Art Reviews: Montreal, New York, Your Town.

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