Art Reviews: Montreal, New York, Your Town.

Hello,

for the moment I'm putting this blog into quarantine.

I now got a new blog at:

http://arttwit.blogspot.com


I am keeping this space to archive
further lenghty descriptive
reviews in the future.


I think this is a learning process
for me. Each couple months I re-read myself
and find my reviews awful ! ;-)

Than I write, thinking I'm getting
a little bit better, but it still read awful.

I will reserve this blog for future art reviews that
will read like "commented checklists", the way I
originally planned it to be.

The general reviews will be kept
for the other blog linked above.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Hi, I'm writting back here after months of absence.

I've seen many art shows in many places since last April.

This blog was conceived as a personal experience
in descriptive reviewing of art. I am mostly writting
for myself, and my goal is far from pretending
to professional art criticism.

My reviews are usually 3 or 4 times the length
of your usual journal or magazines art review column.

The point I am trying to get across, is that there
is no art reviewing being done that describes
exhibits work by work, providing every titles, explaining
the process of the artist for each piece and all at once
adding quick personal comments.

In most art reviews, we rarely get to see pictures
of works because the process of publishing them
is a bit complex.


Given this context, my art reviewing was intentionally
meant to be as autistic, obsessive, programmatic
and mentally photographic as it seemed.

All this being said, back in April 204, I soon realized that the
amount of exhibits I was visiting cut me on the time to review them all
in row, as I originally planned. Since then, I kept taking all the necessary
notes of every exhibit I saw, but I stopped writting this blog as I was
already 30 exhibits behind when I last posted.

I am instead preparing an art project on the matter, for which I won't
necessarely need to indulge into criticism.

Now for keeping on with this rather bizarre blog,
instead of commenting on every exhibits that I see
(the way I first wished it was to be), I am going to try select some
shows (not necessarely my favorites)
and keep describing them in the manner I originally settled
to do.

I will be refining my format to distance myself
even further from usual art reviewing.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: This very September 2004, I counted a total of around 80 exhibits that I visited
in various places, including New York, Montreal, Ottawa, Philadelphia, Quebec, and Trois Rivieres.
So it's not like I ever stopped seeing art since last April.

Yawn ?

Do NOT Expect any great academic theoretical writtings here !! Try "The Body Is Obsolete" by Stelarc
if you happen to find this text by mistake. I`m not writting to be read. I`m the Henry Darger of art reviewing here, honey.

I`m pasting this text about a recent show on performance art at Dazibao gallery, Montreal, that lasted from March 4 to April 10 2004.
Here.


There used to be a great performance triennal in Montreal called Fa3 that seems to have disappeared. With its retrieval one can easily argue that the few quality events on the matter in Quebec happen either in Quebec City or in various remote regional festivals (like you can all see them listed in the excellent magazine (a rarity of its kind) named Inter).


Dazibao, a gallery devoted to the exploration of interdisciplinarity with the medium of photography, are temporarely filling this Montreal lack with a couple months of activities surrounding the practice of performance art, which will include a full day of realtime performances, not to be missed, on the
17th of April 2004.

Sort of like the Find (Montreal New Dance Festival) did a few years ago when they devoted a special programmation of shows linking dance with performance, Dazibao are proposing this time an anthology of works that challenge the standard use of photography as mere document in performance art. The recording of images here become entirely intrinsic with the works themselves.


"Point", the first of these events, consists in an exhibit of older works by "landmark" artists of the 60`s and 70`s, as a mean to prepare the terrain for a dialogue with the newer works that will be shown in the next 2 phases of this special programmation. Most of the artists here are widely known, but contrarely to the press release pretentions, perhaps only 3 of them are international influences (if we want to keep things fair), and only one of them actually a true "landmark" in the precise field of performance. That is to say that I keep reserve for a programmation that could have been a tidy more ambitious, and tightenen in its curating.


Entering the room we get confronted with a couple pieces by Vito Acconci, who is certainly one of the 10 most important performance artists ever. The poster "Kiss Off" (1971) is a good example of the strategy Acconci used to deal with the issue of the art market, which was the production of such lithographic posters that juxtaposed photo documents and various graphic remnants with handwritten scores describing the actions they were depicting. "Kiss Off" basically shows 4 close-up photographs of Vicconci putting on and taking off women make-up, kissing his arm and spreading the original "lithograph" with the make-up residue. The text mentions something obscure about expressing and assuming a feminine side and "rubbing it off" afterward. Vicconci`s works deal much with notions of consciousness of the body versus the identity. Contrarely to popular belief, many of the early performance works were about distancing oneself from the ego and the body, or rather, about using the body conceptually in order to explore and transcend its physical limits. The body was made redundant, it wasn`t always pieces about the self and "identity", the cliché topic of so many other types of art from that era. The video "Visions Of A Disappearance" (1973), also presented here, is a classic example of early performance video art, with the camera directed at the self for a long period of time (25 minutes), and which placed the technological proprieties of this new medium within the context of exploring concerns about the body. The academically accepted Rosalind Krauss theory about the video medium functioning as a mirror (because of its ability to feedback itself) is put into practice here as Vicconti is sitting in the corner of a room in front of what seems like a monitor in which he is able to see himself. The prospect is quite simple: Acconci is trying "everything he can" to disappear in front of us. Obviously he can`t, but this is about attempting to shift our level of consciousness, not about physical attributes. It`s as much about the denying and renunciation of the self (though at some point he does whine about being a solid that craves to liquefy), than it`s about the propriety of video surveillance and how it transports across time realities that perhaps sometimes should better vanished. This simple exercise is actually emotionally extreme and certainly worth the visit of this exhibiton on its own. It`s actually, trust my words, the only real "landmark" piece by a "landmark performance artist" that you will find here (meaning that the piece is cited in every video art books). There are also 3 cool short experimental silent films presented in addition, "Three Frame Studies" (1969, 10.59 minutes duration), which actually are more cinematographic essays than anything having to do with performance art as we know it, and it`s a stretch to term as such the physical phenomenons they represent. In the first part "circle", Acconci runs in circles around the camera, so we can only see him once he is in the portion fronting the camera (us). Vicconci is demonstrating that there is another reality and dimension corresponding to this frame, that he is able to run around the cameras in places where we aren`t able to see him. It`s the type of exercise you would need to indulge in doing to explain your world to an extraterrestrial people from another dimension who would catch your image on the internet. In "jumps", the idea is even simplier, attempting to enter physically a frame from out of nowhere (no need of special effects, when this works is about the confliction between the frame and the "real" ground). The third and final section "Pushes" or "Pushing" (can`t remember which), shows Acconci battling with a friend in order get each others out of the sides of the frarme. Somehow Acconci became fascinated with how the prison of the frame served as a methaphor of the prison of the human body. Wrether you are able or not to appreciate the oversimplicity of these video exercises, for the time they were conceived they were quite witty, endorsing both formalistic and conceptual experiences inherent of their period with much larger, intemporal philosophical commentaries.


Arnulf Rainer is another internationally known artist, from Austria, but hardly a performance artist. Sort of a masculine version of a Cindy Sherman, his work has been for a good part centered on the self-portrait The photograph presented here, "Les Dents Et Les Cheveux (Série: Face Farces)" (1967-72), is quite typical of his method of drawing, cutting and painting over a photograph of his face. The alterations here, including the expressionist handwritting added upon the parts mentioned in the title (tooths and hair) and the grimace of the artist`s face, almost make him ressemble a grostesque Francis Bacon figure, and frankly, it does look like a child has just been drawing over this photograph. There`s no real visual pleasure looking at it. The act of grimacing may be substantial to an act of performance, but I`m not sure if it translates into photography as being relevant to such, or rather, I`m worried that the art world would start tagging any self-portrait as performance art, that would be a little exagerated. But I understand the curator`s "point" of convincing me that such a "de-formed" portrait could serve a link between performance and traditional photography. In 2004 unfortunately the photo is loosing the impact it perhaps had in the 60`s, at the time when everybody was existential about exploring their own bodies. Or perhaps finally, on a pure graphic aspect, the artist simply didn`t pull it off. This piece doesn`t hold the flag for the rest of this series. Also, considering the aim of the work is about shaping the body, I come from a theatre background and I`ve seen a lot of grimacing in school exercises, and perhaps Rainer here is seeking to express an emotion that I can`t foresee, but being able to look at the contours of his faces one can draw some more radical expressions. What-Ever I`m trying to say...He didn`t pull it off, ok?


General Idea are the third (and final) "internationally known" artists presented in this show, but again, they are more easily linked with media manipulation than strictly performance. The group is widely known for his antecedental works related with queer issue. The poster presented here, "Manipulating The Self" (1973), is an early work consisting of a poster made with the photographs of their friends enveloping their head with an arm. Their friends are performing for them (they are not taken part in these actions), and in a sense this poster announces their interest with working within communities and general medias, away from the confinements of art institutions. We don`t need to repeat that the thematic is bluntly related to the period`s interests about experiencing the body, but General Idea are refracting away the ego by proposing a communal work, and seem to treat the subject with a certain irony ("oh..look...we all do performance art....wow.."). It`s a beautiful poster, with its shade of pink and a very cinematic center photograph in color. To tell you the truth, I miss General Idea. I miss them much. Any artist should win a trophy for being able to make so many people smile.

Max Dean is a lesser known canadian artist, and the work presented here also deals with the audient as performer. "Pass It On" (1980) consists of two black and whites "pure" documents of a device consisting of a bath and an automatic polaroid
photograph apparel. Next to them are five polaroid shots of a man entering the room, taking a bath, and leaving. The principle was that spectators were invited to take a bath in a gallery while the apparel would intermittently photograph them. Again, like with Mr. Rainer, I feel the stretch with actual "performance art" a little dubious. I see the work more functioning as some sort of voyeuristic apparel able that scrutinize an intimate part of our lives, offering to stage for us of what we don`t often have the chance to witness. Originally, the results (amongst a selection of other works), were presented in the gallery. I wonder how many people participated ? Who cleaned the bath ? I understand the power of the image of cleansing (most religions have been using water as a symbol for purification for the soul), but this work seems to dwell on our societies taboo of being nude in a public space. It`s hard to say because the title doesn`t add much. Already being naked in a gallery is an activity that is daring to the timid, so you can easily imagine the situation when you`re also being photographed. On that level of provoking the intimate with the public space, the piece is adequate, but the photos being shown here look like they only made sense within the original settings. If they are not documents, than they are artefacts. I`m not sure they stand well as autonomous pieces of art.

Suzy Lake is another well-known canadian artist, but I wouldn`t say she is an international "landmark",though she did influence a lot of canadian women artists dealing with feminist topics. I refer to her as our canadian Cindy Sherman. "Co-Ed Magazine # 1, # 2, # 3, # 4, #5" (1973-98) are 5 self-portrait photographs in which she uses different fashion magazine hairdoes for each pose, all mounted over a long period of time, so that each piece of hair actually represents a new era`s ideal in fashion (love that 80`s "permanente"?). The fact that the face of the artist is covered with white make-up accentuates the expressionism of a work dealing with the artifices of woman identity. Actually, this is perhaps one of the stand-out works of this artist`s career. Note that the difference with the Rainer portrait is that the serial motif here (she also does grimaces) let us infer that these photos were made during a performance. They look surreal enough to convey the artist`s position successfully. Lake uses her own surface to communicate a social portrait. As another reviewer slated, she links the temporality of fashion with the itemporality and blandness of her figure. These photos function like tiny fragments of a theatre pieces that runs through the duration of a lifetime.


Paul Wong "In Ten Sity" (1979, 23 minutes duration) is a canadian "performance video" that looks like it`s from an earlier period. Paul Wong, who became prominently known in the canadian video art field since, made this piece by enclosing himself in a nylon cube provided with five cameras that filmed him bouncing against the wall, dancing to punk music (they didn`t use headphones for the original), while another sci-fi ambient track runned above it. Again, video serves as the media through which the performance can be communicated. This piece is like Beckett on speed. The space functions like a living implosion. The artist radically alienates his own body, balancing himself against every walls, exposing both the limits of the space and his physical endurance, now combined and forming one entity. The mediation of his actions is cold and medical. It looks like a man being observed for insanity. There is humor implied when a lady jumped in at some points, followed by a few other people, and they are start battling. Intense indeed, like molecules on heat. Actually, I`m wrong. It helps sometimes to go back to the original text that accompanied the piece. What we see is in fact some sort of ritual dance made in the honor of a mutual friend that had provoked his suicide. Ouch...


I think they could have been a couple other pieces added to this exhibit, and perhaps a couple replaced, but the basic issues of confronting the body to the media have been overviewed (portrait, movement in time, body as conceptual matter, voyeurism, etc...). A mere didactic show nonetheless, with a couple outstanding works if you`re able to deal with the blunt and minimal (like this very blog).


Cheers,

Cedric

Dominique Blain is the art star in Montreal these days as her retrospective is ongoing at the Montreal Museum Of Contemporary Art.

This was a great opportunity to invite her to present some new (or not so new) works elsewhere, and the Uqam gallery, the best of any Montreal University galleries, jumped on the occasion.

This review is unfortunately late (the exhibition is over), because I had forgotten all my notes at the gallery, and it took me a week to figure that out.



The first thing that stroke me while entering "Monuments" (1997-1998), that "new" work by Dominique Blain, is that it looked "very Dominique Blain". Whatever topic she chooses and materials she select, she always end up creating a piece that is authentically hers. You could have guessed her easily if no names had been written on walls.

The work is simply (well, not so simply) 12 reframed and enlarged negatives of period photographs documenting the rescue of important italian masterpieces of art during the first world war (1914-18), surrounding a replica of the huge wooden case that saved the "Assomption" (1516-18) by Titien during that war (and which is the topic of actually five the photographs, to be honest). These photos are all "painted", through a serigraphical method similar as the one used by Andy Warhol in landmark works such as Race Riot , and each are casted in luxurious wooden frames, sporting their titles on metallic tags, similar to the way old master paintings are presented in your average museum. Not far from there is presented an extra selection, called "I Monumenti Italiani" (1995), of 12 tiny photo-lithographs of other italian masterpieces that were "prepared for battle" on site, surrounded by quantities of bags of sands that hide them from our view. They each hold the title of the work (in talian) as if everything was normal, as if they were copied from a standard catalogue.


Each visitors of the retrospective at the Mac should have been forced to visit the Uqam exhibit afterward. After years of using art to treat about every political subjects possible, Dominique Blain now defies those who critiqued her activist pertinency by developing a corpus irreproachably related to art history and its link with war. Finally is she able to demonstrate how her critique of "evil humanity" can be directly linked to her will and right to do art: because art, is also and always a witness and victim of war.

The tableaux are absurds, with all the people joining together, walking alongside the precious art they are transporting toward safer places. They make us wonder if we would be doing the same nowaday. They seem to invoke the sacred and the sublime, because they depict for a great part the transportation of religious works. If Dominique had opted for the specific, she could have only used shots about the Assomption and turn this whole installation into a sacred calvary (but that could have reduced the broadness of the topic). Normally I would have critiqued the charged use of negatives, but here it`s justified by the extreme surreality of the situation they demonstrate. They enhance our disbelief that these events ever occured. And the central "monument" of the replica of the wooden case does the opposite by hitting our heads up its wall. I wonder if the show shouldn`t have been simply called "Monument" (with no s), to let the word enfolds this unique sculpture. "Is there something inside ?" asks that gallery`s school educational guide. The quasi-religious austerity of this monolith encases on its own the whole memory of these events, the surrounding photographs merely picturing the context, as though argumenting that the central piece be considered for what it is called. The "other" monuments are on the tiny photos: those absurd installations of sandbags. Protecting from war, the museum changed themselves into the most radically minimalist and conceptuals environments. For a moment they looked even more daring than Dia Beacon. The link between the contemporary art world and the ancient couldn`t have been more successfully established. Because of its market, works of art have been more and more understood as objects incorporating strong materialistic values. Somehow Blain provokes us by asking why we aren`t properly protecting ourselves instead of all this art. Blain really made a big hit with this piece and this is probably why it`s been travelling.

The other issue that needs to be brought up is that no one ever will witness one "real" work of art through all these documents. The "hiding devices" are providing "the art". I thought there was an interesting link to make with contemporary copyrights issues and photographic rules in present institutions. How no one is ever able to take pictures in any contemporary museums. In certain ways we protect the art of nowaday by keeping it off the view of people, what I interprete as another way to inflige pain into our lives and against the emancipation of art. In a sense, these monuments could also represent a call to save and let breathe the dying art we have been burrying into archives that no one (but a few) is ever able to see.


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


As a complement, another show at Uqam proposed works about the dying of culture.

Guy Laramée presents three sculptures influenced by the topic of his book "Biblios: Le Dernier Livre" ("Biblios: The Last Book", whose text is also exhibited).

I took the time to read the 35 pages of this quite humoristic essay, which describes in various segments the life of an imaginary ancient people (the "Biblios"), as though it was an anthropological research text (the field inwhich the artist actually studied). Influenced by a story from Jorge Borges ("Library Of Babel" ), each paragraph defines a different facet of the life of these people who "existed" under the dependance of words, writting books, and preserving knowledge, until they dissappeared under the crumble of the quantity of books they had created and amassed. For example there is a paragraph named "What?" that describes their difficulty with defining the term and pointing exactly what it was about. Or another that demonstrate how they conceived of their history through the creation and use of bibliographies One of the best moment in the depiction of these problematic with amassing knowledge, was this sentance resolving that, if you wanted to pass all your life describing your own history, you would end up writting "I write, I write, I write" all the time.

Obviously, Laramée aims to attack our present obsession with archiving information, and the surabondance of cultural artefacts we create. But he doesn`t go soft by directly attacking the nearby construction of the gigantic Montreal National Library ,
which has been subject to severe financial difficulties recently, to a point where it makes you wonder how the people in charge will be able to buy books after the building is finished. One of the sculpture, and perhaps the finest, that Laramée had skillfully produced in the matter of illustrating the thoughts conveyed by his book
is called "La Grande Bibliothèque" (2003), and it`s literally a small pathway of canyons sculpted directly into the middle of two rows of piles of a couple versions of Britannica Encyclopedia. From that standpoint, and looking at the two other sculptures installed in the blue-lighted room, you get a sense that the scape of Babylon is used as a metaphor. Here the "canyon valley" bluntly refers to the erosion of culture. It is not the first time I`ve seen an artist sculpt through piles of books, as I`m recalling a piece by Long-Bin Chen presenting four large buddha heads sculpted with yellow pages phonebooks at an exhibition called "The Invisible Thread" at Snug Harbour, New York (which was themed on buddhism). But different categories of books mean different focus, and here the artist embrace chaos and decay in order to better criticize our deification of knowledge (the press communiquee does make a referece to Shiva, god of destriction). I think Laramée assured himsef his place in the pantheon of new promissing Quebec artists with this piece, and I`m certain we will be hearing about him again very soon. The sculpture speaks for anything else he`s done and on my account is worth exhibiting in any contemporary museums, under any circumstances.


The two other pieces look both like buildings from the babylonian era. The first is "La Tour (Le Trou)" (2003), which is an inversed wooden version of an imaginary Babel Tower. In the book "Biblios", there was a mention about the "people" being divised in two clans or classes: the providers of "horizontal knowledge" were very spread and knew everything but little under the surface while the providers of "vertical knowledge" knew little information but were expert in analysing it. I like to think that this tower refers to the latter, a building built large at the top but going down the bottom through a hole, or rather a darkhole. Sort of like going down the memory lane until it vanishes. The final sculpture, "Autel D`Ordination" (2004) would be about the first group. It`s simply a sophisticated and compartimented sculpture of a computer desk, that is designed with quantities of spaces and holes for every and any types of computer documents, but also looked like a religious altar or, from further and with a little imagination, an imaginary babylonian temple constructed in pyramidal layers. The piece provoke our contemporary devotion and admiration for computer technology, which recently drastically enhanced our capacity for archiving information. With this piece Laramée is pointing that the "Biblios" people he is depicting is actually us, and the artist attempts to warn us about the inevitable dooms of knowledge, that can only logically exist to be lost again some day.

Laramée reminds you and me that this little blog you are reading right now and that I`m writting madfully for no real apparent pertinence, will disappear some day
and return to dust, that our culture will also be facing its own death. And why do we feel so concerned about preserving it ? Blain and Laramée both pose the same problematic in this magnificent exhibit, that I`ll be remembering as one of the best in 2004.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan

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.

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

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.