Art Reviews: Montreal, New York, Your Town.

The reason I went to Quebec last week-end was barely for the David Blatherwick installation, and neither for the very critiqued "De Millet À Matisse" exhibition.


I mostly wanted to see the Rita Letendre`s "In The Colors Of The Day" retrospective. Yes mam ! The first retro that I ever saw from her apart from a semi-retrospective at galerie Simon Blais that I had the chance to witness a few years ago. My first impression entering the unique room of this...errr... "retrospective?" was my deception that it was so small. I knew there was going to be some good works, but I wanted more of this. In case you don`t know who she is, Rita Letendre is a worldwide reknown painter that lived 30 years in Toronto and elsewhere but was born in Drummondville, Quebec from abenaquis ascendance, and now lives in Longueil, Montreal) Someone once argued that Letendre was probably the only painter from Quebec that never made one bad painting. I`m tempted to believe him, though her style may not please to detractors of the abstract.

I was surprised by the way the tableaux were all mixed up, not respecting any chronology or "themes". I was wrong: they were all arranged following the natural spectrum of colors, and I`m dumb to not have realized this myself, though I did notice they had pulled all the black and white canvases into a tiny triangular cubicle in the middle of the room. May I comment on the logistic here for a sec ? They made a fantassstic job !! General public is so lazy when comes the time to contemplate art: the organizers had pared to this by installing a great quantity of armchairs around the center cubicle so we could sit and watch the paintings at ease. Then, the tableaux were marked with large dates on the walls so we could infer the chronology ourselves as we moved along. It took a second to just turn your head around and notice the 8 or 9 different "periods" of the artist (at least represented here). I wrote to these people and lend a bravo, I really had a great time in Quebec.

Now, speaking about the works..hmmm... I`m not a poet, I don`t even master the english language (I`m not english, in case you wonder), and I`m writting here the way I speak exactly because I`m not supposed to do it like this. So I won`t attempt at assembling all sorts of fancyful words describing the style and emotion and joy and dynamism and blabla, that emanate from Letendre`s paintings. Everyone else does that !! Me, I am selecting 7 important groups that I decipher from the artist`s chronology and I`ll see if I can add any personal interpretations to my feeble attempts at describing them.


1) "Casser De La Géométrie" (breaking some geometry: bundles of rectangles):

This first period underlines Rita Letendre`s decision of separating herself from the Quebec "Automatist" movement, and explore geometry (she affirms she owes a lot to Borduas, whom taught her to "find herself through her art"). The oldest work "Ressac" (1954), is simply a panoply of small white, grey and dark "touches" that ressembles tiny vertical rectangles. You could get a sense that a rock had been splattered by water, if you insisted in reading anything into the title. "Jazz À Amsterdam" (1953-55) and "Adieu Sezame" (1955) are both series of perpendicularly superimposed rectangles, both colored and black and white, the first one being much more dense and filled than the second. The title of "Adieu Sezame" seems to wave a goodbye to the Automatists that first welcomed her. These small tableaux with kaki backgrounds and lost of white, really belong to the 60`s and jazz music, but they are unfortunately emptied of a "voice", of a "personality", since they are comparable to any similar geometric artwork provided by quantities of artists from the period. The solarized pastels in "Épouse Fébrile" (1956) are already much more pleasing to the eyes (the squares are now loose and applied as brush strokes on a white background), but they look too much like a copycat of Marcelle Ferron. Somehow, regardless of what theorists say, Letendre was still searching for her style here.


2) Grotesque Orientalism.

It`s hard to describe these paintings, but finally we get a sense of a personality. We recognize a style. "Tropiques II" and "Augure" (both from 1961) are very similar: they both contain two black oily "serpentine" structures (painted linearly but with contours in "zig-zags"), layed over or under other criss-crossing color serpentines bursting at precise points. Mostly red, green, orange and brown surrounding dark oily forms. You could be above a japanese or chinese palace. Or they could spouse the contours of oriental lamps. The term "orientalism" is not from me, it is indicated in the exhibition. The texts refer to a ressemblance with methods of asian calligraphy. "Tsiyah" (1963) is actually from another "sub-period", the "Israel" period, where she used a spatule and mixed large masses of "dark oil" with portions of other colors like here the brown at the base that whirls into the shape of a bowl. I`m supposing she only used blacks and browns during that period (?) The painting holds an iconous,quai religious, feel. A golden bowl against a black background is a powerful image, even if I made it all up myself (!). Apparently, the large dynamic gestures that mainly consisted the technique employed here, are the base of the following "period", which will gain her a certain recognition.


3) Wrestling Masses.

No more ambiguous forms, no more details that could let us infer any figure, this is minimalist abstraction at its purest, or almost. Rita Lentendre simply decided to present dark masses, squares, rectangles, that are entering the canvas plane and deforming into some sort of "battle" one against the other, like in a game of attraction and repulsion. The first example shown, "Drift" (1964), is a timid encounter between a white/grey mass at the bottom that gets mixed up with the upper dark. As we move through the years, the contours of these masses will become better defined and often corners will "point rageously" and expand toward the field of impact. "Espaces Changeants" (1964, a cute little green and black canvas), "Impact" (1964) and "Chock" (1966) are all "battles" between 2 or 3 black masses surrounded by a unique color: greenlime in the first one, violent red in the second, and white in the third canvas (she seems to intermittently return to black and white throughout her career). "Chock" exactly looks like a Borduas in which black masses would magnetically react to each others. The rather raw, brutal, and minimalist approach of this period will not please to everyone. The concept is firm and irreprochable, and that is probably how and why miss Lentendre got respected for them. But for art`s sake, if you permit one opinion, it`s a good thing she moved on. "Espace" (1967) is reducing the confrontation to two hard-edged black "triangles" or "arrows" on white facing each others, what directly announced the next phase of the artist.


4) The Prismatic Arrows:

The arrows represent the height of Rita Lentendre`s career, the period for which she will gain the most reconnaissance and success. In design they correspond to an age when the "pseudo-futuristic" ideals of the 50`s and 60`s were finally taking shapes. New materials and colors like plastic and fluorescent orange (or fluo-anything) were in vogue, as much as principles of aerodynamism (car shapes, etc...). In the age of spacecraft housing, everything needed to look sharp, and I don`t know to what conscious level Rita Letendre participated into this, but sure thing is that her flamboyant canvases from the period corresponded to this "new age" aesthetic. Speaking of "new age", simply the figure of light prism is already charged with esoterical meaning. Not that Rita is a sorceress of any kind, that was probably just coincidental, but as possible as it is with anything abstract, I wouldn`t ridicule anyone inferring the sublime into them. The flabbergasting thing about these tableaux is that they each look very clear and pure, respecting precise hard-edges, color tones and contrasts. They look like the better studies or explorations of airport designs from the 70`s. But while some of them look "classy" and "intemporal" (the darker colored ones, like "Lumière Boréale Ou Northern Lights" (1968), "Pulsation" (1970) or "Midnight Light" (1970)), other look quite 70`s and kitsch, like they couldn`t have been made in any other period (the later brightness of "Sharav II" (1973) and "Sadeh" (1974)). But why not ? Why do we find certain color arrangements so extreme ? I am certain that with all the amount of arrows Rita had produced in her life, that she simply explored any spectrum of colors and tones possible. Their titles reveal that they function like prisms because they often refer to proprieties of light. Altogether, as one major framework, the arrows are both fragmenting (decoding) and symbolizing the matter of "light". And the edges are painted too, affirming the expansion of the canvases: each tableau work as its own "center of the universe", each one is nearing the point de chute of a different dimension. They are no planes, these "lasers" absorb everything. They`re "light holes" (contrarely to dark holes). "Sun Song" (1969) sports two arrows but they are like geminis of the same substance. Every design is slick and enclosed within a logic. This is some of the best work you will find worldwide covering the 70`s. Rita Letendre deserves her place in the dictionaries only for those.


5) The Lost Highways:

Another great period, getting toward the public-friendly. Letendre has reduced her arrows to thin perspectives that functions like "paths", while she has developed a new technique, using the "aerograph" (aerosol paint) to create dense and coloured atmospheres, often involving a few different layers on top of each others. "Oradek" (1976) is the masterpiece here, the largest in the exhibition, and send hints at the larger works that Lentendre had been commissioned to produce by many large corporations during the 70`s and 80`s . The painting is all dense and fluffy browns, with a grey and orange sharp path at the bottom. Someting is said on the board about Letendre "not seeking to represent the colors of the season, but the infinity of emotions". I see pictures like "Aura" (1979, this one is blue-cold) and "The Dream Of The Midsummer Night`s Dream" (1981, this one is flamboyant orange, the path loosing itself toward the right), as being the continuation of one single path: instead of presenting multiverses, like with the arrows, Letendre now seems to signify her ability to cross any of them. These works function like stations. The paths, or lasers, or "light crossings", look like they acknowledge the passing of time, such that the visitor cannot stand for eternity in front of them, but that they invite to pause momentarely for contemplation.


6) The Blurred Scapes:

I consider this period to be the most public-friendly of Rita Letendre`s oeuvre.
They simply consist of layers of smooth "aerograph" paint apposed on top of each others, playing with contrasts and shapes so they look like dense atmospheric scapes from strange dreams or remote planets. The previous "paths" have become darker sections that evoke a far horizon. "Voltan`s Dream" (1983) is an early black and white tentative that is less interesting (just an horizontal column of white blurring over black), but "An Awakening" (1984), with its dark orange lifting up at the horizon, or "Arctic Sun" (1990), which actually looks like an effect of heat buiding into a desert mirage, reach both ethereal climaxes, and makes you crave for scrutinizing them over and over again. I realize from the titles that many of these paintings seems to be about the sun, or more precisely, the sunlight. Like the blue azur of earth`s sky, atmospherical gazes are only visible through the light of the sun. Thus these works might function as monuments or homages to light. Nevertheless: top notch, kick-ass, quality stuff, that is all I can say. And it is great to realize that these 3 tableaux represent a rather long moment in the career of the artist. I am even surprised we haven`t seen more of them around here.


7) The violence of colors: fluxus.

Like many others, I am not certain I understand, or appreciate the recent move of the artist. It seems that after years of being ethereal and soporific, she decided to break a tempest into her work, and started using oil and gestures again, perhaps to reaffirm the position of the body in an age when all slick designs are computerized.
One is tempted to argue that the recent paintings focus on the "process", though Rita will paint incesssently until she gets the "right result". You might hate the figures I use to describe them, but for a starter, "Fandango" (1998) exactly looks like a violent grey sky in which a thunder is roaming (the intermittent red gristles). The method is already evident: she mixes colors in huge and dynamics zig-zags across the plane. The end result looks like impossible basic "elements", such as very colorful fires or water surfaces. "Kyril" (2000) bursts with a lot of red in the middle, coming out the green and dark colors of the background. But I think the artist`s aim is that these colors are actually intertwined. Instead of a battling of masses like in her early period, she now proposes battling of colors, which are not exactly battles but more like "cascades" of joy if you will, or "explosions of life", which is how Letendre often describe these recent works. The last example of those is shown in "Les Couleurs De L`Émotion" (2001), a film by late Michel Moreau (who died recently of alzheimer, a film exists about him too), and which in 49 minutes follows Letendre`s creation of a new painting for a concourse in Baie St-Paul, which if I`m not mistaken, she won. The film is not to be missed, they invite to consider the pertinency of what Lentendre has been doing in recent years, demonstrating how she paints over and over a canvas until she gets the "right" colors and emotions. This said, regardless of all the "strum und drang" theories, I find her recent material doesn`t distinguish Letendre as much as her previous. Sometimes too much emotion is like not enough.


Ok...Let`s try pick up one favorite painting per period to resume the show:
the trophies go to "Épouse Fébrile" (1956), as bright as a Matisse, than
"Tropiques II" (1961), that just looks cool (but anything is great in that period, I loved Tsiyah too), "Impact" (1964), because it`s violent and best represents her concept, "Sharav II" (1973), because it`s really flamboyant, but I`m not sure if I preferred Sadeh or this, "The Dream Of The Midsummer Night`s Dream" (1981) because I luv that orange, "Arctic Sun" (1990), because it mysticizes me, and the work in the video "Les Couleurs De L`Émotions" (2001), because the process is shown and I think the new work is all about process.


As I said, I had a marvellous time in Quebec,


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan


Ps1: Run see the show !!! You still have time it ends on the 3rd of April.
http://www.mdq.org should get you there. Take a stroll into the citadel before coming back.

PS2: Gimme a week to come back to the Millet-Matisse exhibit, I`m returning to visit Blain at Uqam, and another exhibit at Dazibao, that I intend to write about here.

Wowee,

Came back from Quebec City this week-end where I ran
to see the new exhibit from David Blatherwick, in time
before it finishes.

This piece entitled "En Pensant À Toi (Thinking Of You)" (2004) is a simple video installation presented on the main floor`s first room of the Musée National Des beaux-Arts Du Québec (they had to add the "national
Beaux-Arts" to their name... gosh... academics... "conservateurs"... I much preferred the previous tag "Musée Du Québec").


The museum refers to it as yet the most ambitious video installation by the artist (who is also a painter, by the way). Don`t believe them: I`ve seen, or you`ve seen, other works of his that were more complex. This time, it`s a simple "carrousel", a slowly whirling structure attached to the ceiling, holding two opposite video projectors, and two sound monitors arranged at each opposite sides of a long curved pole that is positioned perpendicularly to the projectors.

The images ? Simply a woman smiling opposite a man smiling, slowly sweeping the surfaces of the walls while the engine is turning.

The sounds ? Everyday material: children laughing at school, footsteps in autumn leaves, people dining in a kitchen, urban sounds, etc....(a loop of about 5 minutes duration).

The trick ? They are two tricks: 1) the smiles are actually "performed". The artist asked these two people to sustain a smile for a very long period, that he filmed.
2) The device whirls constantly and being the audience you are supposed to feel attracted by moving toward the middle and let yourself turn with the work so you can catch all the activity. I can confirm this: before I had read anything about it, I was already valsing like a fool.

Again Blatherwick offers us a minimalistic video work about bodily tensions (breathe, head upside down, smile, etc..). But this one is the most subtle ever. Most people don`t get it. Here is a list of reviews from Quebec citizens that perceived the work as being about happiness and the beauty of smiling (!). Blatherwick on the contrary, brilliantly demonstrates what makes that we don`t actually spend our time smiling 24 hours a day: because it`s hard dammit ! It involves muscles, it`s a physical exercise ! Hah ! What a great idea. I can`t believe not one performance artist had ever thought of this, smiling over a long period of time. Ok, wait a sec.....(an hour later).. Here goes, I did it, it`s called "Smile", invite me in any event and I will sit on a chair and smile for a couple hours. This may even convey better what Blatherwick attempted. Because with all the "romantic" irony implied by the title and the cute sounds of children playing, Blatherwicks is adding unnecessary sweats to this piece. Or does he ? Smiling is an activity far from being solely related to love agenda and seducing couples. The two protagonists incidentally are not narrratively related in the piece, it turns out it was all faked. But because it plays around our expectation of witnessing a bubble-couple, it seems to me that this makes the piece evolve around notions of "perfect relationships", how impossible they are, and how joy and happiness are at best experimented in brief since they are tiring activities: we just cannot be "always happy", it`s a physical impossibility.


But smile is not propriety of personal relationships, it`s also about social conventions, and of course the piece accounts to that, but less effectively by default of all the adornment that seems to suggest a romance, a seduction, a friendship, etc... In that regard, the action of sitting and smiling publicly would have been a better solution, if indeed the focus of the piece had been social conventions. The title suggests that the piece is more about the intimate than the social, about one admitting his own limits, that he cannot be "thinking about you" all the time, because thinking, inasmuch as smiling, asks for too much concentration than is humanly possible.

The stage of social conventions is secondary to this introspective psychological realization about the self. David Blatherwick is no mere cynic, he exposes the micro-tragedies of the human body. He underlines the imperfections that we`re conditioned to live with. Like attempting to turn and follow a carousel device: you can`t do it, that`s the whole point. Let`s accept we`re not perfect as we wish we would be.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan

Bertrand Carrière is a Montreal photographer that has been exhibiting and publishing (magazines, books) since the mid 80`s. His style is usually dramatic, technically polished. The exhibition "Jubilee" (18 July 2002), installed a couple years ago at Dieppe shore in France, and which no one here ever saw cos it lasted only one day, has been the subject of a documentary called "913", that I saw at last Montreal Festival Of Films On Art, and that was complemented by a short exhibit of lavishing photographs presented at la Cinémathèque during the event.


"Jubilee" was the first in-situ installation of this kind made by the artist. It consisted of 913 black and white individual photographs of the heads of young men, all wearing the same black shirt, and installed in a pyramidal shape on wooden sticks on the Dieppe "ex-warfield" shore of terrible second world war events, in France. They stood there for a few hours until the tide lifted and destroyed a portion of the work by pulling the photos into the sea (that process was documented). Afterward, the "survived" photographs were picked up and installed for a few days in a similar triangular shape in the nearby military cemetary laying on the propriety of a country church, where apparently, they still stand (!).

Did you feel something weird already ? That part about photos polluting the sea ? Well, in the documentary, the artist even brought back some extra photos on a boat, a couple years later, and throw them all in the sea, one by one (!). I`ve done my research...the artist confirms he picked everything up or most of it after the performance. I`m relieved... because watching the documentary made me believe he had just "layed his stuff" over there, and my general impression about photographic chemicals is that they are not very ecologic. I could be wrong.


Why did he do it ?

It`s a monument to the 913 canadian militaries that died during the "jubilee" operation during second world war on 19 August 1942. It`s a rituel of sort, to exorcise their memories and ours. It`s also quite a nationalistic project since they were actually 1400 men that died in the Normandie events, but fact is canadians were sent upfront and served kind of as protective bags to the allies, and trust me at the time that made a lot of people really upset.


Why young contemporary men instead of original photos of the dead militaries ?

There is an important link made about the notion of filiation. The men that died at Dieppe were the age of the father of the artist. It`s a way to underline how we should feel linked with these events.


Why the waves ?

Well, the metaphor of the tide, representing the passing of time, disintegration of memory, death, etc, has been a little overused, though it`s the first time I heard of such ephemere photographic installation on a seashore. Somehow there is a notion of sexuality that enters here, if you permit me opening a stretch. Masculine fertility is the only way you`ll get to all those young photographed boys. The disparity of fathers mean the disparity of sons.


Why the pyramidal shape ?

Militarist strategy ? It could be so many things. It`s photogenic, it`s practical (the most photos get eaten up by the sea in the background), etc.. The photographs are aligned to reflect a monument in Cambodgia where they put all photos of victims from their own genocide on the walls of a commemorative museum.


Did you like it, Ced ?

Andy Goldsworthy made plenty of ephemeral "land art" that disintegrated with tide: sort of intimate ritualistic works that we can only witness through the photographic documents that he provides. Bertrand Carrière is tricking Goldsworthy by placing directly his photos into the land. The formal approach is interesting. And simply the gesture of going all the way down there is fond and expresses a rare sense of compassion and love for mankind.

Alas, the image of the wave representing the tragic death of these people is,
with all the best intention in the world, a little naive poetically.
I don`t reproach this to Bertrand, personally. We all come to realize
these types of works involving basic ophelian metaphors
about water. It`s the guy`s first installation: give him a break. Trust me, we all go through it.

The other problem is that commemorative works often imply a weakness toward the universal scope of an artwork, but thankfully, Carrière manages
to evitate the specific by proposing a work about filiation, about men being linked to others through and against historical tragedies.


His set of photos will warranty him a certain success,
because their polished quality elevate the actual
importance of the event. The work of the photographer
recycles skillfully the work of the "artist", and this is his major strenght.


Next to these photos (and poster for the project)
was another set (they were 6 photos encasted in a beautiful
dark wood frame), and I forgot the title, but,
they were landscapes (trees, shore) surrounding an architectural
space that ressembled a large tumb from an ancient civilisation.
Or was it a bunker ? Ok, now I`m pretty sure it was a bunker.
Don`t mock me, it was late and I was tired. They looked
like ravishing photos of the type that will appear soon or
later in a CV Photo magazine essay.


Bare with my humble hope we never have to go through war again,
If I can do my part of being sensitive,

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan


PS: I never had time to review the films I saw during the Fifa.
The best ones were "The Life Of Luciano Visconti", that explained
how he really lived as a child amongst the type of people and kind
of life he portrayed in his film (loved the interviews with his two main
lovers: Francisco Zeffirelli and Helmut Berger). Than, a film
about Vermeer, the mystery surrounding his peaceful work
when his life wasn`t. Or another film on the glamorous life of
Coco Chanel that ended up living alone. But the best of the best
was the duo about Iraq Lost Cities (Babylon, Ur, etc..impressive ruins of the first cities of the world, some reduced to sand, but you can still find decorative pieces of the Babel tower, the very first skyscraper) and a film explaining the weakness of World Trade Center, which were two giant tin cans built by baby boomers to impress, but not very solid due to lack of finances resulting in cheaper
architecture solutions. I can`t go in details (I did on some
list), but that is a must-see, shocking documentary about America.

Toodles, me here again with yet another late art review but some cool links for your viewing pleasure.

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I really enjoy the recent refurbishing of Articule gallery. Physically it`s becoming one of the best art space in Montreal. They have devoted a salon for meetings and chance encounters but I`m betting some artists will be infiltrating it once in a while with their projects.

The two new "exhibit spaces" are both enclosed within their own boxes.
At the entrance we are forced to surround the first of these boxes which
is actually the "second" gallery, that is normally reserved for smaller projects.
Then we have to switch into a u-turn to get to the "main gallery", what is confusing because it is but only slightly larger than "gallery two". Nevertheless, the new settings offer interesting dynamics, and I`ll be curious to see what the "insitu" artist Gary Mcneill will make of this architecture during his residence at the gallery next month of May.


I was curious to visit the Barbara Prokop show since I had read articles about this artist previously. I was wondering about the results of one of her projects for which she invites people to portray other people or characters they admire (The full "lecturer`s name of a serie" is "Subcultures, Cultures, and Careers: Stereotyping Each Other’s Lives"). I`m not sure if the work "Britney: Still Me" (2003) presented at Articule is representative of the serie, but I reserved mixed feelings about it. The work is simply a monoband video, presented in loops without credits (they are on the wall) in a room painted black. I`m describing this in case you read anywhere people refer to it as an "installation", a term that is much too loosely used to describe mere video projections. Loops often serve precise formal and aesthetic roles within video works, but here the only focus was the practical repetition of a 7 minutes clip. Pipilotti Rist had developed a better way to deal with viewing clips when she had fabricated a remote control in which you could select and start the clips whenever you desired. With such a system it could have been a solution for miss Prokop to present a couple more examples of what she does. I mean it: she urgently needs to vary her subjects before her audience start believing that she simply indulges in banging on Britney.


Because the impression that the piece presented here gives is that it`s a mere pastiche of the type of mtv spotlight documentaries that are used to promote pop artists. It looks like your typical humor fake-docu mocking Britney`s ego, and/or the music industry that supports her, the self-importance they implement on such ridiculous mass media oriented entertainment artist. But the bias is that this woman we see interpreting Britney and singing her songs is actually supposed to be a "fan" of the artist. The video is also "about her", and I`m not certain if this fact communicates very well. The excessive montage and ultimately parodic mise-en-scène seems to suggest much on the way I should be interpreting this, and I found it all overlapping to the original aim of the project.

Now, judging from other more official "readings", I should have understood that the fan here casted an "empowered" and "determined" version of britney, while public opinion generally infer that`s she just a puppet from the music`s industry. But I still stand that regardless of my interest for the philosophy behind her work (we always somewhat illusion ourselves toward the people we love), the artist is disrespecting her intention by adding too much extraneous comical effect. What helps the video function on its own, provoking smiles or laughter, distanciates it from the original goal of transcribing the character`s feelings about her personal object of desire. Besides, any drag queen could have elevate the sense of campiness that emanated from this video (and trust me they do "love" their material). Or if you`re in for fierce hilarity on the subject I suggest the gay-friendly film "Britney Baby, One More Time" (2002) by Ludi Boeken. Let`s admit it: Britney was too tough a subject: she`s an easy joke. Perhaps with multiple fan interpretations we may have come across a portrayal on how a whole generation of teens perceive, and is moved by, her. Unfortunately here I`m not getting much information about this lone fan`s vision of her idol. It`s as though she`s been "directed". The gallery`s paragraph about the video insists that she`s not. But what basis prove me that she is such a fanatic in the first place ? She could be anybody. This work dwells on my trust of the protagonist`s authenticity, that she is an absolute fan of Britney Spears, but here is how it fails: there is just too much artifice enveloping that authenticity and hiding it from me.

Show me more.

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In the "main room" Julie Andreyev is presenting "Stereoscope" (2001), a work that has been travelling a lot: there`s even a book written about it (!). Surprising for such a simple work, consisting of two large similar photographs of young people in an arcade (the frame actually shifts to the right (or left, depending your view) for two inch and a half), installed at both ends of a cubicle, including a stand with a little mirror cube at the top, and two psychedelic light projections. It`s a chance there was an explanatory board at the entrance cos some visitors walking by didn`t know what to make of it. Here`s how it works: when you bent toward the tiny mirror cube in the middle of the room, eyes at a pretty close distance, you get the image appear in 3d (yippeah). Remember Viewmaster(tm) ?

They aren`t many artists in Canada that are internationally reknowned, but one of them is Jeff Wall, and Stereoscope couldn`t feel more directly linked with Jeff Wall (well,the older Jeff, not the one of the overtly flamboyant recent material). The topic of hyper-reality, the use of precise poses from the characters (who may not be actors, but they seem to stand like mannequins), the contemporary reference to works of classical painting (here it`s Antoine Watteau's "L'Enseigne de Gersaint" (1721)), the use of digital or "virtual" effects, etc: all these elements are shared with mr. Wall`s work, and had I seen the picture standing alone in a museum, I would have try and guess it was his. Luckily for Andreyev, she adds her own layer to the aura of Wall. By using a stereoscopic device, she use ancient technology to transcribe an interesting concern about present days` "virtual reality". For a starter, there is already a conceptual position within the photograph, when the models are standing aside one arcade game player which is sitting back against us, concentrated in riding a motorcycle video game (the position is similar to the character scrutinizing a canvase in Watteau`s painting). The motif functions like a double-arrow: We enter virtuality in the same direction as he does, while the cube is pointing toward our eyes. Further, the artist arguments her choice of a simplistic mirror trick because it allows us to see the "real life" spectators in the gallery on either side of the mirror, as flat subjects. An artificial 3d world materializes as we become its opposite two-dimensional canvas. It seems wrether we look into the device or not, a potential "virtual" dimension exist within the room, overimposed in space upon standard reality. So adding thoughts, the piece reveals to more intrigue than its first sight suggested. Perhaps the topic feels a little cold and intellectual, perhaps you`ve heard already enough about the problematic of virtuality and you`ll feel like crossing out. But I thought it was a well-expressed comment about our fascination and emprise of the devoid and fake, and speaking of strict virtue, there was not much to reproach against its design either, apart from the fact the photos should have been levelled with the cube arriving at standard eye sight (the "performance-driven" spectator-bending was actually a flaw).

3d`s cool anyway. It`s always a little cheesy but that`s why we like it. The decorative lights in the installation was just enough to balance it with pure glasshouse fun. I`m sure a museum will end up buying the piece.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan

Ok...

So I`m reviewing another show
past its date in Montreal, essentially because it`s
being shown at charles H. Scott Gallery
of the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver
from the 31st of March to the 2nd of May 2004.


"The Weather" is the second in a serie of three
exhibitions about the "mundane" that curator
Cate Rimmer has been organizing since a year
throughout Canada. Apparently, a catalog
will be published at the end of the serie,
or so this is what I`m told by Sylvie Gilbert, the director
at the Taran gallery of Saydie Bronfman Centre
where the Montreal seance was taking place.

I`ll be blunt and frank: the show is not up
to the originality and fertility of its theme.
In fact, I`m tempted to say that this is more
the fault of the artists than the curator, whom
I think has been doing a fantastic job at spotting
cool art issues recently and whose text describing the works
in the exhibit program is always concise, pertinent, delightful,
informative, and pure fun.

I just think the theme was too big for such a little show.
It would be worth the curating of much more ambitious "museum level" exhibits
and, hell, just take one classic piece by Olafur Eliasson like
"Your Strange Certainty Still Kept" (1996) and already
you beat the whole lot of what`s here and wonder what these new works
from less reknowned artists could have to add.


Ok, I`m harsh...It wasn`t "thaaaat" bad, and these
artists` approaches are each singular and most of them
original. My shot is too easy because I`m comparing
with a very spectacular piece and one thing I`ve learned
over the years and try bewaring of is that works of
art speak past the scale of objects, and must be read, listened
and adressed for what they have to say as much as what they
have to show. Understanding this equation often unfolds the imagination until
you don`t see art the same way again.


I find genuine in the curator`s introduction that she manages
to contradict two quotes from Oscar Wilde. In one he declares that the weather is the refuge of the unimaginative, referring to the way we always talk about weather with people when we don`t know what to say (except me, I can`t say I use this method), but then she twists this with another sentence where he goes on that: "whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else". Eureka ! With this literary punch she promotes the whole premiss of the show, that is to use the image of weather to express ideas and feelings about what we don`t, would, wish to, and can`t control: nature.

Right at the entrance we can recognize the photograph that was used for the postcard. It is called "Stable Conditions" (2001) by Tania Kitchell. I thought from the postcard that it was a still from a video. The framing is kinda ackward, the face of the girl completely decentered, like slipping away. Then I realized.....duh...of course, this is not about her, this is a "weather exhibit", it`s about the snow residues on her head. And how do you portrait weather, exactly ? With boring landscapes ? Too easy. The artist has been using "winter" as a material of her work since years, and she concluded the best way to treat the subject was to document the way it affects her, wondering what it can mean when someone pass a great portion of her life under such conditions. The title perhaps refers to the weather forecast of the day the picture was taken, or rather, expresses feelings about being adapted to a life lived in winterland. But at this point we realize the idea is a little bit more interesting than the photograph (just a grand size of quick snapshot took overhead), and we move on to her second work, a serie of three ensemble of winter accessories, which I had I already seen last year in the clothe-themed exhibition "Doublure(s)" in Quebec city and honestly wasn`t moved by them back then. On a design note, the looks are extravagant, but they distract from the focus
of depicting one`s creative means to battle with the conditions of weather that she`s constantly forced to endure. Now, maybe if I had seen these artefacts put in context use they would have made some artictic (I kept the typo..."artistic") sense, or pehaps she could have infiltrated sports shops, but shown here as they are they merely looked "ravey". Where does this artist live anyway ??? Judging from these clothes it seems like she thinks she`s in Groendland.


Next we get to Mina Totino, who simply decided one day to devote one of her work (and a whole lotofher time), to clouds. She took many square photos of clouds (one per day) during a certain period and wrote personal notes and thoughts on them. In the show they are all aligned together in some sort of conceptualist`s version of a landscape (a way to portray weather through timed documents), and honestly the project "Cloud Studies" (1996-1998) would have felt a tiny redundant if there wasn`t that other part which I think is the focus of the work: she also drawn all these skies, and I figure not by looking at the photos but "during the shoots", so now you are able to compare a sky precisely documented as a notated diary with the loose representations of it made from the drawings (and they`re straight by the way , doesn`t look like she`s been seeking for white rabbits). It seems to be yet another work about memory, the disappearance of the fluffy, the attempt at recapturing it, saving it, and blablabla, I mean....the "sublime" is a bit of a stretch in a post-Nitzchean world. It`s cute project but it`s a little dated. And there`s no link and order in the drawing section. We don`t know if they follow the rules and times of the cloud photos. It`s just to get a general impression of the process, I guess. Maybe I`ve been paying too much attention.

I missed Ana Rewakowicz`s performance at Taran gallery, and I thought they would have shown pictures of it: did she succeed this time ? Because the serie of photographs "Ice Bubble" (2003) are about the failure of the same performance when it first took place in Banff. The idea was actually neat: try building a giant bubble of ice, using a round pneumatic enveloped by water in low temperature, waiting for the balloon to loose its air afterward (I`ve seen a few works by the artist already and she often use these balloon devices in remote or outdoor contexts). I don`t buy the fact that she uses failure to elaborate a metaphor about the limits of will against nature. There must be a way to make that bubble (I got ideas but they don`t use weather). Looking at the photos I could only think of Manzoni and his "artist`s breath" pneumatics: also using an inflatable sculpture in means to convey another artwork...Maybe a video of the performance would have been a judicious addition, the photos further distanciate the viewer from the experience, and then only the dramatic shots of the "tempest" were attracting. "Nothing to start pouring a rain in a gallery"..that should some motto.

"A Science Of Language And Humidity (Excerpt)" (2003) impressed me for one reason: how did the artist came up with that idea ? Working with clouds, fine. Working with winter, fine. Working with ice, fine. But try this: working with body humidity, language, and meteorological technology to confront the work of a grandfather and grandson of a previous century. Way to go, girl ? Antonia Hirsch has been working on providing a "body weather translation" of Ferdinand De Saussure`s book "Course In General Linguistics" through the use of a machine called "Hygrograph" invented by his grandfather, and which device uses a single human hair to calculate air humidity (air for an hair, that should`ve been obvious, hey ?). Now she adorned this contemporary version of the machine with some sort of "microphone" in which you can read a passage of the De Saussure book while the machine draws a simple pencil line of "your humidity"`s fluctuations on a roll of paper. On the wall next to this device are canvas (well...they`re framed, rectangular, sheets of papers) representing various chapters of the book: they look like a distorted minimalist version of Yves Gaucher. From a distance the work seems all cold and intellectuel, rather uninviting, but it`s actually whimsy: the body works and sweats all the time, you could be attending the most important art theory symposium of the year and than all sorts of weird things starts to happen in your body and you wish to leave. Know whatta mean ? Intellect is just the iceberg atop a very complex machine, and given the 80 per cent water that it uses (and that we each contain), I thought it was neat one artist had patented a way to use some of it in her art.

Edith Dekyndt presents us two works that both dwelve on traditions of minimalism and conceptualism. "Public Sun" (2003) really disappoints as a row of UV phosphorescent light tubes, because they ring weak compared to the artificial sun that Olafur Eliasson had installed last year at Tate Modern UK, and for which he won a few prizes. I`ll grant that the work was made for a specific site, a cold city in north of Manitoba, where people might have really needed it, but here, hidden the way it was from the gallery, arranged for it to be seen from the exterior, I thought it really looked ordinary, like a dated Dan Flavin gone wrong in style. "Program For A Cold Place" (2000) consists of two conceptual video experiment presented side by side: in one the artist hands are holding a portion of water (it`s soap) until a sheet is formed and fall of from the wind, and in the other an icey bottle stands up on snow until it explodes (we assume it contained carbonated water or a similar expanding substance). I did like the bottle bit because it hits by surprise everytime: it`s simply a thrill. But as a whole they`re both reminiscent of Fluxus, or the kind of performance scores you can imagine Fluxus would have conceived if they had lived in very cold places. I must be wrong to be tempted declaring those minimalist experiments should be over by these present days. But perhaps the images Dekyndt use are just not that strong on their own. She already justaposed two of them to comply, but perhaps she should have been recording great amounts of collapsing bottles. The image is beautiful but being the art pig that I am I`m not fulfilled by it.
But I`m glad at least she properly used video instead of photos (like Rewakovicz had provided). It`s always surreal to see events happening when you`re away and safe from the temperature in which they occured. Bare with me, let`s consider this work as half a hit.

Lisa Robertson "The Weather" (2001) is a poetry book that I haven`t got
the chance to read (I`ll order a copy, it doesn`t seem expensive). In the gallery
were presented one different audio track per day of an extract read by the artist`s voice though headphones. Here`s the picture: Sitting on the two armchair that look like they are Mies Van Der Rohe`s, you are facing the giant windows of the gallery toward the exterior. How genuine that I came on a Friday morning when it was the helliest height of a February rain (you heard that correct, "rain"). "Ahhhh, God, art and me...": I often stumble on the right conditions to visit an exhibit, and that day was just a great example. I must have sitted listening to the 10 minutes poem four times in the row. The major piece of the show was that spectacle of the violent activity going on outside. I could rely that the artist in the text was talking about how she`s been affected by weather, but I couldn`t help laughing: she couldn`t have meant it to be this intense. I must say that I had imagined this piece myself, years ago. I remember saying to a young girl who was guarding at a side desk that I thought the best piece in the gallery was the large framed window. It takes a poet it seems sometimes to notice things cos finally an artist had involved it in her work. It`s a luck that a parc is facing across the street. A nice moment in the show, but the reading was a little dry: every work in that show had a problem, I`m sorry to say.

Next we enter the "video room" where stands the "star" piece of the exhibit, a wall projection by Trisha Donnelly, certainly the artist here with the greatest reputation.
"Canadian Rain" (2002) is a piece that had travelled a lot. It`s a pun at weather forecast. The lady (she ackwardly ressembles my mother when she was young) predicts that she can affect the weather in Canada by dancing and making all sorts of weird movements, until grainy photos of bad canadian weather appear, intermittently. It`s actually funny, however ridicule it sounds. This Los Angeles woman is somewhat arguing that she`s responsible for all that happens in Canada
on the weather aspect. We`re forced to believe her (it`s always cold out here). She made me think of Pipilotti Rist, they both share a similar sort of feminist fun doing their art. The comment is crisp clear: we can dream or develop any faith we want, but they are things on this earth that are not meant to be controlled. Let`s not ridiculise ourselves trusting we can. As a piece worth a museum level inclusion, this was my favorite piece in the show.

Finally, the three video pieces from "Fieldbook" (2003) by David Crompton and Andrew Herfst were also worth the visit. Not the "Cathedral Station" described in the program, which is an hommage to metro stations with a voice over of people impressions about the slowly incoming winter: that one looked too cliché (we`ve seen videos about the metro before) or reminiscent of old Quebec black and white documentaries about winter life. But the two other clips swinged. One is a sweat allegorical slow motion caption of people running near an harbour passerelle in a weather of full-speed wind. The soft piano and reverb sound effect makes it look more like a polished film you would expect to vision in a short film festival than an actual video art piece. But it`s peaceful, regardless of the subject, and you can feel the kids pictured had fun doing it. It`s an emotional, impressionistic tableau, quite different from the two other pieces, and certainly the rest of the show. It`s also quite accessible material for a cable tv interlude in case you happen to work for television. The best work of the three was the architectural study on exterior elevators, which doesn`t say too much about weather (unfortunately for the curator), but was a great addition nonetheless. It works as a typical cinematic "trompe l`oeil" effect, when each time the elevator crosses a floor it shifts into montage with another scape. So the ending collage is a surreal neverending travel up and down across very varied layers of urban and nature scapes. I think in the 60`s they had a term for "cubist cinema". This is the type of formal work I can really appreciate. Those guys have been researching, they must have travelled a lot to film all those sets. In a flash we moved across a variety of spots where I`m sure we`ll never put our feets during our lives. So in a sense this was an invitation for time travel. Don`t miss it if you can.


--------------

"Weather" the curator admits it or not, the exhibition "The Weather" wasn`t up to her intentions, and not one that will be remembered for years, but it was paved with an honest research. Her thesis kept its theoretical values and pertinency as we left the room, and one thing certain is that I`ll be curious to read her future broadening on the subject. For the rest, you can try dig the last videos described in any art festival (if you`ve been reading to spot the goods).



Cheers,

Ced

Ok....

I promissed myself to review at least the important shows
that I saw since March 2003 (when I started this journal).
(Oh...and by the way, John Veltri at CCA had been extended
and that is how I could review it, in case you got their calendar).

Looks like it`s more than I can handle, but I think
I cannot pass over the exhibit "Global Village: 60`s Revisited"
at Montreal Museum Of Fine Art, even though it`s already
gone since the 7th of March. They are chances it`s getting
played elsewhere but couldn`t find any mention on their site
www.mbam.qc.ca. At any rates, when possible I`ll try to make this review somewhat of a "virtual version" of what I saw.

The exhibition attempted (and succeeded) at demonstrating how
the major frames of thought of today actually expand from the 60`s, a decade when a lot of social shifts occured on many levels, and on a
worldwide scale (political, philosophical, artistic, etc...). In art,
all the things that were left to be invented were born in the 60`s,
wrether it`s performance art, minimal art, installation art, media art,
pop-artifacts related art,etc...In fact we could argue to anyone
that believe invented anything circa 1970, that some unknown
geek must have certainly thought about it in the 60`s.

The premiss of the exhibition was Marshall McLuhan`s theory of the "global village", proclaiming that since the invention of satellitte and world tv, we entered a new era when everyone started being aware and feeling concerned about what was going in other parts of the world. Most social, artistic, or philosophical movements born during that era were spread worldwide (hippies, fluxus, student reforms, etc..). The 60`s were a decade of excesses (many reproach the baby-boomers to have wasted ressources fancifully), but also of emancipation, people liberating their minds on many aspects (mainly, sexual) and experimenting life on every level.


The show started with a replica of the Sputnick Satellite, a video of launch of Apollo 11, that was a major tv event at the time (first men to leave for the moon), and a blue pigment earth by Yves Klein, and then went on to develop its theme in 4 categories that willingly resumed what the 60`s were all about.

SPACE:

This is the first point that I`m not agreeing upon: that the 60`s developed a "space-mania" that influenced the worlds of architecture, design and art. Truth is the "space-age" era started well-early in the 50`s, if not prior, and already tons of experiments had been taking place in the fields of architecture and design. Though it wasn`t yet under the ideals of "safe-cities", and "worldwide aimed", or anything esoteric, they existed as culturally framed cold-war oddities, mainly from Russia and America. What the 60`s did to space-age is explore the materials and models that better conveyed these pseudo-futuristic ideals and configure them with present values of contemporary life. For example, the geodesic globes of Buckminster Fueller had a lot to do with concerns about ecology. But "terraforma" theories and imagination about life on extra-terrestrial grounds made architects develop all sort of dynamic ideas (and using a variety of unusual material, like plastic, the new "polyurethane", etc..), that culminated in the classic and reputated "Expo 67" of Montreal, one of the most ambitious Universal Exhibition ever, with its eccentric pavilions and adapted monorail that crossed between them. One of the major piece of the exhibition was Verner Panton`s Phantasy Landscape(1970), some sort of extravagant living room made of layers of colored polyurethane foam in curved contours on which you originally could sit and chill. This piece is as much linked with psychedelism than with space, but on that level it affirms the formal burst, or a crystallization of what the 60`s brought to utopias that had been in the air since the 50`s (fact really demonstrated by the 6 magnifiscent geometric Coupe Savoy Plates shown here that are from 1953).

But one has to agree that "cosmonaut life" really seem to have made an impression with all those JVC "Videosphere Television" Videosphere Television" (1970), Helen Von Boch`s "Avant-Garde sphere Dish Set"(1969), D`Urbino "Blow Armchair"(1967) and "Apollo 861 Record Player" (1966). The children "Sky Rail" toys accentuate the dynamics of an imaginary life on the moon as much as the 1966 Kodak Pavilion,with its lunar soil made for visitors to take photographs. Obviously, all those vestiges work to prove me wrong, when all I`m trying to say is that if indeed "cosmonaut" or "extraterrestrial living" were indeed great themes of the 60`s, they were an evolution of something that already started a decade before. For example, they were many sci-fi films in the 50`s, but the 60`s levelled the genre by bringing the downward intellectualism of "Alphaville" by Jean-Luc Godard or "2001 Space Odyssee"by Stanley Kubrick. The minimalist work of Donald Judd (fantastic "untitled" piece from 1968 consisting of 10 aluminium modules that seem to be entwined with the walls, each surface purveyed with green filter glass, lifting up a sentiment of purity and ethereal (oops: the work seen here from same period is actually an uglier yellow and only 8 stairs)) and Sol LeWitt ("Open Modular Cube", a cube containing 216 small "air" cubes in its squeletton), could as well be linked to fonctionalist architecture than with anything having to do with the cosmos, and their form spouse the era`s interest with simple forms basically because the 60`s were a lot about bringing dead ends to both formal and theoretical aesthetics researches within the arts. This is the era of structuralism: nothing makes sense anymore, we destroy signs and codes. Modernist avant-garde is mocked and deconstructed as we shift into "post-modernism", for lack of a better term describing the tumbling of something that got very high but is now spreading horizontally. Conceptually, Piero Manzoni`s "Socle Du Monde" (Base Of The World, 1961), reaches high point in ready-made (suddenly in the 60`s everyone discovered they were fans of Marcel Duchamps), because it declares the world as a work of art to better remind us (through an hommage at Galileo) that the world, wrether "art" or not, is indeed one precarious little ball (now forever standing on this bronze base in Denmark, that has to be looked upside down). One of the standout of a show aptly titled "Global Village".

Other mentions of the Space section: Nam June Paik`s "Electronic Moon" which is a cheesy early romanced video art piece, Bridget Riley`s "Untitled (Warm And Cold Curves)" (1966-69) because it`s a nice representation of yet another great 60`s art
agenda: op art, easily linkable with the television technology now able to distort and synthetize images. Than we get the "Saut Dans Le Vide" poster of Yves Klein (1968)
which manifesto (something about appropriating the air) bored me (I`m also too used of special effects to react to the photo that seems to date from the surrealists era).
Fortunately Klein had been working on much better treatments of his cheered theme of "void". James Rosenquist is also forgiven for his rather simplistic "Noon" (1962) (clouds incorporating a flashlight spot at its center), which almost look like he turned a painting into a deadpan ready-made when his other work is so impressive (he`s my favorite pop artists). Amongst the many I am not listing there was an ackward plastic tower made of toys by Martial Raysse, one of the rare artists here I had never heard from. Some french Arte Povera ?



MEDIA:

Again, Tv, the major focus of this section, existed since the 50`s, but here we consider that it got its mass appeal and distribution mainly in the 60`s, when it enhanced people to develop a sense of the massive cultivation of pop icons, which resulted in them being recycled through Pop Art, the most popular art manifestation of the 60`s (and even though it didn`t quite last as a movement, everyday objects and images continue to be the main material and focus of zillion artists).

Sadly missing some good Rosenquist panels, the Pop movement is still well represented with the famous Brillo Boxes (1969, not the same group and amount shown here) by Andy Warhol (these seemingly boring 18 painted boxes do 3 important things: they philosophically examin the point de vigueur about hyper-reality, as much as they demonstrate how design can be shifted into art and how the link between both is blurring, while also warning us about consumer culture, including within the art market), who`s also showing "Jackie" (1963, three portraitsof her shifting moods from soon after J.F. Kennedy assassination, made using silkscreen methods). There`s a funny piece by Arman "Poubelle De Warhol"(1969) which ironizes pop art by encasting in glass and wax some consumer products garbage, but they could have reserved this for the ending section of the exhibit (ecology). Also, Roy Lichtenstein`s much better "Vicki" (1969), typical of his comic close-up style, using the surface of popular comic design to convey psychological tension. Claes Oldenburg`s "Pepsi-Cola Sign" (1961), consist of the powerful image of replicating a giant pepsi bottle capsule or sheet took from garbage, which succeeds at making a big blunt accusation, or the other "Esso Lsd" (1967), a double sign by Oyvind Fahlstrom, which hints at the effects of artificial drugs (a "greater 60`s" invention), but compares it to a nocive substance, unless it means that petrol helps you to roll on (something ambiguous about embracing or rejecting psychedelia). A fine piece, unfortunately not as famous as the "Love"sign (1966) by Robert Indiana, which link on its own the 4 categories of the exhibit (minimalism (space), a word (public message media), a concern (peace in a time of wars), and pure fun (color, psychedelism, summer of love). There`s nothing to critique about such piece, it`s pure and godly as minimal art but uses the word love to make you ponder about what it means to you: just go buy your own tiny replica.
(oh...and that bent "o"...it refers to the infinity symbol....I always feel like I need to explain it, at any rates I luv it, there`s a huge version in New York). Finally, there`s the print by Gerald Laing of "Brigitte Bardot"(1963) whose face is encircled as though it was the enlargment of her face spotted amongst many in a mundane press photograph. Very well expresses the oddity of a mass being fascinated by someone`s persona, the circle serving as some sort of overimposed "aura".

They are a few early video art pieces here, thank god, from two Fluxus artists (which I thought were very badly represented, the importance they had on conceptual and performance art at least, their name is barely mentioned).
I`m really impressed by Yoko Ono`s "Sky TV" (1966), a "zen vs the media" piece
typical of Fluxus, in which the sky above the museum is replicated in real time through a monitor. Yoko Ono is one of those artist that you have a hard time spotting what she actually does (think "white", "sky", "peace", "imagination", "getting lost to better find oneself"..and you got it), but always finds her way with interesting ideas. And she had them so early on, they confirm that she was one of the four most important fluxus members. At any rates, this amazing ready-made, one of the best imaginable (...the "sky", the "sky", not the tv, puhlleasee), is put next to a very dying and unrepresentative piece by collegue Nam June Paik (a technical expression of the yang of a tv that`s ying, totally dating), while in the middle there`s a cool retro op-cathodic painting by Victo Vasarely ("Vegga-Nor", 1969), totally representative of the era`s flamboyant use of colors and optical effects. The next tv related works are photographs, such as Lee Friedlandler`s enigmatic "Florida" (1963) (is that Bjork on the tv making an intemporal apparition?), in which television is perceived as an ackward incomer, or the Dennis Hopper massmedia shots of "Kennedy Funeral" (1963), that documents a mass conscious wittingly, or even the Bert Stern cute fashion photograph of famous "Twiggy" model (1960) sitting on a tv broadcast of herself.

Speaking of fashion, Barbie (Mattel) is genuinely represented here with various kitsch versions of her friends and dresses, an important addition regarding the women issues that unfolded around her in the 60`s. The "Pillola Table Lamps" (1968) by Casati And Ponzio, taking shapes of contraceptive pills, a 60`s novelty paralleling sexual liberation, stand not too far from there, amongst other objects as colorful and casual that you coud imagine Barbie use very well: the Ettore Sottsass "Valentine Typewriter" (1969), a landmark for youth secretaries and the ancestor
of laptop computer, or Dreyfuss`s "Swinging Polaroid" (1968), launching a new era of instantaneous photography and homemade sex photos. Media by then had become something of the ordinary life.


Other mentions: Well, for the amount of photographs and projects shown from Christo in this exhibit, it`s good that they included one true sculpture, some "Wrapped Magazines On A Stool" (1966-67), which I happily touched cos
I had never touched Christo`s wrapping yet in my life (the knots are kinda sexy).
The "Artifact Relationship" (1961-62) by Charles Gagnon is there for no apparent reason but we like it much when it plays "the little melody" (3 tinker apparels in one). The Malick Sidibé photos at Salif Keita are not much further a good attempt from the curators at promulguing that the phenomenon of pop icons was worldwide. Did I mentioned that bulbous "mamma" chair called "Up" by Gaetano Pesce ? Totally pop! They just remade copies of those. There`s a ball and chain to remind you to always "get up" and not let yourself emprisoned within the mamma. By the end of this media section I realized that though the show was satisfying enough, they didn`t include a lot of "everyday objects" (I mean... getting away from the "grand" designers). They did hold a small glass including some paraphernalias (Ian fleming`s James Bond books, tv mags, a copy of Spiderman, the Expo 67 card, all shown near monitors showing images of Marylin Monroe or The Prisoner tv show), but it wasn`t fulfilling. I`m told that a show is coming up at McCord where they will focus more on these everyday items. Last question: Why wasn`t Richard Lindner "Rock-Rock" (1960-67) put in the "Change" section (it`s obviously not much but a psychedelic painting of a guitarist) ?


DISORDER:

This section is divised in two parts: first it covers the politic tensions and dramas of the era, and how artists responded to them, and secondly how the personal politics on gender and sexual liberation affected the themes of others (but often same) artists. Right before the entrance, there was a photo of Christo`s "Iron Curtain-Wall Of Oil Barrels, Rue Visconti, Paris, 1962", which was an activist protest against the Berlin Wall, which unfortunately didn`t help much since the Wall ended up lasting over 20 years. Still a fine, colerous, "inflammatory" attempt (don`t light at match there, honey), but I`m curious to know why the curator included it as transitory with the Media section. The real opener was Dan Flavin`s signature (recognizeable from far) of minimalist neons called "Monument 4 For Those Who Have Been Killed In Ambush
(To P. K. Who Remided Me About Death)" (1966), which apparently represents a canon though I first saw some kind of structure to hang people, and the evident pain and rage that comes with the use of red light (you may as well think it`s sex, but that`s gonna have to be sado-masochistic). Red is a color that will often come back during this section (there`s even the red little book of Mao Tse Young "Citations" from 1966, now you get my point), but the most impressive of those works would have to be the three flags "France", "Japon", and "United States" from 1968 by Gérard Fromanger, which had all their reds bursted like coagulating blood (remember we are in 68 Paris). Overtly sensationalistic but a good punch nonetheless (some of them are shown on a nearby monitor as performance work). Obviously, many works accentuated on the topic of war, the most biting being the unspecific Nancy Spero`s very poetic and feminine "I Laid My Stuff All Over It" (1968) which, beside sexual connotations, accuses the egocentrism in any war
through a simple pink drawing of stars falling on dead bodies, with the handwritten phrase attached somewhere in the midddle. "Andy Warhol, Artist, 8-20-69" (1969) by Richard Avedon shows the damaged body of Andy, years after the Valerie Solanas shoot, as monumental to every war victims (yep, there is a context here: Vietnam). What a stand-out! Also of note is the "Kennedy-Khrushchev" (1962) mixte-media wall-sculpture by Niki De Saint-Phalle which is an absolutely grotesque siamese monster connecting the two presidents (turned pink and grey) within their war toys. Not something you`ll want hanging on your wall ! (and it provokes opinions to know that Niki shot the damn thing as some sort of exorcist ritual, and now what you don`t see is that it`s full of gun balls within.) The Martha Rosler magazine collages ("Balloons" (1967) for example, showing vietnam victims in a luxury american apartment), really looked like they influenced Dominique Blain who is presently showing in Montreal. On the pure design aspect, the melted polyutherane-foam of Gunnar Anderson`s "Portrait Of My Mother`s Chesterfield Armchair" (1964-65) was quite revulsive as what any of the other works were attempting to provoke. A fine addition, moving along a trend of anti-design parrallelling the rapid spread of conceptual art.

The "identity" portion of this section dealt with much of the social rights issues that
were brought up in the 60`s (racism, feminism, gay liberations, sex, etc..). Racism is the subject of one of the greatest work in the show: the Faith Ringgold "Flag For The Moon: Die Nigger"(1967-69) that portrays an american flag made of the letters "die nigger", which is hitting quite hard at exposing the hypocrisy behind the government attitude of the era toward racism, made mornings after the cosmonauts on the moon planted that ridiculous american flag. Not a comforting piece, and it feels weird to see it nowaday, like rehashing some old dirt. The Andy Warhol "Race Riot" (1963) perhaps more aptly pays hommage to african-american fights during that era (it`s an image painted from a journal news), while Norman Rockwell did a technically beautiful, quasi-religious "Murder In Mississippi" (1965) that seems quite intemporal and not related to its era at all, but recounts an history of american racist murders. On the sexual politics aspect, we get, at last, one good representation of performance art through the document "Meat Joy" (1964) by Carolee Scheeman, which certainly must have shocked many people since it`s literally an "orgy" made with men and women bathing with raw chicken, chocolate syrup, feathers, and all sorts of bizarre materials, connotating sexual liberation. This allegory and celebration of sexuality also seemed to parody the pornography that was getting huge development at the time. We like sex but just so in what are we getting dipped in... Nancy Spero`s both "Female Bomb" and "Male Bomb" (1966) represent an agressive sexuality and genuinely express the fatality of a war of sexes (the male ejaculates sperms that look like bombs or biologic monsters spitting bloods). On another side, Les Krim presents an array of nude shots from 1969, examining this new phenomenon the same way Diane Arbus did, who is also represented here with "A Naked Man being A Woman, N. Y. C., 1968", but then we already reach another topic about queer identity, which is magnificently adressed with the David Hockney courageous (for its time) "We Two boys Together Clinging" (1961), a very expressive painting showing two "boys" (just chunks of pink squares) kissing each others, with very liberating graffiti mentions. It`s funny to think how a similar work would seem redundant nowaday, or a mere expression of one`s personal feeling of love, when at the time it meant such political impact. Than we end here with a few general "existentialist" work, such as Ben`s "Mon Envie D`Etre Le Seul" (1967), which by writting in red the phrase "my envy of being only" on a black canvas, originally accuses the avant-garde and deconstructs the ethic of making art, evoking an artworld that is but onlya war of the egos (also at the time linking with the egocentrism of actual happening wars). Then "Authorization", the theoretical work of Michael Snow (1969), one of the best essay on self-portrait ever made (and tricky, you need to scrutinize the process, which mirrors itself to reflect the limits of documentation against authorship). But the cherry top I reserve is for Chuck Close`s extremely realistic painting "Nancy" (1968), because Chuck, from who I`ve just seen a neat retrospective of prints at the Metropolitan, has based a majority of his works on representing his close friends, often in gigantic formats, in a manner to battle against the impossibility of an artist to communicate the identity of another. This work demonstrated that works about "identity" (yawn...) and "memory" (yawn...), which had become cliché art themes since the 60`s, didn`t have to be about the self.


CHANGE:

The final section of the exhibit deals with the general positivism of the 60`s generation who either truly believed that we were going toward a better world, or have developed the means to simply escape and forget about the world`s problem. It was divised in two parts, but both can be linked with the hippie movement: psychedelism, and ecology. Psychedelism isn`t well adressed, I thought. Apart from the "Donovan`s Guitar" (late 1960), which is fantastically designed by collegue Patrick John Byrne (a brittish eccentric sitting or standing amongst animals in a garden), we merely get a bunch of record covers (Jimmy Hendrix, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, you name them, all the long haired bands of that era, and those Woodstock albums too), and baba-cool retro posters of concerts such as Monterey Pop, including one cool "op art" design for TEXT"Jimmy Hendrix Experience" made by some Gary Grimshaw (Hendrix is shown nearby playing the Star Spangled Banner at Monterey). The best part here are the colorful prints by Richard Avedon of each Beatles members (1967) which are considered classic (they each symbolize each singer`s personality traits, making full use of recently advanced technologies in solarization, an effect that was going to be over-used by the psychedelic artists and designers). The "ecology" room is one of the best of the show, not so much for the quality of the works but the way they all breathe into space. They were some ridiculous pieces like the Tesumi Kudo (another Fluxus) garden called "Pollution - Cultivation - New Ecology"(1971, contaning plastic mutant flowers and mushrooms looking like penises, proposing selon the artist the "consequences of pollution on sexual impotency"), but from what I enjoyed, the Stand-Out work was really the "Condensation Cube" (1963-65) by Hans Haacke, which wink an eye to the minimalist movement while adressing environmental issues (water bubbles evaporate within a cube made of glass, a neat attempt to frame a whole natural process). Some other major works were documents of "land art" projects, a movement we generally associate with the 70`s, but..giving a stretch: "Spiral Jetty" (1970) by Robert Smithson, a "landmark" piece if there ever was one, a path of salt and rocks that still functions in the Salt Lake at its original spot, formulating the sign of an universal law within the nature that nurtures it, or Christo`s "Packed Coast (One Million Square Feet), Little Bay, N. S. W., Australia" (1968-69) that was one hell of a crazy project of packing an entire sea coast for a couple weeks with erosion sheets. "Why have they done it?", asked me a nearby visitor, and at this point I realized the major flaw of the show: 90 per cent of the works are "not explained" ! The problem occurs when a good portion of them are "conceptual" works (a major shift in art since the 60`s), and therefore are hard to understand without being put into context. I thought Christo`s concerns about underlining the beauty and fragility of nature were self-evident, but I can understand people questioning the Joseph Beuys`s "Sledge" (1969), perhaps a residue from performance, using the usual elements that the Tartar peasants used when they saved him from a plane crash during the war, and enveloped him with animal fat and grey felt to then brought him on a sledge in the middle of night. Beuys devoted his work to these fellows, that sledge is a "war survival kit". Evident, hey? Even the Joseph Kosuth`s "Titled (Art As Idea As Idea) (Meaning)" (1967), which depicts the definition of the word meaning, would have been judiciously put in context with a little writtings by Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, and other structuralist thinkers of the era. Kosuth had the brilliant idea of focussing on demonstrating the process of interpretating art instead of just throwing ready-mades like the Fluxus gang were doing. This is one of his important works, kinda like an universalist`s cul-de-sac: it will be mostly entertaining to intellectuals. Bruce Nauman kinda succeeds at humoring the theoretical pretense of his peers by making a huge pop neon spiral (following the chaos theory of the "gold number") that he signed with "The True Artist HelpsThe World By Revealing Mystic Truths" (1967). Now, that made me laugh. Total 60`s right there: are we going esoteric, or pop ? Scientific, or fun ?
Some other artists chose quite direct ways of expressing their thoughts about urgent world situations: Giuseppe Penone "8-Meter tree" (1969) is a long wood carve of half a pine, sort of a totem dedicated to the precarity of trees, or the nature inherent in each finish product (here the young tree evolves from a larger, raw trunk). Alighiero Boetti made a powerful world "Map" (1971) which is some sort of wall tapestry showing the flags of each country within their territories, alerting about overpopulation, and demonstrating the absurdity in political frontiers, and how some of us have much more space to breathe than others. Quite a shocking piece, using a similar effect that Dominique Blain, also showing in Montreal during that time, would use much later (the political "Rug"). Claudio Parmiggiano preferred to use cow skin to cover is "Pellemundo" to provoke a similar idea that we live in one only world that is "life", a work totally demonstrative of the Arte Povera movement which was well represented during the show (Pistoletto, Boetti, Paolini, etc...).

The show ends with a luxurious handpainted psychedelic "Porsche Gmbh" (1968) belonging to Janis Joplin, and painted by Dave Richards, which was invited to experiment freely as long as he included the artist`s astrological sign (capricorn, hidden in the sun at the back), and for some reason the painter added, amongst varied colorful motifs (butterfly, etc..), the motif of the Sputnick that was first seen at opening of the exhibit. Psychedelism ressembles to me as such a vernacular or "counter-cultural" exploration of surrealism. Dreamscapes consisting of curves, candy colored people, animals and objects, cosmos, and all sorts of esoteric paradises were current themes. I wish the show had exhibited some of the drugs that paralleled the movement. People will assume all these hallucinations came by themselves, when both the surrealist and psychedelist movements owe a lot to the various drugs
experimented by these artists (both the highs and the downsides). Kubrick hits the final nail in the show with the last chapter of 2001 Space Odyssee, "Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite", an hallucinatory scene that surely must have made all people`s
eyesbrows gone awed when it first came out, and thus became the cinema achievment that has been rarely surpassed since, if ever.


Global Village was a "good" show about a very important era that
included landmark works of art that no one expected to see
by Manzoni, Yoko Ono, Sol Lewitt, Verner Panton, Chuck Close, Hans Haacke, Claes Oldenburg, etc..). My final reproach to the show is the way it was spread out. Maybe I`m being too didactic (as always), butI would have preferred if the show had been layed out following the great movements of thoughts and writers fromthe era.

Here:

Global Village and Mass Media: Mcluhan, beyond "space-age" architecture , pop art, video art, mass produced objects and their effects on the conscious, identity, etc...

Structuralism: Lacan, Derrida, etc...minimalism, conceptualism, the end of theory and exploration of new forms (performance, installation, etc...).The killing of art.

Liberalism (both politics and sex): which are the same selon Foucault, and here, activist art (the coca-cola bottles of Cildo Mereleis), war-related art, identity again, Arte Povera, anything underlining the vague definition of post-modernism.

Peace And Love: Allen ginsberg, the hippie movement, all the psychedelic works, the naiveté, the drugs, the esoterism, the nudists, ecology, "Land Art", etc....

Hyper-Realism: notes on Baudrillard notions, the blur between design and art (pop art), the concerns about reality, "The Prisoner", Hyper-Realist painting, media art, the impression that all is lie, etc..


Hmmm...yeah it`s a draft but I guess that pretty much covers it.
That is the way I would have done it, still mixing every forms, origins and intentions of objects.


Nonetheless it was cheer fun,


Cedric


PS: They were above 250 works included, so I`m sure I`ve just described a third and less of it, but certainly all the good stuff (unless you really insist that I should have mentioned the Che Guevarra photo),
but I`m also writting a "virtual exhibit" with french descriptions of the works as some sort of basic educational ground for some people I chat with.

It`s really about writting a little explanatory board near each piece,
but it`s just a first draft that needs tons of rewritting and corrections.

I might be doing something wrong. I`m more of the "comprehensive" type, I guess, but it will be published in about a month
at revuedart.blogspot.com , the french version of here.

Expect full personal explanations of each art movements and on any works you really didn`t get. The 60`s deserves this, nothing ever changed since then.

Been late in posting because I lost
some notebook and panicked, especially
because one had some New York exhibits
notes (Kiki Smith and Chuck Close).

Than the FIFA is here:
www.Artfifa.com

Going to see a bunch of films there.

Already much enjoyed the film
about Matisse`s Vence Chappell
which for its time (early 50`s) was
still an ackward artistic move. The "Cross path"
looked like a series of sketch made in less a minute.
But Matisse intended them to look raw as he never
much was interested in depicting violence. His Virgin Mary
and Saint-Dominique are softlined emptyfaced minimal murals on white, as all the colors in the chapel stand in the light provided by the colorful glasses. It`s a whole installation of a church, every element designed by the hand of Matisse, and seeing it
on film I was as surprised than how must have felt sister Monique, friend of Matisse, when she discovered it.

Also saw...a documentary on Fluxus which
I didn`t like for omitting Joseph Beuys.
But it up-levelled my admiration for Ben Vautier
(my respect salutes to Yoko Ono and Paik along
the way). I felt like I had seen the Roi Vaara
performance clip opener for the zillionth time.

Then I saw an Impressive documentary on Futuro Houses,
those ovni plastic houses from the 70`s designed
by Matti Suuronen. I want one!! Even though they`re totally
non-practical unless used as mere camping deluxe bedrooms.

http://home.wanadoo.nl/imagineer/mags/mag10.htm

One day I`m going to have to review the influence of Spage-Age
on architecture from 1950 to mid 1970, but obiviously we were reaching the end by the time products finally became functional cos they didn`t last. Hey, even Warhol was intrigued by them.

Finally I saw a film on functinalist designer Bruce Matthsson
and I`m surprised how little info there is on the web about
his early glass houses and curled-wooden minimalist chairs.

I`m gonna miss the film on Richard Serra`s installation
in New Zealand....


Cheers,

Ced

Kamila Wozniakowska`s show at Musée D`Art Contemporain is actually part of a double bill with Dominique Blain, and if one thing rings between both artists`s works is that they`re each engaged at revealing how we`ve been living in an harsh and unfair world filled with violence and injustice.

Except that, contrary to Blain, and this is what you can fathom from the title of the exhibit "Le Monde Comme Il Va" (The World As It Goes), Wozniakowska is not pointing any fingers at anything but rather proposes distanced, cynical allegories merely depicting the world "as it is, and always have been", meaning that, it`s vile and hopeless as ever, and that the artist is not seeking to provoke any sort of moralist reaction in the viewer`s mind. To put it bluntly: if you happen to be a war criminal, Dominique Blain may succeed at making you tremble of guilt exactly for what you did, but Wozniakowska will rather make you smile thinking that we live in such a rotten world anyway, that seen from remote, human nature is so intrinsically violent, that you may end up leaving the exhibit just as what you were when you first entered it.

In reaction: though I understand the interest of making these two shows respond to each others, I believe that Wozniakowska should have been installed "beside" the Dominique Blain and not "following" it, because the spectator could as well be leaving the museum taking for granted whatever Blain`s was trying to upset about human violence.


Does that mean that Kamila Wozniakowska is herself a bad, mean, and evil person ? Not at all !! It just means her work is more broader and philosophic. Her aim is to portray us as we are, and if it is any shocking than great, as we are free to alterate our lives, but the artist doesn`t oblige you in any direction. Or rather, if you "choose evil", than she will make fun of you, revealing the ridicule in your violence instead of categorically convey what she finds "upsetting" about it, and it`s through this position that Kamilla somewhere underneath still guides the viewer`s morality.

(yeah I know...my reviews are weird......)

The paintings are technically impressive. For an artist who originated from Poland, most of her work looks brittish, from a reminiscing Francis Bacon in the early pieces (though I could also imagined them on local walls of any eastern europa taverns and breweries), to the teabox (or teabiscuit box) graphic vignette style of the classically informed later works (that seem to reflect both the vernacular and purely classical style of such period painting, but the way they are cut in vignettes made me think of old tin box designs). The artist is well-organized in her researches as her style unfolds and develops in precise corpuses over the years. There is one constant: the serial vignette, or slightly altered repetitive frame, which led to a multiplicity of graphic matching canvases when she decided to move out of the single composite. We`ll try to ponder how these evolutions guided the interpretation of her work, which followed similar socio-conflictive themes throughout all her career.


1990-1993: bavarian tavern fights.

Ok...my appellations are silly. The works doesn`t necessarely represent fights (though we may infer it from the later works), but rather can be read metaphorically as tensions between various bodies, the same way we detect bodies on top of each others in Betty Goodwin`s paintings. They are as sensual as they are violent, and the figurative style is both expressionist and grotesque. Bodies seems to melt one into another, and the bizarre image I had in mind was that they were depicting medieval drunkards in such "eastern tavern" poses, (I`m saying this just cos many are painted on old wood panels (or rather, planks), using similar dark colours backgrounds as eastern european medieval icons, and some of these bodies look like boars or packs, and I gave me the permission to compared them with neo-medieval shop panels of such exotic origin), when we are not sure if the bodies are in tense of fight or if they are merely supporting each others. Truth is I`ve seen some of these paints long ago ("Portrait Équestre" (1990), a title referring to animality, "La Concorde" (1993), which seems to ironise peace, "Modus Vivendi" (1992), "Suite Mythologique" (1993)) in an early collective show, and in fact I was already much impressed (true, true, I got old notebooks somewhere) that I can remember exactly where: it was in "L`École De Montreal", a group show at Maison de la Culture Plateau Mont-Royal, and it`s good if I can remember any other artist from it. I remember how they retained my attention for demonstrating such a crystallization of human`s animality and violence (they looked really raw back then, "Goyaesque", as Stephane Aquin referred to them, if I`m less easily impressed today). Ackwardly, since then I had never seen anything else from this artist except from her various participations in Musée d`Art contemporain de Montréal group shows (who seemed to have jumped on her early on), and her public work on Laurier street on the facade of the National Theatre School. I`m discovering much of it all here. The series of 21 ink vignettes "Figures Pour Mes Amis Qui Boivent, Mentent Et Me Volent" (figures for my friends who drink, lie, and steal me, 1992) , each containing 4 drawings loosely influenced by passages of Marquis De Sade antimoralist "Philosophie Du Boudoir", is the most surreal and abstract piece of anything shown in here, and where I got this idea of the "boar" above, which is one of the recurrent motif, amongst enumerations of bottles, drunkards, and various other items or bodies (human and animal) "gaping" into each others (as in the previous "Portrait Collectif En Pied", 1991, that seems to have influenced this serie). From this very complex and bizarre ensemble of tiny works (expect being exhausted at scrutinizing them), we get the essence of what was going to form the major characteristic of Kamila`s work: the repetitive cases, complementing or enforcing a singular figure or "idea", like in a formula or film storyboard, deblatering on a major philosophical debate about the inner "bads" of mankind. Such other rough-edged works from the "early" period as "Colloque Particulier" (1993) or "Argumentation Logique" (1993) entices at reading them as sarcastic philosophical ironies through their judicious titles.


1992-1995: Wrestling Duos And Quatuors.

The "epuration" of Wozniakowska`s style happens here, with the canvas keeping toward small size, and the figures really looking like fighting characters (their contours slightly shifting from the roughness of the early works), and most importantly, the works come in fragments of 2 or 4 frames, what really confirmed the artist`s interest of exploring the multiple views of one scene, the characters (here still anonymous) often shifting place from one another (so that you can`t spot any winner in these combats, the focus is really on the fight itself, as a constant formula). "Vol Qualifié, Vol Qualifié (Bis)" (1992), which its repetitive title, best represents these energic, often red backgrounded, self-inflamatory tableaux. "Extorsion De L`argent" (1994) and "Extorsion De La Promesse" (1994) are each series of 4 little square paints sharing similar fighting motifs than on the previous "Suite Mythologique" (1993) shown next to them, but this time we are away from the mytho-poeic and fully engaged in adressing the subject as both permanent and contemporary. The multiple framing plays a trick with narrative in that it demonstrates how events move through time but there is never any shift in ideas: actions are merely repeated ad infinitum.


1996-1999: Repetitive Tinbox Vignettes Depicting Absurd Acts Of Affection, Condescension And Violence.

This is the major portion of the show, including the "typical" work that is now recognized as the signature of the artist, these grand canvases formed by series of repetitive theatrical vignettes in which characters (now academically drawn and recognizeable, using what Nicolas Mavriakis from Voir refers to as "pre-modern pictural codes") are shown in various and inter-relationnal "dynamics", over an exact same background landscape (looking like mechanical reproductions, but actually painted one by one, pondering our notion of the singular painting versus the series). The choice of figures may be either completely anonymous, or depict precisely sourced material (often of remote origin), but they all convey similar topics about parading or enumerating the absurd poses of their subjects in various contexts of human tension, as a whole proposed as allegories on social relations. The titles are pretty self-explicit, such as "Saint Sebastian Receiving Unsolicited Advice On A Professional Martyrdom" (1999), which presents 12 vignettes of an anonymous contemporary personnage comically mimmicking to deadpan Saint Sebastian the various effective ways to express suffering, or "El Matador Practising Being Disturbed By An Unidentified Activist" (1998), an hilarious series of 28 (4 times 7) vignettes of a matador really getting annoyed by some geek in a quantity of imaginative positions over a grey empty background. Both these works implement the caricatural vision of the artist, using humor to better ridicule the inherent tensive dramas in every human negociations. Characters as a matador or a saint are used because they are charged with psychological clichés, such as impassivity and passivity. Sometimes animals are included, like in "A Hunting Hound With Two Travelling Salesmen On The Meadow" (1998), where two men are pulling 16 variations of grimaces in front of an inimpressible dog, a painting that better expresses the surreal and vain animosity of mankind. But the "inherent human drama of social tense" is getting a little more ambiguous and uncomforting in the anonymous works, like "Corrigé Pour La Postérité" (1997) or "Character Assassination" (1996), where in both a threesome (the smallest social cell when problems usually start to occur) are replicated into extravagant poses of mixmatch relations (example: a character kisses another that is being punched by a third one, or they all tangle in triangle). These works, often focussing on one character being abused by the two others (as though to expose that in life hell is "always the others"), made me think of the performative work of John Wood And Paul Harrison when they aren`t using props but defying gravity laws with each others body. The first one of these tableaux is technically interesting for the way the characters are enacting in blurried impositions under the firm lined bodies that never alter but keep their position within all 8 vignettes. If people had never got it before, now it is clear that these formal "fights" are presented as metaphorical to human psychology (if not philosophy). They represent the secret tensions hided in each of us, when we meet one another. They also represent how society is being built as some sort of kid games about power, as evidenced by the 12 vignettes in "A Commissar, A Squire, And Others In The Countryside" (1998), which adds an alteration of the size of the 5 or so characters in order to better applicate a comment on the chaos of hierarchy in social tensions. But this said, the interpretation is always left open because never anyone seems to be ever winning anything in all these fights, which are eternal and endless, such of what the artist reached her best at communicating in "Two Mortal Enemies Seen From A Distance" (1999) which will seem at first less technically impressive and self-erasing from the lot but actually judiciously examplifies the distance the artist is engaging when depicting acts of human violence (physical or psychological). When all is reduced to the size of ants across vast arid landcapes, these human behaviors only seem ridicule and emptied of any valuable meaning.


The Year 2000: Blueblooded Historico-farcical Paintings Encounters (Trilogies).

This time the artist experiments with a couple new things, following 3 precise parameters (and it`s a coincidence that these works all consist of 3 equal sized canvases aligned in row): 1 - monochromatic painting (which by the choice of blue only enticed my impression that they look like another century`s tinkerbox vignettes, or english porcelain plate designs by now if you will), 2 - choice of historical figures and reference to precise works of art and style, 3 - confirmed use of narrative effect (stories are told with beginnings and ends). I am not certain of the aims and reasons for all of this corpus though. These intellectual farces are getting a little too specific and lousily adressed. Both "Avant Et Après (Scène D`Intérieur Avec La Référence Et L`Artiste- Interprète)" (2000) and "Avant Et Après (Scène D`Extérieur Avec Le Roi Et Le Révolutionnaire)" (2000) are presenting blueblooded versions of Velasquez`s "Pope Innocent X" (1650) or Rigaud`s "Portrait Of Louis XIV" (1694) in "before and after" conditions, the first after being "fucked" in bed by some guy that looked like a contemporary politician, but judging from the decomposing version in the third canvase, we infer that it was Francis Bacon (he reworked that painting) making out with Velasquez, and the second is presenting the Louis XIV after shifting or gaping clothes and faces with what seemed at first like a religious David but turned out to be..haha...Jacques-Louis David`s (the great classical painter) version of Marat (!), the revolutionary intellectual of the French Revolution (hey..I didn`t remember what that looked like). What was the point of these contemporary re-reading of Louis XIV and french Revolution ?? Maybe we are lacking the context of a Parisian exhibit ?? Something about demonstrating how violence is the constant wrether it is for the good or bad ?? I really don`t know. These works are "decoratively" beautiful, nonetheless. In "Avant Et Après (Scène D`Intérieur)" (2000), we get a crude clue of what these other works might be about. It`s basically an 18th century style series showing a man and a woman in a room before, during, and after the act of fuck (oh..don`t feel so shocked, tons of similar erotic paintings were executed during that era). The couple, are in near exact positions in first and third paintings, but their facial expressions have changed: in the first the man ask a favor to the woman, in the final the woman ask a favor to the man. The world spins but not much ever changes when in actions we`re all the same.


2001-2002: Vignettes Of Brecht Characters In Poor And High Resolution.

This corpus was the focus of a precised research, based on the exploration of characters-symbols created by Bertold Brecht for his version of Threepenny Opera (1928). The subject may seem a little outbound and remote, but Wozkanikowska thought of a judicious trick to link the contemporary with Brecht`s "alienating effect" notions. First, she returned to the use of multiple theatrical-storyboard vignettes aligned on one canvas, depicting various moments of "alienation" of the characters in poses that support their theatrical identities, as crude as "crude thinking is the thinking of great men" (Brecht), but then she replicated these canvases in two quasi-identical versions, of "low" and "high" resolutions, meaning that she added a typical victorian british "tinbox" miniature city background (the stage of Beggars`s Opera) in full color over the grey emptied background of the "poorer" versions. In "Peachum, Version 12k", "Peachum, Version 24k", "Macheath, Version 14K" and "Macheath, Version 28k" (all 2001-2002), we get eight sections of Peachum stealing each time a different part of a costume or nine sections of Macheath running to hit the head of the other fellow with different tools, both those scenes exactly replicated in their full color format. The corpus is highly theoretical, and it would be long to discuss all the spheres it is implying, but suffice to say it complements Brecht`s discourse very well, interested by the exploration of general social motifs rather than precise psychological characters, and by getting away from make-believe rather than ornementing with precise socio-historical contexts. Here, the works titled using the terms of computer digital imagery, also send hints about hyperrealist theories (is the world we live in simply just the illusion of the best that it could be??). Both "Jenny, Macheath And Peachum, Version 15k" (2001-2002) and "Jenny, Macheath And Peachum, Version 30k" (2001-2002) present the same 6 theatrical vignettes resuming allegorically the whole play of Threepenny Opera, but presented in their anti-realist and hyper-realist "resolution" formats. Touché! But I`m sure most people won`t get it. It`s really a work made for art snobs to enjoy, but quite pristine in execution.


2003 To Today: Tryptic Allegories On Artistic Life.

According to my usual impression that artists given a chance to exhibit in large museums often take this opportunity to communicate their views and opinions about the art world, the final section of the show presents all new works dealing humoristically about the absurdities of living a life as an artist. Again, the distanced view of using older forms of figures borrowed from classical painting (apparently, sarcastically influenced by french Enlightment), and this time all the works share a similar pattern: they`re each tryptics of 3 canvases showing slight variations of one image over 3 different sizes (a trick also used in more abstract form by Damien Hirst seen in some recent popular auctions). In "Deux Théoriciennes Tentant D`Appliquer La Théorie De L`Art Actuellement En Vigueur" (Two theoricians attempting to apply the theory of current art practice, 2003), two french court women and a little dog are shown in three different symmetrical positions, and it looks like this is a humoristic view on post-modernist perspectivism (that the art`s meaning always shifts depending on where you`re at). Actually, I`m not sure, all I can say is that the work is lavish and I was really frustrated that it wasn`t included in the catalogue. "Groupes D`Artistes Autonomes Attendant Les Directives" (autonomous artist group waiting for directives, 2003) is another exhilirating tryptic on which court women throw an harlequin into the air on a drape, a scene duplicated one time per canvas, in symmetrically opposite positions. I`m not sure if the clowns symbolize the "art", that the women await to be evaluated by authorities without too much knowing what to do with it, or simply the "fun" they`re all having while they don`t need to think about art (cos they`re waiting for directives by Mr. King, you know?). At any rates, it`s a joyful image that expresses something about art communities, fun, idleness, and survival away from the powers of those who make all decisions for the art word. The three other works imply the artist herself: "Visite D`Un Artiste Incognito, De Trois Personnes Travaillant dans Les Arts Et Du Sewing Circle" (2003) is showing a similar "shot" from the back of a canvase, that is seen from three different "visitors", which implies that meaning will be inferred differently on the hidden work depending on the reasons and backgrounds that these "visitors" came from, each a motif borrowed from three landmark paintings (but I didn`t recognize them all, I`m too uneducated), their level of implications perhaps evocated by the shift in size. By this time I`m having sheer fun, cus even though these theories have been discussed in art since the 60`s and been rehashed many times by artists (and we still don`t get it...), I still think it`s fair that once in a while an artist reminds us about the tricks and games of art theory, on both representative and interpretative level, and Wozniakowska here seems to be crossing these commonly accepted points nicely ("cleverly" the educated journalist will say) . "Visite Pour M`Apporter Quelques Précisions À Mon Sujet" (2003) is another ackward visit of two classical frenchmen, monochromatic, looking like one is the theatrical smiling guy and the other the bad mood guy. They sit next to a table and seem to directly adress the audient. The work seems to figure the artist`s constant duality of dealing in between light humor and dark subject. "De Mon Apport Dans La Pratique De L`Art" (Of what I am bringing into art practice, 2003) seems like filled with anxiety, as a monochromatic grey contemporary painter is looking nervously toward a colored french classic painter, as though envying his inspiration: art of today is dauntingly free of bounds and artists often feel lost as they are no common theoretical grounds, while artists of yesterday knew exactly what the art of their time`s agenda was and what they had to do. Theoretically I may not be getting all these works right, I feel I`m lacking research and right now I just feel too lazy to open books. But I wonder if I should care since technically, I`ve been already entertained by them (and what is art theory but a rhetorical (intellectual) form of entertainment?).


Perhaps Wozniakowska is an artist more important than we realize, her style is unique and hard to compare. It uses tricks of pop art, minimalist art and classical art, often proposing through them surrealistic and oniristic encounters, but the work is primarely conceptual and philosophical. It`s culturally charged or informed but yet very entertaining even to the worst of art neophytes. It`s a delightful show in the end, we laugh more at the world`s cruelty than being shocked or saddened by it. It`s like cruelty have been proved redundant, this work being all about redundancies. For an instant, by means of art, we were living above them and enjoying ourselves.



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan


PS: On the other side of the museum rooms was an exhibit of "recent acquisitions" by the museum. Of the 31 one works shown, the only ones I thought were worth buying were: Paterson Ewen "Abstracted Clown" (1995) (cos it`s funny), Anselm Kiefer "Karfunkel Fee" (1990) (cos it`s majestuous), Roland Brener "House Of Digital" (1997-99, 3 parts) (cos it`s twisted and clever), Nam June Paik "Structural - Something - Please Add A Noun" (1975) (cos it`s funny), Betty Goodwin "La Mémoire Du Corps" (1992) (cos it`s sacred art), Monique Mongeau "Acacia" (1996) (cos it`s beautiful), Nicilas Baier "Nourriture / Vaisselle" (cos Baier`s big, you know), Roberto Pellegrinuzzi "Cible / Paysage IV" (2001) (cos it`s beautiful). I thought that Michel Goulet, Roland Poulin and Rober Racine were each capable of better works. The rest is all stuff I didn`t care for (or didn`t understand, that is always a possibility).