winnie’s street cred from the easy-living West Coast. I later told a friend living in Winnipeg about how her city was mentioned, and she thought it was absolutely HILARIOUS that anyone even thinks they can do a Polar Bear Swim in Winnipeg.

Everything’s frozen solid.

A fact I had once known, but had forgotten as I stood on the beaches of English Bay, unable to even see my own breath as I watched thousands of people hurl themselves into the water only to come screaming back out seconds later.

But what troubles me is how this loss of perspective reveals itself. Recently I was in the presence of a remark following a charged discussion held on border crossings between Mexico and America. Thousands of migrants are dying in the scorching Sonora Desert, and this play had attempted to render this fact into a poetic contemplation. Not sure how convincing their efforts were as in the elevator directly afterwards, a fellow audience member who had stayed for the post-show talk turned to me and another stranger and said, “Well, at least the Mexicans are getting a real Canadian welcome with this weather!” I thought it was an insensitive statement at best, but I also thought I had found protest against his presumption that no one in the theatre company had been more north. Looking back though, I am actually protesting his perspective of “weather” as there’s really nothing Canadian about this cold dampness. I could be in any number of countries in and around the North Sea or in the Northern regions of China or Japan. This type of unwarranted over generalization and lackadaisical perspective may be a real Vancouver welcome, as I am finding more and more reasons to believe that Vancouver doesn’t really exist in the same country as Winnipeg … and it is from this perspective that I need to begin.

Image credit: Blenda from Andre Gintzburger

The historical backdrop to Amarillo has several different narratives, depending on who you ask, but America’s deterrent strategy in 1994 to shift migrant crossings from urban locations to isolated regions casts a long shadow over the play’s central theme.

The consequence of this policy change (which remains “successful” in American standards) is the drop in illegal migrant crossings and the rise of migrant deaths as they try to pass through the vastness of the Sonora Desert. The relentless will to cross the border despite the risk of death or incarceration, was the subject of Norteado (2009), the film screening preceding Amarillo on Wednesday night in collaboration with Vancouver’s Latin America Film Festival (and also starring Alicia Laguna who is in both film and play) and this would again be the theme in Amarillo.

Presented by Mexico City’s Teatro Linea de Sombra, a company that with a laudable reputation for its integrated blend of mixed media, movement, and research methods, Amarillo relies heavily on its imagery, creating vivid tableaux that engage with all six perspectives of the stage’s black box.  As the title refers to the destined town in Texas, one that remains forever out of reach, the show is a series of moments just beyond a finger’s grasp.

Both Norteado and Amarillo may be structured on the same premise of a lone everyman trying to cross over the border, but while the film offers a potential catharsis, Amarillo denies its audience any such emotion, implicating the audience into the production of the play whenever possible through technical choices such as leaving the house lights on for parts of the show, or addressing the audience directly through repeatedly asking, “What are you looking at?”

Using multiple live feeds, some stationary and some manipulated live by the cast themselves, the noted question of “What are you looking at?” reaffirms a fractured and unstable perception of the situation.

However, the most interesting part of the evening was not within the show, but in the post-show talk back, which as an event, was emblematic of the political issues and its place in our everyday.

First, less than a third of the audience remained behind for the talk, which to a cynic, would signal a malaise of consciousness in engaging with political theatre.

Then, the two main threads of responses that were expressed by those remaining could be boiled down to:

- An earnest discussion to tease out the “art” or specific aspects of the production as something separate from its politics.

- A call to arms for action and activism!

I almost felt there was a general confusion towards art that was political and politics as expressed through art, as if they were different genres. For example, one woman’s question was a suggestion for the theatre company to invite agents of border control to come see the show. I’m sure the suggestion was well intentioned, but why is the will to do something always put back onto the artists? They have made the work, and now it is our turn to respond. Nothing is preventing her or anyone from making that phone call or writing such a letter if so desired, but this divide of art & action as removed from social responsibility is also, unfortunately, one of the persistent backdrops in works like Amarillo.

Click through for more information on showtimes and PuSh Festival Events

This past week, a slew of new art exhibitions opened from the depths of UBC to the nearby city of Surrey, and while I have never been fond of seeing work during an opening or even writing about it based on this haphazard encounter, I will record the going ons as the following post:

Going backwards, I ventured out to The Surrey Art Gallery on Saturday to visit the opening of Beyond Vague Terrain: The City and the Serial Image, the new group show curated by Jordan Strom, whose name I once associated with Fillip Magazine. The journey in and out of Surrey was by far the most interesting part of the evening, as I managed to convince a friend to go on a public transit adventure with me for both of our first trips into the second largest city in British Columbia.

Image credit: Helma Sawatzky “The Phoenix Complex” 2012

As with the progression of each train stop and bus transfer, the essence of Surrey started to take shape. Before arriving at what I first thought was a skating rink, noted was how demographics started to shift and phantom memories of Sherwood Park, Alberta emerged as the six lane traffic rumbled by. A mixture of being turned around and also being asked directions by (other) recent newcomers, my first foray into Surrey was limited, but I know what I saw en route and what I saw in the gallery were not exactly compatible.

Beyond Vague Terrain carried heavy hitters like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, along with the next generation such as Khan Lee and Owen Kydd, and as far as works go, I paused at length before the works of Chris Gergley. His “Vancouver Apartment” series was only outstanding in its direct address of the housing shortage issue that in many ways defines Vancouver’s vague terrain. I had to wonder if these portraits of the charming early to mid century Metro Vancouver walk-ups situated in Surrey were seen as fantasies, or maybe an affront to what Surrey lacks in choice and history. The majority of the works in the show engaged with Metro Vancouver’s facades, but having no nostalgia attached to the city, and no invitation by any of the works to engage further than what was presented, I left Surrey learning nothing new about Vancouver.

I missed all openings on Friday night, but I ducked into Or Gallery and Centre A on Saturday afternoon for a quiet look around. In the former, a premiere of Annika Rixen’s solo exhibition was up in the gallery’s Vancouver location. The bulk of Sciences of Observation was inspired by 19th century physicist John Tyndall’s Six Lectures on Light, and I was absolutely mesmerized by “Verification of Physical Theories,” a video loop of what I can only imagine as a stationary perspective of a translucent moon’s orbit around the sun. In the latter, waiting for was a group show of four young artists addressing migration and displacement, but in irony, I got there early to took a look around and decided I was not going to be waiting for the artist talk after all.

Image credit: Annika Rixen “The Rendering of Invisible Rays Visible” (Video Still) 2012

On Thursday night the evening went on longer than I would have thought. Still going backwards, the last opening I attended that night was at Catalog Gallery. If you’ve never heard of the place, I doubt you’re the only one; if you have heard of the place, I am guessing you were born in the 90s. There were some paintings in the front room by Andrew Young, and while polite convention would lend to comments like “technically good” and “new figurative,” the bulk of action stayed in the backroom by the kegs and DJ. In some ways, the work was primarily conservative compositions of the young and jaded, so a nice parallel was drawn from the room in the front to the room in the back, but I don’t know if that was intentional.

I had been having a conversation in the back room of another gallery earlier that night, chatting with new and old acquaintances at grunt gallery that also seemed oblivious to the show in the front space. Christoph Runné’s video installation maybe did not warrant any impassioned discussions, but a good chat was had about the tight parameters of critical discourse in Vancouver. I was told a possibly true story about others in accountable positions who were a bit too vocal of dis-satisfactions. They were scolded by members of the higher echelons to stop this impolite behavior, who were only trying to help the misguided young person. I believe the moral of the story was that Vancouver isn’t critiqued enough.

Earlier down the street, Ian Wallace appears for the second time with his new solo showing, Masculin/Féminin, at Catriona Jeffries. In comparison, his collaboration with Neil Wedman at Surrey looked really interesting, and if you have seen both, you will know what I mean. Wallace has more than proved himself to be an important figure to Vancouver’s art history, but this new work came off as derivative of successful Wallace’s from times past, and I am disappointed.

Image credit: Ian Wallace, from series Masculin/Féminin

And the night that never seemed to end started at CAG for a talk/response to Corin Sworn’s Endless Renovation by Nancy Gillespie. Gillespie’s advertised credentials caught my attention, as they were relating to past doctoral research on some of my favorite writers that shattered the limits of English poetics such as Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy. But beware of credentials. Endless Renovation may currently exist as an installation, but the work began as a performance of Sworn’s now-recorded disjunctive monologue.  Having traveled from warm receptions at Glasgow International and TATE Modern, the majority of discussions relating to Endless Renovation have been focused primarily on the visual references in how we construct and construe meaning, and no exceptions were made at the CAG as Gillespie also sidestepped any poetics analysis in favour of New Lacanian readings. In my humble opinion, New Lacanian theories exists only to postulate Old Lacanian theories as still relevant. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned in desiring a discussion of literary strategies employed throughout Sworn’s text, but hey, New Criticism is still younger than Old Lacanian theory.

And at the beginning of it all, I started the exercise with energy on Wednesday at UBC. I wrote a full account that can be read here.

I have just watched Phyllidia Lloyd’s The Iron Lady (2011) and I am left with two heavy disturbances converging into one.

The first disturbance came in the opening moments of the new biopic of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as portrayed by Meryl Streep. As all the funding bodies did their obligatory flash across the screen, prominently displayed was the UK Film Council’s logo.

As an organization, UKFC started only 12 years ago under the Labour Party to promote new British cinema. By mid 2010, the organization had been dismantled under the Conservatives. The discrepancy from what I had known to what I now saw was revealed in a quick search, which to my horror, showed that UKFC never died (in name, anyways). Worse than simply being burnt to the ground, UKFC has been transformed to carry a new agenda.*

To nip public funding of the arts is only a short-term response to an issue that will never disappear. The same rigid thinking in Canada has led to impractical reforms of human rights such as increasing incarceration to promote public safety or criminal laws that jeopardize the safety of sex workers as a means to stop prostitution. But to absorb and transform the existing funding body to serve its own ideology, the current British government have hit the core of ideological control.

The arts has always been held in contempt of provoking and challenging the status quo, but the arts holds an understated power that makes it one of the most cherished and feared aspects of civilization. This is hardly an exaggeration, as no other human achievement can provoke such a range of reactions and exchange. The very reasons the arts are constantly attacked is reason enough to suggest its ability to aggravate issues that lie far below the surface, issues that if considered deeply on mass could provoke change to the unsatisfactory bits of status quo.

If the Conservatives axed the whole of UKFC under ideological reasons in 2010, in a sly move they have quietly chosen to keep UKFC breathing, but only breathing life into new projects like the sentimental dramatization of Margaret Thatcher, one of the most despised leaders in modern history. 

This leads me to the other disruption of thought, the dramatization of Thatcher as riddled by Alzheimer’s and flashbacks to her rise as the first and still only female Prime Minister of Britain. The film focused her ascent into power as a series of self-determined confrontations against persistent sexism running in parallel to her limited, yet haunting love towards her son, husband, and father. Streep’s chameleon powers also managed to humanized Thatcher to the point where one can feel something other than contempt for the person who devastated our very sense of social responsibility.

Tying back to my first disruption, the power of the cinema has swayed my perspective in loosening my contempt of Thatcher’s politics. The UKFC-funded film has shifted my way of looking at certain things in the world, which unbegrudgingly, all well-made art is capable of doing. The power of art is here exemplified as limitless and surprising, and  in this backhanded way this film has made me question how an empathetic portrayal of Thatcher and her policies will affect our current society sliding deeper into a global Conservativism? 

In Canada, imagine a new film or documentary or anything other than this to humanize Stephen Harper. Unimaginable to some; such a work would be illuminating to others, and beware the power to shift and mythologize is nothing new (one only needs to think back to the media blitz of Kim Jong-Il’s mourners).

The irony though is the loosening of my own rigid contempt for one of these figures, a loosening that I have only argued and hoped for to occur on the other side. This film has successfully used what I cherish as a tool to evasively blur the boundaries between history, art, and ideology, and I am left to contemplate how this strategy, when reversed, would appear.

*This post by Media Activist is not swayed, but whose argument I reference.

As an exhibition curated by Marina Roy, an Assistant Professor in UBC’s Visual Art Department and a practicing artist in her own right, Never-Dying Worm presented two impressions.

Burrowing deep beneath the Walter C. Koerner Library, the window-wrapped AHVA gallery displayed the administrative tenacity of Heather Passmore’s “Form Letters” (2008 - ongoing), a selected archive of letters from galleries, residencies, and granting agencies that weigh more towards rejection than acceptance. Moving away from illustrating each letter and towards a revelation of record keeping, the series as a whole was surprisingly nostalgic. As I peered over the grid of letters dating back ten years, the assortment of letterheads and corresponding names attached to the various institutions were duly noted as a set of fluctuating names within this standardized method of peer-to-peer engagement. Time moved on, but it would appear that language stood still (save for a few hilarious oddities).

This is the first impression: that beneath the necessary persistence, the work opened up an understated importance of the tangible material. The letters themselves are the fetish, and they are all the more cherished when traces of handwriting appear beyond the obligatory signature. The traces of presence were also visible in the work of Kelly Lycan, who had several of the strongest pieces in the exhibition.

Image credit: Kelly Lycan “315 Eyeglass Lenses” Detail (2004)

Expanding beyond a mere obsession with collecting and creating seemingly use-less objects, works like “Doily Stump” (2004 - ongoing), “315 Eyeglasses Lenses” (pictured above), and the stand-out, “Tab Flyers” (2009) from WHITE HOT, Lycan consumes our excess, our loaded material discards, and offers back to us these formal monuments built out of considered accumulation.

An honorable mention also goes to Derek Dunlop’s “A Lover’s Geography” (2008), a photo-based project of deserted and heavily pixelated domestic spaces, furniture, and homely fabric patterns. It is not obvious, though overheard was the explanation that these are screen captures taken from amateur online pornography videos. Their uncanny sensibility comes from an odd blend of Kijiji aesthetics and a mild shout-out to Thomas Ruff’s Nudes series, the latter which heavily distorts freeze frames of digitally downloaded pornographic images into blurred portraits of bodies in motion, exacting a sensuality where there was none before. Dunlop’s works are barren landscapes in contrast, and perhaps it’s unfair to contrast, but so it goes.

While there were other works in the exhibition, they seemed anomalies to me in their overall relationship to each other. This is the second impression, which came hours later as I was reading over the leaflet containing Roy’s curatorial essay. As a mediation on the unconscious and the material turn, instigated by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from where the exhibition’s title is derived, I paused to wonder if what I was reading was in fact about the exhibition I just visited. There were some common themes of interest, but a close analysis of the essay didn’t necessarily need any of the art works to support or even compliment its existence. While I shudder at the marketing copy of exhibitions that inanely describe the works into bare reductions, and I can barely stomach curatorial essays that expand upon these reductions with c.v. padding, this type of academically rigorous arts writing arguably swings hard the other way and subsumes its parallel exhibition.

This is sliding into a quandary on the relationship between the words of an exhibition and the works of an exhibition, and here I am finding them too disparate, but nevertheless, unexpectedly welcoming in presenting the choice of multiple entry points. 

Exhibition runs until February 4, 2012 at AHVA Library Gallery

It’s a shame to have to repeat anything written by Los Angeles-based Mat Gleason, but these words do reaffirm the very point of contention that has been occupying threads of my most recent conversations.

In a recent Huffington Post article, Gleason glibly waxes over the pitfalls of the Western art world including this sentiment here:

“A painter struggles in his or her studio with a stack of canvasses, tubes of oil paints and nothing but time. It is a romantic vision we can all accept. It is also pretty much the only way that great painting takes place. But ask an art writer to write about your art and they want $3 a word. Where is the romance and pursuit of pure artistic vision for the writer?”

Initially blinded by the ridiculous notion that writers should not be paid out of some romantic pursuit of artistic vision, I completely overlooked this portrait of the “Artist.” Summoned here as some literary trope, the Artist in all seriousness appears sequestered away in a private studio struggling with all those tubes of oil paint.

Gleason’s a hack, but unfortunately he is also reflecting and reaffirming a dominant perspective that sits at the bane of being in the arts in the 21st century.

The inherent value of being a functioning member of the arts today sits in the shape of some deformed hierarchy, existing only as relations and reactions to the past or those who keep vigil of the past. I have been hearing and dishing my fair share of grand delusions and exhausted dejections about the arts, but they often oscillate as lamentations on surface issues. It’s hardly disputable that arts funding is vanishing and art collectors are losing their minds, but these protestations are analogous to weeping over band-aid repairs for a palliative patient.

The structure and our reassertion of contemporary art and its function have become so nuanced and inbred that distinctions of myth and reality perpetuate each other. The primary attack of the arts is a disdain for elitist fodder, and the primary defense of the arts is the advocacy for specialized knowledge. Word choices aside, the very definition of “art” has been flattened into two sides of the same coin. This character of the serious and enlightened artist living on the fringes of society exists as both the hero and the villain, and he (and it’s still usually a he) is not much more than a scapegoat, “special” by default rather than understood by any active connections to social contexts.

It’s time to consider mythologizing another type of bildungsroman if we are still searching and advocating for the value of art, a value that cannot be diminished and determined by funding cuts and inflated speculations. Reassessing our modes of distribution is one way to start …

Is it too obvious to dislike Douglas Coupland’s visual art? I didn’t find it so.

A few weeks ago I was briefly in Calgary and caught the opening at Trépanier Baer for Douglas Coupland’s Twenty-First Century.

I saw Coupland’s visual art once before as part of the National Portrait Gallery show that started in Edmonton in 2010, but there was no point in picking on contemporary revisions of portraiture when the main issue was how Canada doesn’t have an official NPG.

I walked around the crowds a few times, looking at the Chris Cran’s and Ron Moppett’s looking at the Douglas Coupland’s. I got into a half-argument with a young painter about painting text, even though we were arguing over lacquered editions of one-liner slogans, but that seemed besides the point.

Image credit: Douglas Coupland, “Twelve Slogans for the Early 21st Century”

I felt no inclination whatsoever to write about the show, especially after reading that Coupland refuses to discuss his writing career in any press for his visual art work, which I think is a little Billy-Bob, as I can’t imagine anyone, especially commercial galleries, caring about Coupland’s painted words without the success of his published ones.

The majority of the show was dominated by large panels of brightly coloured smart phone codes, with when decoded, revealed their titles (which you could also access the old fashion way via the price list). It’s hard to say what was more tiresome, the coded titles or the numbers sitting next to titles like “God is Dead,” but then again, the issue of monetary value of a work of art goes back to Coupland’s position as an established author and public name, and so to his specifications, such an issue will remain off limits for an art review.

The other works were pointy plastic floor sculptures that resembled the peaks of sharpened pencil crayons, which offered a contrast to the unsharped pencil crayons hanging in frames near the back of the gallery, which incidentally were the only things I remotely liked, but their presentation also reminded me of a student design portfolio show I see every year.

I hate to mention those books again, but I have in the past appreciated Coupland’s pop sensibilities, but this show doesn’t convince me that he’s slowed or made any new headway in trying to make pop culture into a cult. In context of his novels spanning over twenty years, the works in the gallery give another dimension to his ongoing detangling and retangling of identities and technology, but as a white cube show that tries to distinguish itself on its own, it made me tired and grow ever wearier of what passes for art in the Twenty-First Century.