Author Archives: johnluna

Barrie Szekely: Yardsquare

Barrie Szekely: YardSquare

[Written for the Slide Room Gallery, March 2011. In its published form, the last sentence (pertaining to Anne Carson) was omitted.]

“…what’s exciting to me is if I can just catch anything in this great mass that’s turning, turning around. You see, it’s a world apart from language, I mean, the way a real writer would use words.

[…] “I would like to use a child’s hiccups held far off like water dripping as a component of my frame.”

–          Richard Tuttle (1.)

There is a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti called “The Palace at 4AM” that features a series of cryptic forms that look like the parings of known things: a bird skeleton, a spinal column, a chess piece, a ball tipping in a shallow elliptical groove like the gall bladder resting against its liver…Not as themselves but vestigial gestures, rinds curing in the night mind’s swelter and chill. The palace might be an art museum, a treasure house of precious objects estranged from origins, gathered in greed, fiat & caprice, left alone to their histories in the dark of an abandoned castle of matchsticks. It might also be a birdhouse: wing-pinion, spine, organ and queen being more fluid or obdurate states of mind; thoughts in & out of flight.

The objects in Barrie Szekely’s paintings entail similar flip-sides of serviceable and mutable language: they are both facts that emerge into the conspicuous gloss of viewership and/or coordinates intuited in fugitive trace-making. Layered onto the wooden panels day by day, up against void (black ground) or open grain, they form into more stolidly actual pictorial propositions as they develop, but also, conversely (like mislaid names’ mnemonic tokens) less specifically accounted for as things in the world. Intimacy hovers like a tactile reprove; contingencies become paramount. Negative spaces enact unanticipated symmetries. Is that the hungry mouth of an empty glass or the flush, translucent bottom of a jar of jam? Usually something seems left out, as if an object had first acquired a reflection and then disappeared completely, its apparition (like an afterimage) lingering for a moment, a kind of backward salutation from the looking glass.

In Szekely’s studio, which also resembles a workroom, and also a garage, the wilted husk of a seed head sits on a bench waiting to be picked up and considered. After a time in that relatively dim locale it may lose its burden of task at hand and become a more or less ambient fixture between haphazard basement architecture and the behavioural & definitional perimeters of painting space. Consider the moral instruction of still life painting, the way it segregates personal, perceptual, and present-tense. W.H. Auden reminds us that it is not Keats who insists, “Truth is Beauty, beauty truth” but the urn itself (the poet just indicates that it’s what we know, and it’s enough.) Objects trained through the latticework of poetry know a life independent of perception; they are themselves. In Szekely’s paintings, this stubborn nowness is not a problem to overcome in making work; it is the primary condition for working. Working itself might be only another condition, for walking. (What is walking for?)

Rosalind Krauss has pointed out that the grid is the inevitable, self-concealing matrix of twentieth century art. Never seen before its advent, but afterwards, discovered again and again, and each time the artist “always taking it up as though he were just discovering it, as though the origin he had found by peeling back layer after layer of representation to come at last to this schematized reduction, this graph-paper ground, were his origin, and his finding it an act of originality.”(2.) But Krauss has also described the grid as, “a prison” in which the artist feels at liberty in searching for origins, but challenged in making something new from that beginning, in exercising that liberty, in adding more to what has already been said (3.)

The job of that freedom -to propose yard to studio, to tolerate and integrate shifts of scale and weather, to tether loose form to pattern, inhering call and response- necessitates a chronic absentmindedness. A tool is abandoned in one corner of the yard and its absence begins to weigh invisibly, inevitably elsewhere…Over several seasons, a pocket of oblivion forms, fallow and granular as a pillow cast from dirt. Thoughts in the house, the yard, the neighbourhood undergo gradual alchemical envelopment as indifference oxidizes, hatching pigmentations.

In his poem “Voyelles” Arthur Rimbaud famously gave each vowel a colour (“A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue”) conjuring a state of synaesthesia that also hinted at a chain of being from word to world – “I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins”- in which each letter conveys a terrain of evocation and animation (‘A’ for instance is black, “bright flies” and also “gulfs of shadow”.) (4.) These inventions as interventions are part of the morphological tug of Szekely’s peculiar creation, but they are not so much beginning as suspended, to be observed with a patience and practice that unites artist and materials, seed head to brush stroke. Habits of the mind, they are husbanded in what Anne Carson calls “Decreation”(5.), an undoing of continuity, a movement, not without desire, towards something less sentient.

  1. Quoted by Bob Holman, “The Artists Voice Since 1981”, Bomb Magazine BOMB 41/Fall 1992 online at  http://bombsite.com/issues/41/articles/1580
  2. Rosalind E. Krauss “The Originality of the Avant-Garde”, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 158.
  3. Krauss 160.
  4. Arthur Rimbaud, “Voyelles”, trans. Paul Schmidt, (New York: Harper Perennial), 2000
  5. Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Vintage, 2006). Carson’s use of this term derives from Simone Weil, as explored by James Pollock in his review, “Anne Carson and The Sublime”, http://www.cprw.com/Pollock/carson.htm

Choice

Choice

[Originally published on Exhibit-V, February 2011.]

Referring to Debora Alana’s recent piece for Exhibit-V on Rebekah Johnson’s The Hamlet Panels, Christine Clark has commented, “Poor Hamlet.” That seems to be a good place to start. Why? Hamlet is one of those roles that consumes the actor’s personality, or insinuates itself in. Thinking of Daniel Day Lewis on stage frothing & neurotic, or Mel Gibson’s jocular striving to show himself to be both robustly and pragmatically insane,  or my old favourite Lawrence Olivier, absorbed, withdrawn, narcissistic but tender (in response to what? To whom? To the form of the play, to the script. His tenderness is almost John Cage-ian in its withdrawn, abstracted amorousness for passage.)

Why this aside? The role is famous for connecting player to part to play to form. It is acting about acting in a play about plays (literally the theatre Hamlet creates within the play but also his own “antic disposition”.) That is important to notice here because the piece that RJ has made references Minimalism, specifically (in the statement) Donald Judd’s ‘specific objects’, for instance. Now the old debate about Minimalism (esp applicable – or at least the fight worth fighting- in the case of Judd), is Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” in which Fried argues that Minimalism engenders a theatre for itself…a theatre of viewer response, self-consciousness and action.  This is a problem for Fried, who argues that ‘absorption’(a kind of self-forgetting) is a key experience in western art. Minimalism, with its call to action, its theatre of the literal, disrupts this contemplation, spectacularizing itself in a way that becomes a didactic object lesson. OK.

Now, the problem (meaning the knotty problem, the interest, the tension) in The Hamlet Panels is that it is a theatre itself. A theater about Minimal form and its concomitant action…the surveillance cameras record your responses. A second clue is the floating ‘X’, like a patch of gaffer’s tape marking a spot for an actor in rehearsal, insinuated into the glass sandwich which is the the small zone, the puppet theatre if you like, for real viewer interaction in the piece. Caught between absence-presence-x-marks-the-spot and the cameras trolling, self-consciousness becomes self-surveillance. Obvious enough but keep it in mind.

Now we are quite acclimated to self-surveillance, as it has become pretty much a social form online in ways that pursue the courtly mirror-world of Hamlet. It is an adolescent environment, and Hamlet, though thirty, is an adolescent character, which explains why some playwrights despise him and modernists adore him. Moderns also love him because as a neurotic non-decider, Hamlet’s diffidence between problem and action becomes action itself, an interstitial zone that is rhetorically dynamic but practically static, indicating the importance of the courtly mechanism, the mechanism of the play and Hamlet’s playing as pivotal within it.

I want to argue that self-surveillance inherits this trope, that social networking for instance with its passion for text and mechanism and prurient curiosity for exposure and echo is very much the fit to this glove. It is important that Johnson’s not-quite-Minimalism-as-theatre-of-Minimalism has plenty of open ends when thought of this way…the absolutist qualities of many minimal forms as something we now accept as part of designed environments, both real and virtual for instance, reminding us that the big Hamlet-gambit of ‘specific objects’ (that the Minimal object is non-relational, anti-Cartesian, irrational in its insistence on unity rather than a compromising interplay of parts) has long since been absorbed into the current state of virtual environments as theory, but that as practice, having space ‘to stretch one’s arms again’ (as Rothko, pre-minimalist and dramaturge once said) is very important.

Thus the Fifty-Fifty for this show, thus (though I think it’s a weak point) so much loose swagging of cable around the site. Outside of the institutional habitat of the UVic Visual Arts department where this work was made (itself a nod to Judd, clarified) Johnson  has shifted ground to surround her work with cameras and their cordage and the close walls of an artist run centre that has long made a name for itself as an ad-hoc venue. This is an authentic strength of the Fifty-Fifty at times, and a ranklesome irritant at others. Here it works, mostly. Knowing what we know, it would be great to see Johnson work with cameras again, and aim them more directly at the problem of lighting (attention that grants what Fried called presentness, grace) vs. surveillance (attention that implicates and frames), and all this vis a vis the question (thinking of Viola’s Room for St. John of the Cross) of connecting or divorcing the space.

Afraid to Look

[This essay was originally commissioned to accompany Tyler Hodgins’ installation, “Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue?” at the Stride Gallery, Calgary, in September of 2010.]

Afraid to Look

The title for this essay refers both to Barnett Newman’s 1966 painting “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” and to painter Philip Taaffe’s 1985 riff on the same, entitled “We Are Not Afraid.” Taaffe’s painting can be interpreted as a semantic maneuvering of Newman’s colour field from its existential origin (itself a reaction to Mondrian’s equivocal, geometric composing) to another outcome: frankly plastic, positively ornamental, but not less serious for surrendering abstract autonomy to decorative sociability. It is context that matters here, and the courage to shift the scale with which an iconic image is read from public to personal, even confessional that I would like to address to Tyler Hodgins’ choice of motifs and materials.

What exactly is being confessed? The ambivalence (not to say fear) inherent in Hodgins’ decision to offer his own colour blindness as an impetus to reading this work introduces several important questions. For one, the work potentially unites artist and viewer in perceptual uncertainty. As Hodgins’ piece progresses, its colours are potentially compromised, though just how thoroughly and at what rate remain variables. This slippage echoes the character of colour blindness itself, in many of its varieties scarcely detectible without testing. The confession is also an act of faith: the degradation of colour in Hodgins’ work sets in motion outcomes to which he himself would be challenged to bear reliable witness.

Hodgins’ personal history compounds this sense of confession.  Raised in a Christian Science household, he may have regarded his imperfect vision as something to greet with silent circumspection; the mystery represented by a crayon whose label had worn away was a singularity of personal doubt. Later, in art school, it was secret by default. 1 Colour in this anecdote stands for faith, but is defined by its absence within a continuum of undermining uncertainty; an endless, worldly dust.

Sculptor Gabriel Orozco’s defines just such a “confrontation of colour and dust,” defining dust as both “a negative pigment” and a “totalitarian surface”:

…Everything that gets dusty just becomes surface […] Painting tries to create an illusion, the illusion of volume, perspective or light. It promises a kind of enlightenment through colour […] but dust is the contrary force. 2

Orozco cites the special case of public sculptures, whose default state, he sees as “abandoned to dust.” Hodgins’ practice engages an ongoing involvement with public sculpture projects, underscoring the monumentality of the column-like ‘zips’ of Who’s Afraid. But they also resemble both Pop quotations of Newman’s forms, or their revision as Minimalist sculpture, and in extending the metaphor of dust as a ‘totalitarian’ leveler, we might conceive of the entropy of dust as relatable to other kinds of entropy, such as the inevitable debasement of monuments as enlightening commons to commercial or industrial spaces, kitsch or cliché. 3

The complexities of these quotations have already been mapped somewhat by artists like Taaffe and Peter Halley, who used similar strategies to relate Newman’s zips to decorative/architectonic/technological schematics; not a purist platonic geometry, but, as Halley describes it, “the soft geometries of interstate highways, computers, and electronic entertainment.” 4

Likewise, Hodgins’ vacuum cleaners have a precedent in Jeff Koons’ readymade New Hoover Convertibles (1981-86). Thinking of Koons’ ‘vacuums’ or even Warhol’s ‘Brillo’ boxes, the metaphor seems obvious, that readymade culture is a killer hygiene, destroying all other seminal gestures of meaning. Halley writes that Koons’ perfect vacuums propose a world of model realities, “a state of asepsis and weightlessness.” 5 That Hodgins’ robot vacuums not only clean the sand but (through bumping the columns) trigger more spillage is important. They imagine the underside of the readymade’s spiritualized sheen as a polluting of perception, a totalitarian leveling of the value of visible labour.

It is significant that invisible labour via institutional care completes the cycle of Hodgins’ work: the behind-the-scenes activity of gallery workers emptying vacuum cleaners back into the column-tubes at day’s end. It should be said though, that the work is not so much completed as protracted… The time it takes for hollow columns to retreat from their initial interactive vibrancy to become greyer, more obdurate things is impossible to measure, a collapsible eternity. Ultimately what makes ‘us’ Who’s Afraid is a more subtle, moral entropy, our own inability to track and discern with care over time. As Paul Valéry remarked, “It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increased aversion to sustained effort.” As every compulsive gambler knows, observing the operations of chance too closely for too long engenders a fatigue with the concept of destiny. Like the retinal fatigue that dismays Newman’s painted zips with juddering afterimages, attempts to track the serial overlap of Hodgins’ colours do not reveal their subject so much as dismay it, carrying our attraction to further and further back toward an increasingly unstable instance of material cause. Like Newman at his most integral, Hodgins is interested in marking a human scale, albeit one in time rather than space.

Endnotes

1. Conversation with the artist, August 28th, 2010.

2. Gabriel Orozco, “Gabriel Orozco in Conversation with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (2004)” translated by Eileen Brockbank, October Files 9 Gabriel Orozco, Edited by Yve-Alain Bois (Cambridge: MIT, 2009) 114.

3. Yve-Alain Bois makes this equivocation in addressing the use of cliché in Edward Ruscha’s work, comparing the latter’s trompe l’oeil melting letters to the entropic undoing of articulation – both physical and semantic- in Ruscha’s use of ‘pop’ language. C.f. “Liquid Words,” Formless A User’s Guide, with Rosalind E. Krauss (New York: Zone Books, 1997) 124-129

4. Peter Halley, “The Crisis in Geometry,” Arts Magazine (New York, Vol. 58, No. 10, June 1984) http://www.peterhalley.com/.

5. Halley

6. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken books, 1968) 93

Visceral Bodies at the Vancouver Art Gallery

“Visceral Bodies” at the Vancouver Art Gallery

[This review was written for Exhibit-V and posted April 29th, 2010. It has been edited slightly from its original form, mostly to eliminate redundancies in language and argument. ]
Part of the Cultural Olympiad, the exhibition Visceral Bodies at the Vancouver Art Gallery (curated by Chief Curator/ VAG Associate Director Daina Augaitis) is presented in dialogue with the accompanying show of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies, The Mechanics of Man. Visceral Bodies is itself divided into three sections, “Visceral Bodies”, “The Scientific Body” and “The Fragmented Body”, invoking both hard and social sciences, or as Gallery director Kathleen Bartels put it, “the body as a subject of anatomical, social and psychological study.” Strange bedfellows with skytrain station advertisements displaying the sleekly x-rayed physiques of athletes in motion (faster without their skin on), the notion of the paired exhibitions is to present Leonardo’s sketches -taboo-transgressing scientific humanism – alongside a more radical inquiry in which ‘humanism’ as such may not survive the procedure by which the taboo is excised.

At the entrance to the gallery containing “The Fragmented Body” is a collage by Kenyan-born, New-York based artist Wangetchi Mutu, I belong to you, you belong to me (2007.) Gracefully negotiating attraction and repulsion, smooth skin cut from advertising and illustration presents a soulfully luxurious tension that is ruptured by clutches of plastic pearls that spall incomprehensibly, uncomprehendingly out of unexpected orifices. Skin as such (and our gaze skimming it, drawing pleasure) becomes inadequate to cover what lies beneath (an interior decomposition, or more threateningly, like an expanding universe or spawn of maggots, recomposition.)

Mutu’s materials are at one with her content: Mylar (the synthetic cousin of vellum, calfskin) feels like skin and is manufactured for drafting; craft store ‘pearls’ are at once both agitating grains and corrosive kitsch. Everything frightening in its natural manifestation has its synthetic echo and all of it cajoles, upsets, and ultimately objectifies our involvement. It seems too obvious to say that Mutu’s imagery speaks to gender or race (in another gallery, we see more collages made from old medical illustrations of sexual organs infected with disease), or rather of one race or gender’s view of another exclusively. They are the fear of multiplicitous categories, of mutation, loss of resolution’s dignity and segregating language. They are powerful because they acknowledge that desire undoes these things as readily as disgust or dread.

Other works in this gallery are not as strong. Shelagh Keeley’s Writing on the Body (1988), is a massive multi-panel wall piece consisting of drawing as deliberately crude atavistic/confessional sign systems referencing bodily fluid, internal organs and amputated /alienated body parts. It was originally a site specific piece, in which the artist covered the walls of a gallery in Tokyo with a mixture of wax, Vaseline, and pigment. Here the panels have been cut out of their original architectural environment and propped against the wall, appearing as matter-of-fact slabs mostly absent of tension; the space the bodies would seek to assemble themselves in cannot thicken around them or attenuate threateningly.

This point is underscored by a small row of drawings on vellum by Betty Goodwin on the opposite wall. The Goodwins are taut by comparison; merciless in their ability to marshal stray swipes of carbon into a deft, dramatic economy. Positioning these two bodies of work across the gallery from one another robs each of something important. Keeley’s work looks like poorly informed illustration when it means after all to appeal directly rather than portray; the terse mythopoeia of Goodwin’s drawings get crowded out by a much larger work that seems to extrovert and vulgarize its palette and technique. It’s a superficial comparison.

Overall, it has to be said, that the gallery would benefit greatly from some judicious editing. The overwhelmingly sensuous affect of works as varied as a papier-mâché skin by Kiki Smith and a video of several sonorous larynxes by VALIE EXPORT would have more impact in an evacuated, clinical environment, the lucid surveillance of a contemporary art space merging with the sterile caution of the care facility.

Perhaps the only work that makes a virtue of the crowding is a haunting sound piece by Teresa Margolles called Sonido de la Morgue/Sounds of the Morgue (2003). A pair of heavily insulated headphones hanging from the ceiling in a corner proffers listeners the sound of an autopsy being conducted on an anonymous murder victim in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The sounds are mostly a continuous, slushy slicing and sawing remarkable for both its professional efficiency and its homogeneity. I am reminded immediately of the seemingly endless string of unsolved murders in Sonora County, excoriatingly documented in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, and like that narrative, the relentlessness of the situation is by turns both horrifying and giddily absurd.

In a crowded space the sound becomes gravely intimate, the grim reaper sharpening his scythe heard as cricket legs rasping together on the fringe of your hearing. It almost feels consoling to note its persistence as one strives to shut out other sounds, feeling the relief that the worst is after all over and the procedure carries on unhurried. It’s only when one tries to have an interior monologue in response, that the continuity of the sound becomes gratingly intrusive, demarcating a boundary between internal and external, and interupting the predatory progress of expectation as development. Death is distracted.

The next section, “The Scientific Body”, suffers from overcrowding, but in a way that more directly undermines the operation of some of the artworks. Notably, works by Gabriel de la Mora and Mona Hatoum propose the artist as manipulator of medical imaging, and rely on a place for the viewer’s body to relate directly to this imagery so as to be implicated in its projected diagnostics.

Mona Hatoum’s Deep Throat (1996) presents a blandly innocent dining table and chairs, with a screen neatly inserted on the bottom of a dinner plate. The screen shows a video of an endoscopic exploration of the artist’s digestive tract. The title of this work calls up the famed pornographic film of the same name, with its overlapping associations of eating, speech, and sexual penetration. The arrangement also suggests an homage to the work of surrealist René Magritte, notably Portrait, 1935 (a slice of ham on a plate that stares out at the viewer from an unblinking eye) and The Rape, 1934 (a face whose naïve features are a woman’s nude torso.) The implication is of sexuality without intimacy, but more properly of a body alienated from itself. Like the victim of an eating disorder or childhood abuse, the self of Deep Throat has lost the horizon upon which to envision the negotiation of its thresholds. Paradoxically (and pathologically), nothing can be controlled but everything shall be witnessed.

The problem with the presentation of Deep Throat here is that the room is too crowded to approach the table at some remove, as ordinary domestic tableaux. As a result, the initial sting of bourgeois betrayal is lost. Likewise, the chair is barred from sitting with both conspicuous plastic strapping and a large sign. This seems like museum security overkill, and disrupts the fantasy that it is the viewer who is invited to sit and stare, and by extension, weakens the implication that the abyss we gaze into represents our own internal workings.

Likewise, Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora’s Memoria I (2007) wants to make a space for the viewer as participant. Using MRI technology and a 3D printer, the artist produced seventeen replica skulls based on those of his close family from both live and posthumous scans. These include the skulls of a stillborn sister and deceased father, all placed at their owner’s respective height with the exception of the tiny infant, who appears as if cradled at chest level. As a memento mori or vanitas (reminder of death’s inevitability), the piece is compellingly direct, yet also delicately tactful. At a distance, the synthetic skulls emerge only gradually from the background wall, calling forth their idiosyncrasies and differences as they do so. Up close their appeal becomes more immediate and irresistible, their evident fabrication hinting at both material and virtual presences; now, elsewhere, and later all at once. In a tight space, this transformation is not enabled, and the pieces can too readily be taken up as ethnological curiosity -Day of the Dead carnival-, their mirroring potential passed over (It’s worth noting that this is one of those pieces that rewards, or even anticipates the gap between online purview and firsthand encounter) .

In the end, it is not really only a question of curtailing or choreographing certain works to a greater or lesser degree. The more important issue is how the various works come together, and it is here the charge of crowding becomes most detrimental. Having two works each by Wim Delvoye and Marc Quinn, for example, means that each piece by a given artist, though distinct formally and conceptually, has more obvious similarities with its sibling than with other pieces in the exhibition, so that the artist’s brand is more strongly enforced than thematic links from work to work across disparate disciplines and milieu. Of two sculptures made by Berlinde de Bruyckere, one maintains a delicate balance of sacred and profane grotesquerie while another is less subtle, weaker in placement and ultimately supplementary.
In some cases, artists should have been reconsidered, relocated or not included at all. The exoticism of David Altmejd’s work feels generally ill-supported and out of context in the midst of its more somber neighbors. Antony Gormley’s Drift II (2009) accomplishes itself brilliantly in a room of its own while Luanne Martineau’s provocative Dangler (2008), stuffed into a corner by a doorway, is hard put live up to its name. Martineau’s felted sculpture has fantastic but complex presence, much subtler in reality than in reproduction, and this is part of its tactile/semantic undertow. To deny the work its softer operations is, significantly, to curtail the viewer’s  progress through the hazards and liberties of critical reading.
Visceral Bodies suffers from organizational problems that obscure both the power of individual artworks and the greater gesture of curatorial intent. I hope it does not sound like post-Olympic grousing to state that the challenge faced by the proposition of Visceral Bodies are a problem of curating as commuting meaning versus programming as engendering spectacle. The body is a potent frame of reference when come upon unexpectedly, offering both the informational shock of the facts of life and the contemplative unpeeling of their artefactual presence. To repeat this revelatory act of skinning the cat so many ways in such close quarters however, is to risk robbing mimesis and allusion of their power to transform in any lasting way, which is to say, within the body of the viewer’s sensibility. Denied sensibility, the works must become bodies without politics.

Pedestrian Colour

[Pedestrian Colour was an exhibition I curated at the Slide Room Gallery in the spring of 2010. A review of the exhibition (as well as video of the opening talk) can be found on Exhibit-V.]

PEDESTRIAN COLOUR

I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn’t a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing. – Robert Rauschenberg[1]

Robert Rauschenberg coined the phrase, Pedestrian Colour in the interest of capturing ‘a general no-colour,’ comprised of found and collected things, but also base materials like dirt and gold, and incidental colours, like commercial paint mistints and the cast shadows of viewers on white canvas[2]. This exhibition seeks to acknowledge an activity shared by Rauschenberg, John Cage and others as a starting point (only an elected one, one of any number) for a series of activities related to waiting, watching, choosing and collecting. If conventional studio practices often build themselves around a sense of material and conceptual territory, a ‘local colour’ as it were, Pedestrian Colour seeks to be both rooted in everyday experience and yet ‘anti-local,’ occupying a grey gap between tasks, schedules, property and relationships; and the mostly overlooked otherworld in which their consequences spend their off hours.

THE PATINA OF PEDESTRIAN

My “poetical tendency” is challenged and brought back to life’s crude reality just by going down to the corner shop. No ivory tower allowed for the street will always beat your imagination… So, might as well stay on the street… Mexico City has got all the ingredients for “Modernity”, but somehow has managed to resist it. And it acquired a unique identity trough the resistance process.  – Francis Alÿs [3]

The watchman falls “into” the “trap” of looking. The spy is a different person.

“Looking” is and is not “eating” and “being eaten.” […] That is, there is a continuity of some sort among the watchman, the space, the objects. The spy must be ready to ‘move’ must be aware of his entrances and exits. The watchman leaves his job and takes away no information […] “Not spying, just looking” – Watchman.  – Jasper Johns [4]

Patina was at one time the way to recognize value in objects. Before the fashion for imported goods (Calico, chintz and china), Patina was a signifier of tradition and belonging among families rooted in rustic ancestral seats. The conspicuous use of courtly display that coincided with the fashion for exotica was part of an effort to centralize power by controlling monarchs like Elizabeth I and Louis XIV. Patina became a lost signifier; a centuries-old relationship of reciprocity between object and onus rendered redundant.

Taking Alexander Grewal’s Homeless Signs out of their shipping package was unexpectedly intimate. The cardboard and the writing still carry the feeling of another person’s handling, so much so that the sense of a touch is overrun by the sensation of an embrace, a bodily presence, a personal history.

Alex Grewal:

The homeless signs are signs that i have been collecting since i have started working for the city of Vancouver doing night shift street cleaning. I started coming across signs left behind on sidewalks or stuffed in garbage cans. I thought some of them were creative, humorous and honest. I guess i wanted to collect them and see what i could do with them next. The first thing i started to do was photograph them or scan them. I thought it would be interesting to either start buying the signs off of the homeless people […] Then i thought what if i created sandwich boards with the same text of the cardboard signs and then give them back to pan handlers. I thought maybe it would be too big to carry but also legal complications because sandwich boards are technically against city by laws. I thought maybe T-shirts would be a good idea for them to wear and send their message. After a few years i am still deciding what to do with them […] i was afraid to show them because of the politics behind homelessness especially during the Olympics. I think it’s unavoidable.

Grewal’s ambivalence about using the signs as artistic currency could be seen as ethical but also aesthetic; it also reflects on their success or failure as signs. The marked-up cardboard’s patina lends the signs familiarity, but it’s a troubling directness that can’t be exploited or deployed confidently. It demands insecurity. For many no doubt the signs will become signs for a political situation rather than representing the people who made them or their pleas for money or visibility; the meanings intended for the signs will slip under the fence separating patina from camouflage. To enjoy the signs as art you have to ignore them as signs. It’s an intransigent poetics, or a poetics of intransigency.

For Marlene Bouchard, patina is a charm, as in charisma but also like a talisman or note carried around in a pocket and mistaken for cash. Her work jumps from diagram to social mural in a single bound, transforming graph paper, date stamps and advertisements into antic propaganda. The animism of Bouchard’s work parodies a corporate lore of centralized distribution. As the peripatetic inspirer behind the blog ‘bucolic battery’ (bucolicbattery.blogspot.com), Bouchard offers an activism composed mainly of names, games, routes and lists. The winsomeness of these propositions alludes to more serious games however, power-plays of desire and force not unlike those of Louis or Elizabeth.

Marlene Bouchard:

C.C.C. is a drawing that illustrates North America’s dependence on cows, corn, cars and condos for industry.  The drawing is meant to function as an interconnected, capitalist machine to comment on actual consumer disconnect with their purchases and issues surrounding the unhealthy production of and unsustainable distribution of beef, genetically modified concerns related to corn, single occupancy vehicles and over dependence on motor vehicles (oil oil oil) and the branding of condos as an alter reality.

SPOOF […] is a look at suggestions made for food choices in Canada’s Food Guide from 2007 (the most current version sent, upon request this year).  The painting and its surface is embedded and fastened with adhesive tape and peeled supermarket flyer images of poor quality, (subsidized) cheap food items that best fit into the four food groups.  Transport trucks and their exhaust are then added, all is headed into an oil crater.  The piece is meant to highlight the hilarity, instability, unsustainable, short sighted nature of North America’s food distribution system and the conglomerate companies such as Kraft that keep it afloat.

bottled water has adverse effects on health, economics, the environment and human rights, this will be discussed further as potential clients come to taste victoria’s delicious tap resource […] two major corporations are running the bottled water industry at present in north america dasani coke and aquafina pepsico, […] i was thinking of offering two types of water at the bar from two public tap water sources on a route i generally take. 25% of canada’s bottled water is simply, reprocessed tap, in most cases, bottled water is less regulated than tap, and we actually purchase it for 2000x more than if we were to turn on the tap! we are then conditioned to purchase it at an astronomical amount, specially if one begins to count all of the waste associated with making, packaging and transporting the bottles.

Grewal and Bouchard work opposite ends of patina, invoking its history and employing its sheen. For Grewal, it is the staying-power of a social contract’s stain on the local landscape. For Bouchard, alter-reality’s shell game of clean or consequences (kilowatt hours for carbon credits) will be called out and countered in the working up of character into a culture of personality.

WHITE PAINT AND GOLD LEAF

I don’t think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else. – Robert Rauschenberg

It’s tickling to consider that Rauschenberg’s use of white, that placeholder for innocence, characterizes some of his greatest brushes with notoriety. Rauschenberg’s early white canvasses might have been fun-making with Clement Greenberg’s proscription against content other than ‘flatness and the delimitation of flatness’ in painting (Greenberg himself having once grudgingly admitted that a blank canvas might have to be a picture, just not a very succesful one.[5]) They were left empty for the viewer’s presence to fill, in what John Cage suggestively described as ‘airports of the lights, shadows and particles.’ They opened the signal cliché of creative fear -the blank canvas- to haphazard general intervention.

His Erased deKooning Drawing was seen as an oedipal gesture by some, and a faux-naïve Neo-Dada goof by others. Leo Steinberg has argued persuasively that Rauschenberg’s erasure of deKooning’s drawing wasn’t a crime against deKooning, but a creative proof in admission of the passing of a whole conception of painting  as based in draughtsmanship (of which deKooning represented the most worthy example).

Steinberg comments, “…it’s easy-come now, but the thought had its freshness once […] the fruit of an artist’s work need not be an object. It could be an action, something once done, but so unforgettably done, that it’s never done with, [6]” This echoes Rauschenberg’s description of the white painting’s to Betty Parsons as “almost an emergency;” adding that “they bear the contradictions that deserve them a place with other outstanding paintings and yet they are not Art because they take you to a place in painting art has not been. [7]”

Rauschenberg’s comments help illustrate the sense of risk or gamble in his enterprise, and also that it was indeed an enterprising gesture, a stretching out into undiscovered “place”. Steinberg remarks that Rauschenberg’s Erased drawing is itself “ever less interesting to look at,” but that, “the decision behind it never ceases to fascinate and expand […] [making deKooning’s drawing] famous as the Library of Alexandria is famous, and for the same reason.”

Think of white as an investment in crisis, vacuously compelling or passively destructive, eating or being eaten. If white is The Emperor’s New Clothes, chance with its pants down or the egalitarian ethics proposed by Rauschenberg and Cage, it is up to us. The glare coming off of white is the ghost of a golden promise, paid in advance.

Rob McTavish:

[The cubes] can be for anyone. I want them to just kick them down the street you know?

I saw [the Close Eyes Series] as mimicking an art gallery experience, for just an instant.

McTavish’s Close Eyes series, notes directing readers to “Imagine”, “Remember”, “Feel” or “Become” are meant for random encounters; only his signature at the bottom of each sheet undermines their anonymity, providing the ‘instant’ when the writer behind this message-in-a-bottle situationism becomes personified and so proprietary. A problem arises: should we believe in the persuasion of anonymous things (rooted in our relationship to how we see and what we find in it), or abdicate it in favour of the more certain office of authorship? McTavish depends on environmental circumstances to resolve this problem, allowing that the work is completed as “people write all over them, they even correct my spelling. Sometimes the pieces get stolen, or replaced…”

Laird Hamilton:

The instructions for this piece are fairly straightforward. There is a

649 draw this coming Wednesday and Saturday. The draw always has to be in the days following the opening, so sometime between Thursday and the opening purchase a Quickpick 649 ticket without the Extra, then fill out a card manually with the same numbers in the same sequence, also without the extra. The two tickets can be put up beside one another […] it has something to do with chance repeating something or vice versa – not being sure. i want to activate genuine social reactions – something that’s common but hidden and visceral. like what if it’s a winning ticket – who owns it? i’m thinking of the possibility of different things coming up for different people – fantasy, greed, imagining sharing it. wondering if you might be cut in or not – that good feeling of expectation or hope. wanting to steal it to keep it for oneself, or out of desperation for legitimate needs. but it’s also nothing special – just this thing anyone can buy any day.

i was thinking it brings up a really basic orientation for each of us depending on our views: trust of others versus a more legalistic attitude – trust in people versus trust in rules or protocol. i don’t want to address any of those questions explicitly but just give the tickets space and time to emanate what they really are, what they really bring out in us. money is all that is there sometimes – my consciousness is predominantly money when there isn’t enough. money is the shadow-consciousness of all my work – one facet of it i find it hard to address.

Swapping white for money is an old notion; like a passage to the afterlife that weighs the waverer’s heart against a feather, it represents a judgement in which each proposition depends on the other for a sense of proportion but the two cannot possibly be compared. Yves Klein made the same gesture when he offered portions of empty gallery space as certificates sold for gold leaf, and then threw the gold into the River Seine[8]. The white of gallery walls is always about trading trust for gold, equality for power, personal pecadilloes for shared values. The danger (charges of charlatanism, ‘the emperor’s new clothes’), is to assume these opposing forces measurable on equal terms, when in fact they present restive relations of mutual exclusion, perpetually in play.

Laird Hamilton:

i’ve wondered about that since 2002 or so: what constitutes ‘material’. do you think it’s more accurate to say art is something between the actual material and its apprehension? when i started wondering more about the ‘apprehension’ part of it my orientation towards the world changed forever, because it implies so many real things to me that deserve focus but without necessarily ripping them off as a resource for standard presentation as art. i feel like for years i confused representations of experiences to actual experiences of living in the world that we all share. i mean as opposed to explaining it to myself as an engagement in discourse…. that feels too much like a screen or a deferral…. as a general orientation it helps me make more sense of how and why i’m working, and also gives me a kind of deepdown stability or self-trust in what is often an overwhelming situation (so many ways of going about it, so much history, so much tantalizing writing and theory…) […] but back to the lottery thing […] it can only do – as art – what it would do if they weren’t winning numbers – which is no more or less what lottery tickets do every day anyways.”

Thinking of Hamilton’s lottery tickets, we might reflect on the expression, ‘play the lottery,’ as if the lottery were either sport (‘play ball!’) or entertainment (play the video, play the album, play me a song.) But a lottery is neither. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss notes that “Games… appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers.”

But not all games have obvious outcomes. Paul La Farge notes that fantasy role playing games in which “there is neither an end to the game nor any winner,” are closer to ritual, “the exact inverse: it conjoins, for it brings about a union… or in any case an organic relation between two initially separate groups…[9]” Think of the lottery for losers as a fantasy-ritual role-played with a largely virtual currency (hope, luck, greed, goodwill) with the understanding that the prize money is a proportionate sacrifice from one world to obtain real riches in the next.

A similar (if inverse) dynamic occurs in the contemporary practice of “Gold farming,” in which young, typically Asian workers slavishly play fantasy games like World of Warcraft to accrue imaginary status, experience and wealth in order to satisfy a market made up of less experienced but more affluent (typically Western) players for real-world dollars. If globalization’s progress from spiritualized desire to alienated labour is read as capitalism’s opus, gold farming is its mind-bending ouroboros.

Lotteries and gold farms are ritual strip-mined of the affirmation of affiliation: people are played, and nobody gets to play. And of course the gamesmanship of someone else’s ‘art world’ will only seem like either a lottery or a gold farm if you will not join in and make yourself a character.

BLACK

Shortly after making his white paintings, Rauschenberg made a series called ‘black paintings’ but incorporating aspects of collage. Rauschenberg considered them to be “visual experiences…not Art” and refuted symbolic associations with his color choices:[10] the surfaces were alternately shiny and matte, curdled and enamelled. If white presents a purging determination to measure things against first principles, black is the view from the other side of the vacuum, dense with discarded possibilities, like an alchemist’s nigredo. Claustrophobic, haptic black is a workroom in the dark, like the black walled studio views Matisse painted in the years of the First World War.[11]

Paul La Farge (see appendix I):

According to modern neurophysiology, […] photoreceptors in our retinas respond to photons of light, and we see black in those areas of the retina where the photoreceptors are relatively inactive.1 But what happens when no photoreceptors are working—as happens in a cave? Here we turn to Aristotle, who notes that sight, unlike touch or taste, continues to operate in the absence of anything visible:

 

Even when we are not seeing, it is by sight that we discriminate darkness from light, though not in the same way as we distinguish one colour from another. Further, in a sense even that which sees is coloured; for in each case the sense-organ is capable of receiving the sensible object without its matter. That is why even when the sensible objects are gone the sensings and imaginings continue to exist in the sense-organs. We “see” in total darkness because sight itself has a color, Aristotle suggests, and that color is black: the feedback hum that lets us know the machine is still on.

The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, remarks that the fact that we see darkness means that our eyes have not only the potential to see, but also the potential not to see. (If we had only the potential to see, we would never have the experience of not-seeing.) This twofold potential, to do and not to do, is not only a feature of our sight, Agamben argues; it is the essence of our humanity: “The greatness—and also the abyss—of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness.”3

La Farge’s cave or abyss is a concrete darkness, it has substance (presence, quantifiable potential), but only as a point of indecision and avoidance. From within its texture, one projects forwards and backwards, while melancholy echoes back a thousand what-ifs:

Black is the color of what might have been, not of what is: it is the color of pleasures past. Regret is black, and so is its cousin melancholy, which Robert Burton describes as “cold and dry, thick, black and sour” […] Melancholy is the humor that keeps the others—warm blood, angry choler—in check, the one that counsels against action. It prefers the potential to the actual […] The space of refusal is also the space of imagination. You can sit in the darkness for as long as you like, staring blindly at nothing, and see what you will. Maybe that’s the reason why caves, which are the Fort Knox of blackness, were the first sacred places. […] a liminal space, between two stages of life, the one dissolved in darkness and the other not yet known.

Studios are liminal spaces not unlike caves, between a future state and a present in which things are ‘dissolved in darkness’ (John Berger points out that a studio contrary to analogy is less like an observatory than a stomach.[12]) This dissolving is a timeless porousness, in which history seeps into the present tense and fuels accelerated, unexpected evolutions.

Sean Alward:

The pictures] deal with representations of space – historical spaces (domestic) – and are pseudo-archaeological […] including some based on my studio – which had a fire recently – and the secret room that was revealed behind my studio wall.

Alward’s photographs are glimpsed through circular mattes, like a camera-obscura or porthole, giving you the sense of being inside looking out. On the left panel, a worn piece of cloth is pressed between the viewer and the view, a repoussoir pointer engendering the sensation of zero gravity, vertiginous hovering at the darkened threshold. Rodchenko’s Constructivist camera aimed up into the sky or down from the balcony rail. The right panel is fringed with a soft blossoming of white gouache, like particles of light bending in a telescope; the ash-white wall of the photograph a half-shadowed lunar landscape.

Both these reveries suggest a tethered, projecting imagination, and each has a compelling gravity in the form of a negative attractor; the imminent becoming of a forgone history. The ‘pseudo archaeology’ of Alward’s pictures is a parallel to the physiological archaeology of the mind and body’s time in the studio, hidden pockets of wilful ignorance and delayed gratification like fossilized matter awaiting exposure and combustion.

RED

Proceeding to the back of the classroom he sat at his usual desk and took out a pencil.

New Ending:
All over the world the beautiful red breezes
went on blowing hand
in hand.  – Anne Carson[13]

For Rauschenberg, red was a colour liberally applied to the disparate inventories of his earliest ‘combines’, as if annealing their differences by smearing them with a common afterbirth. By admission unable to think of paint as an immediate, expressive syntax in the way the previous ‘Abstract Expressionist’ generation of painters had, Rauschenberg used red like a cosmetic, a superficial surface that confused allegiance in a decorative unity not without warmth; a gesture of confederacy.

It is interesting to note that the Greek nymph Pharmacia is responsible for our notion of modern cosmetics (kosmètikè) but also of pharmacy (pharmakon[14]); red as rouge but also infusion. For Plato, the notion of pharmakon encompassed both remedy and poison: love-drug, charm, medicine and paint. Arguably, the word can’t be translated definitively, nor was it even originally used in Plato’s arguments as a word with a decided deference; we may argue about it, but not from it.[15]

It’s quite possible by imagining the Rauschenberg of the early red ‘Combines’ to think of the cabinet of wonders (and by extension, its spectre the still life) and the spurious travelling road show rolled together, his expansive patter as two-parts Walt Whitman one-part snake oil salesman.

June Higgins’ ‘prom night’ is nothing if not pharmacology. The artist has attached a list to the piece (see appendix II) in lieu of a statement: an inventory of every bit and bobble, where it was found and how long held before it finally found its way into this particular sculpture. Consider the half-life of such kitschy picking awaiting use-value. Rememb Walter Benjamin’s observation that book collectors always believe the destiny of each of their prizes was only ever to end up as part of their library; the history that came before – the history of the hunt – their second text. But it is also the way each ingredient resists its ‘destiny’ that defines it as a sculpture.

Prom Night barely holds itself together; differences are the jumping-off point of its dynamism. The objects in it are silly and desperate, goofy and banal. Their coming together feels like the brief and confectionary coming-of-age bricolage: a homecoming float made of crepe; a cut and paste prom dress. The inventory is a tally of expectation, an adolescent’s spastic fantasy, like the bad horror film that is its namesake, a gory temper tantrum, the consummation of a ritual, with all of its climactic turn and transmutation.

Wendy Welch’s Reading the Heart (prototype) is an intensely personal piece cut from the Times Literary Supplement, a paper the artist has referred to as “a monthly reminder of the fact you are not reading,” As a kind of debt to the world (as well as to Welch’s mother, who had purchased the subscription as a gift), the papers must be absolved of their burden to tell all through a gradual disintegration of their readability:

Wendy Welch:

I have been thinking a lot about cells and how everything is made up of them and it is a great way to disintegrate problems if you start thinking of them as having cellular components.

Welch points out that “scientists now recognize the membrane or wall of a cell as its most important component.” In a cellular culture, surface communication is at the heart of the dilemma of all-consuming growth: strength by absorption and its shadow as thin-walled vulnerability, infection, invasion and collapse.

Welch:

I would say that I’m interested in the metaphoric potential of the body and illness and in ideas surrounding the heart (the queen that rules the body) and the pericardium (the protector of the heart) and how the cell and its membrane is a microcosm of the heart and pericardium. The work also has a lot to do with strength and fragility.

Cut, layered and draped, the text is (recalling an old joke about newspapers) red and not read: wadding or swaddle, deadweight or treasure chest; the heart as the mind perceives it. Like Rauschenberg’s newspaper cuttings or old master images, Welch’s papers shift a little towards fictive friction. The associations will seem affectionate in retrospect, the body’s tale having been told, and the words having no more weight to bear.

MOULD AND LICHEN

Where the consumnations gather, where the disposal

Flows out of form, where the last translations

Cast away their immutable bits and scraps,

Flits of steel, shivers of bottle and tumbler,

Here is the gateway to beginning, here the portal

Of renewed change, the birdshit, even, melding

Enrichingly in with debris, a loam for the roots

Of placenta: oh nature, the man on the edge

Of the cardboard-laced cliff exclaims, that there

Could be a straightaway from the toxic past into

The fusion-lit reaches of a coming time! Our

Sins are so many, here heaped, shapes given to

False matter, hamburger meat left out.[16] – A.R. Ammons

That space between two positions (like the edge of a knife

cutting an orange) is a wake of consequences in

all directions. Constant explosive space to

wherever. Projection of circles starting from a straight line

– Gabriel Orozco[17]

Rauschenberg once made a painting out of dirt for John Cage. This dirt has been interpreted as emphasizing a sense of ‘base’ materiality, ‘lowering’ received notions of what a painting ought to be. As Yve-Alain Bois remarked, “the mud in Rauschenberg’s dirt painting is not depicted mud […it] does not lend itself to any metaphorical displacement.”

But there are other kinds of displacements: over time, the Dirt Painting grew mould and lichen, and seeds within its surface sprouted. The indeterminacy of the dirt mould became a kind of meditative communiqué between maker and recipient (an impermanent one, as Rauschenberg retrieved the piece years later for a retrospective, never to return it.) The articulation of soil into life is very slow, seemingly static, but the gesture of correspondence encloses it at either end, redefining it therefore as a garden.

Michael Jess’ short videos, ornen, reypeha, irithjiens, lstyn are likewise defined by delimitation. Refrains of rhythmic repetition (trees swaying, clouds drifting, escalator stairs rising) are orchestrated with and against music sequences that alternately enervate and still their colloquy. Brevity condenses, interrupts, and ultimately supplants the expectation of any linear narrative arc. Lively moments are funny but also poignant or manic as they end without warning; softer moments earn our involvement by virtue of their variation and invention.

Michael Jess:

these are all made up words/titles. language that is made up defines the made up language of art, in a way. they go together, or something like that.

The pieces (like Jess’ statement and drawings) are pointedly modest. Like Eric Satie, who Jess quotes as background for the vocals of John Cage in lstyn, Jess rejects long-range compositional development in favour of a direct appeal to the oscillations of attention span. The simplicity of the images buffers a steadily insistent pulse, the sensation of forever enveloping every present-tense.

Cage championed Satie’s music during his seminal period at Black Mountain College, citing his static repetition and rhythmic structure as a ‘correction’ to the emphasis on harmonics modern music had inherited from Romanticism.[18]Some of the more eccentric epiphets Satie used to describe his output (“furniture music”) or his vocation (“phonometrician”) are suggested both by the casual but conspicuous symmetry and the intimist analogue mechanisms with which the videos are presented.

Finally, the small packets of information in Jess’ videos can’t be separated from the obviousness of the edits that bind them. Cage’s voice in lstyn urges us to “alter, not the means of connection, but the things being connected.” In the tradition of ad hoc avant-gardism, these sequences of moving parts recall their own creative origins continuously, appearing thus as both naïvely cobbled and pointedly instructive etudes. As separated sequences, the images in the videos seem immiscible, (a chemistry term brought to bear on Rauschenberg’s work by Leo Steinberg), defined by mutual repulsion. As wholes, they are, like their titles, not quite articulable. Their life is in the cuts.

Jon Dowdall’s belated addition to Pedestrian Colour involved the placement of a small schematic collage (what seemed to me a little salon of windows or pictures and figure s at play) inclined by both orthogonal lines within the composition and its physical circumstances – leaning up against a dumpster near the gallery – away from us and toward a graffiti-covered dumpster siding on which the word ‘toy’ was scrawled by the artist or somebody else. The piece rested on the gutted frame of what looked like maybe a printer, which had been filled with clumps of dry, uprooted turf. Two days later the piece was gone, the clumps of dirt wet from recent spring rain, the graffiti dormant.

POSTSCRIPT: COMBINES

“Disinterested” work: knitting, playing chess, driving a taxi,. Short term objectives.

A time-space-person relation dedicated to the day and to that which

Is immediate. To construct a house just to construct a house (Schwitters). To make a

Museum just to have an office (Broodthaers). To form a political party for planting trees

(Beuys). To play chess. To read (Borges). To play chess. Billiards.

To play the landscape (Mondrian). To play the bull (Picasso). To play the sailor.

The businessman. The bureaucrat, the tourist. The designer. – Gabriel Orozco[19]

Rauschenberg’s term ‘Combine’ is a word that sounds like a verb made into a noun, or more properly (leaving its farming connotations intact) a tool. Thinking of the old notion that usefulness is to a good tool what purposeful purposelessness is to the beautiful, I might say that the danger of discussing the work of Rauschenberg as a body of tendencies that as a whole form an aesthetic, is to miss the implications of those tendencies in shaping real social situations. Shared agreements, contingent situations, collective gambles, bargains, poetics, friendships; by engaging these artists in such situations, I hope to have avoided this trap a little. But I would acknowledge that a Combine is always both/also as well as neither/nor, and allow that the instances of so many things coming together in so rough a way generated its own patina, one that retroactively, inexplicably, projects its history, legend of beginning, and underlying fields of use.

[1] “http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/9117/rosetta-brooks-interviews-robert-rauschenberg

[2] A brief but useful interactive summary of Rauschenberg’s different ‘colours’ can be found courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/interactive_features/52#

[3] Gianni Romano,”Francis Alÿs: streets and gallery walls”[interview], Flash Art #211, 2000 [http://www.postmedia.net/alys/interview.htm]

[4] Jasper Johns, “Sketchbook Notes,” qtd. In John Yau, “The Mind and Body of the Dreamer,” Uncontrollable Beauty, ed. Bill Beckley w. David Shapiro (New York: Allworth Press, 1998, p. 298.)

[5] Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” Art International, Vol. VI, No. 8, October 25, 1962, p.30, qtd. In Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood”, Minimalism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), p.123.

[6] Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 22

[7] C.f. “Must Painting be Mark Making?” http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/interactive_features/52#

[8] C.f. Yves Klein, “Le Vide” (Paris: Gallerie Iris Clert, 1958), at http://www.jasonbeale.com/writing/klein.html

[9] Paul La Farge, “Colours: Black,” Cabinet, Winter 2009-2010. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_lafarge

[10] Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4823&page_number=2&template_id=1&sort_order=1

[11] Specifically, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (Window Swung Open at Collioure), 1914 (see http://www.centrepompidou.fr/images/oeuvres/XL/3L00077.jpg; and The Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916, http://www.phillipscollection.org/

[12] “The first thing painters ask about a studio-space usually concerns light. And so one might think of a studio as a kind of conservatory or observatory or even a lighthouse. And of course light is important. But it seems to me that a studio, when being used, is much more like a stomach. A place of digestion, transformation and excretion. Where images change form. Where everything is both regular and unpredictable. Where there’s no apparent order and from where a well-being comes.” John Berger, “Drawing: Correspondence with Leon Kossoff”, Shape of a Pocket (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001), pp 71-72.

[13] Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (New York: Knopf, 1998)

[14] Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “On Platonic Cosmetics,“ Uncontrollable Beauty, p 91.

[15] “The Pharmakon,” http://www.cobussen.com/proefschrift/200_deconstruction/220_undecidables/221_pharmakon/pharmakon.htm

[16] A.R. Ammons, Garbage, (New York: W.W. Norton &Co., 1993), p.29

[17] Gabriel Orozco, Photogravity (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999 ) p 87

[18] Peter Gena, “Cage and Rauschenberg: Purposeful Purposelessness Meets Found Order.” (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992) http://www.petergena.com/cageMCA.html

[19] Gabriel Orozco, Photogravity (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999 ) p 39

Curator’s Notes: Fantasy Island

 

 [Fantasy Island was an exhibition I organized with Wendy Welch at the Slide Room Gallery in February of 2010.]

Curator’s Notes: ‘Fantasy Island’

Wendy Welch and I had originally been looking at a show based on notions of fantasy with something of a dark side. We were interested in this tendency in the work of several Victoria artists, and we thought there was some kind of crossover between the alternative subcultural crust that forms on the Western edge of the country, with its heritage of experimental living, psychedelia, folk music and craft and a sense of weightless whimsy that in my mind will always recall the networking obsessed turn of the millennium…a sense of interconnectedness that fuelled upbeat, neo-liberal notions of a self-policing community of moral & economic improvisation. By now we have all become more begrudgingly circumspect about the unreality of social media as it relates to the reality social contract, but that buzz of displacement, that momentary liberation of plugging in and getting down, remains a signal experience of our time.  

We began talking about a strain of escapism that both of us associated with the Pacific Northwest in general and Victoria in particular, a sense of utopia or dystopia as represented by both Victoria’s long history of tourism as well as the addictive behaviours of its homeless population. The ‘natural wonders’ that lure so many folks out here are part of the story as well…images of flora and fauna that nudge closer to human behaviour may indicate the fantasy of a back to nature ethos, or the ornamental expression of something that no longer participates meaningfully in our lives.

Caitlin Gallupe’s small, vivid gouache panels for instance, tell peculiar stories in which youth at play frolic in a hallucinogenic landscape. A monstrous character – the Brothers Grimm via science-fiction – emerges in the depiction of a landscape filled with alien intelligence. Her characters may have found an ideal, alternative community, or they may be the subjects of a countercultural cautionary tale, terribly out of place.

June Higgins’ acrylic paintings feature a bacterial fairyland whose lush brushwork whose rising hackles offer glimpses of a visceral, vulnerable underside. Their resemblance to landscape painting could be a form of protective or predatory camouflage. Lyle Schultz’s paintings by contrast configure a wall on which dense, paranoid, scribbles huddle together for crumbs of stray goodwill, all the while ready to change tactics and aggressively insinuate themselves into your consciousness.

Carly Nabess’ works on paper are delicate, open-ended monochromes. Their flower and animal shapes recall both an adolescent scrapbook aesthetic and something retro-modernist, the future that was…Likewise, Tyler Hodgins’ miniature community began as a model for a public sculpture proposal for the Dockside Green development. I’ve always been of the opinion that models for unrealized public sculpture are inherently utopian, representing a possibility of community that never was…His addition of live moss to the hollow centre of the piece suggests both the dream of a nature-centered community and the ‘greenwashing’ attendant upon so many prefabricated models of home.

Caleb Speller’s contribution to Fantasy Island bookends (literally) an odd, vaguely miraculous procession from youth to old age. Like the animals that mournfully carry the dead hunter through the forest in Mahler’s First Symphony, his quirky musical instruments are both droll and admirably serious at their work. Nearby, an author’s portrait of dubious veracity gives up the joke.

Selina Jorgensen has produced dozens of small to medium format works in graphic silkscreen and acrylic patterns based on tidal life as rendered with insistent flatness. Arranged in hypnotic configurations of lacy forms and tie-dyed colours, these works suggest the unreality of the aquarium world. 

Rachel has experience working with injured wildlife via both the SPCA and Metchosin’s WildARC. Her position is something of an update on the nineteenth century model of artist as naturalist. Though Evans’ work is motivated by a sincere interest in her subject, it also entails an aspect of wonder and curiosity. For instance, the eyes of the deer masks are fitted with periscopes so that viewers who try on a mask must relate to the sensory/cognitive experience of the way deer actually see. The curious (and potentially absurd or grotesque) appearance of a person wearing a deer mask is reflective of an element of fantasy, fallacy or romance, inherent in scientific models.

Camilla and Rosey Pickard have produced a screenplay for an absurdist melodrama, “Hinterland Attack of the Friendly and Dangerous Animals.” The farcical story pokes fun at images of animals as both friendly companions and/or majestic, awe-inspiring Canadiana, as well as our current penchant for environmental catastrophe as entertainment. Her sister Rosey has provided Surreal, retro-Edwardian illustrations. 

Finally, Dallas V. Duobaitis has reproduced the dizzyingly inventive structure of his recent show at the Fifty-Fifty Arts Collective, Ad-Hoc Trajectories. Less a rehash than the continuity of an ongoing, seeking series of questions, his site-specific sculpture connect the rudimentary and the sophisticated, repetitive handwork to sweeping scale, while at the same time suggesting an invasive growth principal reminiscent of a virus. To become involved in these bridges and fretworks is to entertain a romance of domination and isolation, undercut by a persistent humility of means. A practicing Buddhist, Duobaitis argues that the fragile, contingent nature of his structures causes viewers to reconsider their own biases and expectations as to stability and storytelling.

The purpose of Fantasy Island is not to organize a central statement or aesthetic but qualify atmosphere-as-activity, like a mood or variety of weather, slightly inert but also definitively unstable. Perhaps it is symptomatic of both the works involved and their organization in the space that the show was largely organized through social media. The trust that poetry can manifest itself through such networking is an investment in localized sensations travelling great distances (think here of Colin Wilson’s definition of authorship as a spider feeling tremors at the center of a web1.); a kind of magic, an occult character that roots the show’s more absurd banalities and high-minded constructions in perpetual ritual.

  1. 1.        Colin Wilson, The Occult (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) 22.

Wendy Welch, Circuitous Routes: Abundance/Excess


[First published by Open Space, Sept 2009]

“Why do nature’s messes always look so much better than human messes? I always observe those piles of tangled seaweed along the ocean shore intensely and wonder how could the feeling of that tangled heap be captured in drawing. A lot of my drawings are an attempt at this. Actually I’ve been after this effect for about 20 years.”

– Wendy Welch

I. Bodies Without Work: Circulation, Density, Arterial Routes

”A huge investigation for me is the ‘natural gesture’ …the scribble, when is it authentic, when is it natural,” writes Wendy Welch, speaking to the origins of her cut-paper assemblages.

“Cutting makes me take the time to focus on the nature of this gesture.”

Welch has cut up cheques, envelopes and other forms of documentation that flow through the economic circulatory system of the Vancouver Island School of Art, a school she directs from an office that, in sequestered instances, becomes a studio. At such moments, cutting becomes a means of intervening relief, the same way doodling on a message pad grounds the current of a telephone conversation.

Welch has stated, “I have a fascination for how people doodle, how these marks have an authenticity whether or not the person who makes them is an artist.”

She cites Luanne Martineau’s drawings that contain tracings made from the background marks in comic books:

“…Those side gestures that aren’t part of the main narrative but are so important…” the unremarked-upon marks like the crazy spiral whorl around Charlie Brown as he is tackled for the thousandth time, the conjugation of the conjuration that is cartooning.

“They come from an understood language.”

A salient characteristic of drawing in the modern period is self-consciousness. An artist’s mark declares ongoing intent and present-mindedness, whereas background hatchings, the non-artist’s telephone doodle, declare their author’s absence like a Houdini diagram in a tangled coil of abandoned rope that no longer wears the gesture of its vanished captive.

Works like Circulation Density and Arterial Routes strive to emphasize this disappearing act, presenting the doodle as telling everything about the body (where it goes, what it does, how it’s made) except what it looks like from the outside. Both Circulation Density and Arterial Routes explore a copious layering that isolates and explodes (respectively) the quest for a decisive, revealing gesture, what Welch refers to as “an authentic mark.”

Rather than tell, Density shows, like the illustrations of a biology text, promising the secrets of reproduction that forestall our prurient search with one page after another of transparent provisions (bones, nerve-endings, blood vessels, musculature) until at last lust loses to literature. Floating out front is a part that won’t mesh, the reflection or projection of inquiring desire.

Arterial Routes amplifies the doodle’s intimacy until it yields an unravelling physiognomy, like the ectoplasm produced by a medium, a message like the letter some poet said we all get to read sooner or later, carried around in our corpuscles as the mnemonic chant we forget we forgot. Tracking the rhythmic Routes on the gallery wall, we are somewhere between sonar and shadowboxing.

II. Everyday Excess

Welch’s mother was a weaver, a heritage that doubtless asserts itself in the ways she manipulates materials. Welch was initially trained as a painter and uses colour in her work as a means of fabricating discernment and choice, but the palette she chooses is made from commonplace domestic materials. For the piece Corinthian Column (2007), for example, Welch braided six months’ worth of paper, fabric, plastic, aluminium cans and foil, household elements that would otherwise have been thrown out or recycled.

Welch’s compositional language takes form by successively linking bits of discrete information into a complex network. With an intensity born of a laborious assemblage technique that is at once painterly and sculptural, the interplay between individual components and overall structure allows Welch to explore the boundaries between art and everyday life.

It is in the narrative of cataloguing everyday life, however, that a confessional aspect of Welch’s work unexpectedly appears, at first like an unintended flaw, traces of restlessness or mess that gain conceptual momentum as the work is explored more fully.

Welch’s installations must be assembled and broken down carefully. This can be an exhausting process, ecstatic at the outset, depressing in its denouement, a shift from promising transformation to wearisome stockpiling, the bell-curve of buyer’s remorse. The choice to manipulate everyday domestic material carries connotations of a domestic struggle, The Story of Stuff dramatized on TV as redemptive purge and renewal cycles in which the clutter of ordinary homes is briskly disciplined by more organized storage.[1]

Welch cites Martha Stewart as an influence, in part for “her dedication to the handmade,” but at the same time for the “almost ridiculous creating [of] many objects we don’t need (embellishing cloth diapers with rick-rack comes to mind).”

This aspect of potential self-parody (often noted affectionately by fans) is in equal proportion to the growth of Martha Stewart Omnimedia (MSO), a synergistic corporate entity based on the consolidation of Stewart’s various incarnations and undertakings. Stewart the entrepreneur has always made able use of herself as a model and exemplar, with the understanding that through care and investment, consumers can “become like Martha.”

Welch’s creative behaviours mimic and amplify those of the aspirational credit-card nester: she chooses the material before she decides what can be done with it. She thinks in terms of infinity, of an ever-expanding universe of materials.

III. (Reconstructed as Abundance)

Making art with waste isn’t what it used to be. The transit from an object’s being discarded to its becoming abstracted as a spent idea or a piece of scurf, in Welch’s time (as opposed to Kurt Schwitters’ or Robert Rauschenberg’s) is virtually instantaneous. Objects project themselves as desirable consumer choices and imprint in the resin of physical memory in a single transaction, as we harvest their promise with shocking velocity. To paraphrase Monet’s comment about landscape, waste is nothing but an impression, and an instantaneous one.

Welch’s weaving of the everyday objects of Tumbleweed (Reconstructed) is also their unweaving, their undoing as personal effects and their transformation into redeemable meaning. Made of material used a decade’s worth of earlier artworks (the artist keeps a colour-coded inventory), the materials are now in their third life. Paradoxically, this process of hashing and re-hashing brings them closer to painterly gestures even as the physical act of pulling them from plastic bags stashed in a rusted shipping container implicates Welch in Baudelaire’s model of artist as rag picker.

Welch confesses a fascination with Celtic knotwork forms, with their underlying grid structures and open and closed forms. The literary parallel of the knotwork motif could be seen as the Celtic or Old-English riddle, as a progressive unravelling of attributes in search of an unnamed culprit

I am not made from the rasping fleece of wool

no leash pulls [me] nor garrulous threads reverberate

nor do oriental worms weave [me] with yellow down

nor am I plucked with shuttles or beaten with the hard reed

and yet I will be called a coat in common speech…[2]

The modern equivalent of this identification-via-disconnection would be Ad Reinhart’s recital of refusals, a zero-degree definition of artwork that also reads like an operating manual for abstraction:

A work of art is not work.
Working in art is not working.
Work in art is work.
Not working in art is working.
Play in art is not play…

…Yellow in art is yellow.
Dark gray in art is not dark gray.
Matt black in art is not matt black.
Gloss black in art is gloss black.
White in art is white…

…Simplicity in art is not simplicity.
Less in art is not less.
More in art is not more.[3]

In the binary litany of “is”/ “is not”s, the slimmest of points of overlap dispute critical territory, a glancing friction between positivism and negation that yields up the identity of the subject in question (“black,” “working,” “work”).

The woven/unwoven/rewoven objects of Welch’s Tumbleweed (Reconstructed) are participants in a rolling retrospective that is also an elimination dance, Recalling Michael Ondaatje’s poem of the same name, a rambling catechism of absurd yet humanizing stipulations (“Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law,” “Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board” and finally, “Anyone with pain.”[4]) These characters lose their specific identities even as we adjust our gaze to identify or indemnify them, registering a castoff’s flash of sadness before succumbing to their hue.

IV. Failover Histories: Of Traffic and Transmission

“The knowledge that we have invented our world does not erase the possibility that we might believe in it.”

– Jessica Stockholder [5]

In graduate school, Welch subtitled a piece Single Point Failure, referring to the concept (from computer network systems design) of a system that will fail if any single point of its network is disrupted. Welch pointed out in an artist’s talk that her work does not in fact ever have a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) construction despite her penchant for precarious presentation.

Though the gestures of Transmissions (Broken) are dense and ecstatic, they do not contribute to any final gestalt diagram. Instead, they are full of dark, anarchic marks, suggestive of oddball follicles or skid marks leading into snow banks. Our fear in an age of ultimate connectivity being ever that one random anomaly (a leaked e-mail memo, a sneeze in a subway train) precipitates systemic collapse.

The series separately titled Traffic Patterns and Transmissions (Broken) are models of the tension between the will to propagate and the success or failure to connect. They are also artworks that are about success as the outcome of prior error, reflecting systems that have learned to imitate and accommodate the patterns of accident. Welch’s antic gestures in the end relate what the artist has elsewhere referred to as “contingent agreement”: a program rewritten by its user-community, a hemisphere of the brain reclaiming lost functioning after catastrophe.

Taking the metaphor of “SPOF” further, why not interpret Welch’s work in terms of SPOF’s proposed solutions, conceiving of “failure” not only in terms of structural integrity, but also the modernist promise that structural integrity equals a commensurate integrity of meaning? In adapting the solutions offered by systems designers for SPOF problems, we construct a conceptual sitemap for navigating Welch’s work:

What designers call “Reduced Complexity,” for instance, promises that “complex systems shall be designed according to principles decomposing complexity to the required level.”[6]

Interpret “decomposing complexity to the required level” as wit or tact, a function of truth-telling relative to scale. Up close, Welch’s interface falls back on an intimist humour of object-fatigue. Standing back, it reveals itself as fulsome, lovely structures. Between the two is a blur.

“Redundancy” refers to the duplicating of critical components, so that should one component fail, the other will kick in. The literature of systems design refers to “an automatic and robust switch or handle to turn control over to the other well functioning unit,” a.k.a. the “failover.”[7]

The phrases “automatic and robust switch” and “well-functioning unit” speak to a body’s restorative rituals and regimens, the day-to-day engagement to repetitive efforts that as a matter of course miraculously transpose routine encounters with everyday materials into pleasure, acuity and mental health.

This “robust switch” of course, is craft.

Related to redundancy is “diversity design,” “a special redundancy concept that cares for the doubling of functionality in completely different design setups of components to decrease the probability that redundant components might fail both at the same time under identical conditions.”[8]

An artwork’s ability to be read in multivalent ways owing to its inclusivity is something decided in its origins rather than in its outcome. To tolerate a wide range of materials, permitting them to arrive in a work with their histories intact, allows that adjustments in meaning to flex as readily as paper bowing under the weight of several stresses. A call-and-response of gesture, gap and gloss will surely transfer those stresses onward to other meanings elsewhere, as viewers pick and choose, recognize and relate, acknowledging tensions without apprehending freight. This is generosity.

The final condition of a successful network is “transparency,” the promise that whatever systems design will deliver long term reliability is based on transparent and comprehensive documentation.[9] Transparency has an ethical basis, in that with a self-documenting system, flaws can be assessed by a community as potential areas of improvement, development or growth… (Governments no longer meaningfully promise any ideals other than transparency.)

Welch’s pieces offer a triple transparency. The first is the way repetition inhabits their gestures, encoding redundancy in an automatic switch to what the body learns. Because it is easy to learn, it is easy to see (and for Welch, easy to teach).

The second transparency is in their collaborative character (the artist produces her installations with the aid of a community of friends and students), which insures both robustness and diversity.

The final transparency is in their insistence upon literalism. The works never cease to be their materials, photographs, posters and drawings, as such. Their flatness is self-documenting, the artist’s starting point is also her punch line, inviting viewers at all times to acknowledge just how much of the work they are making up themselves.

V. Postscript: Enclosures and Edens

“On the very first day of art school I had a sense of coming home that I’d not once experienced from K to twelve. I loved every moment of art school. […] Art, you are my Jackhammer. Art, you are my bulldozer.”

– Douglas Coupland[10]

In authoring this essay, I have tried to recall my primary experience with Wendy Welch’s work, which was installing a large wall-collage piece for an exhibition in Portland. At the time I was aware that the coming together of the work would be fundamentally improvisational, attached by segments of tape or clips, rippling and clinging to walls and stairs, as much a mental projection or imaginative construct as a scenographic (or biomorphic) model. It was easier to understand as an activity than writing a conventional essay that does not itself branch out in every direction, dangling rather than bonding, resembling rather than describing.

This experience has also merged with my primary experience with Welch herself, as her colleague at VISA. Phrases that seem appropriate to her work such as “candour at once literal and fictive,” apply equally well to the consensus-forming-as-moving-target that is art school. Surveying the plenitude of graph paper in Welch’s watercolours, one recognizes the charting of creative unreality underlying her entrepreneurial adventure.

The tiny painted gestures in cells that make up Enclosures are gestures in potentia, instructor’s exemplars like alphabet of a kindergarten frieze, peculiar lore touched as much as read.

Writing in a recent issue of Art in America, critic Dave Hickey drew on contemporary notions of Utopia and Eden, Utopias being largely defined by what they leaves out (hunger, vagrancy, artists, etc.) and Edens for what they incorporate (anything your heart desires.)[11]

Gestures are an Edenic language, executed without shame, morphologically promiscuous, whereas fixed cannons of formal criteria are utopian, exclusive and absolutist. Art schools have been all of these.

Art pedagogy is perhaps at all times threatened and enlivened by the provisional, speculative honesty that is the art that happens inside and around it, the two forces only certifying one another fully in rare moments of collaboration so perfectly demanding they might be characterized as sculpture. At these moments the undertaking of “art school” ties and tethers itself to the physical fabric of the space brokered between building and authorship, but it remains difficult to separate the experiential from the possible, to mark, that is, the boundary between physical and imaginary space.

[1] C.f. http://www.storyofstuff.com/

[2] “Notes, The Old English Translation of Aldhelm’s Riddle of Lorica,” The Review of English Studies 1997 XLVIII(191):345-349; doi:10.1093/res/XLVIII.191.345 (Oxford University Press, 1997.)

[3] Ad Reinhardt, “Twelve Rules for a New Academy.” Art as Art, The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. Ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991)

[4] Michael Ondaatje, “Elimination Dance (Intermission).” The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems. (Toronto:McClelland and Stuart, 1989), pp 77-87

[5] 5. Qtd. by Lynne Cooke for “Jessica Stockholder: Your Skin in this Weather Bourne Eye-Threads and Swollen Perfume.” http://www.diacenter.org/exhibitions/introduction/52

[6] C.f. Wikipedia, “Single Point of Failure”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Point_of_Failure

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] C.f. Douglas Coupland, “High School Confidential”, The Walrus, July/August 2006; http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2006.07-field-notes-douglas%20coupland-memories-high-school-confidential/

[11] David Hickey, “Pagans”, Art in America, October 2008; http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_9_96/ai_n30890687/

Daniel Laskarin at Deluge Contemporary Art

[written November 2009. Never published]

Like a film in which doomed youth try in vain to escape vengeful spirits only they can see, I have of late been menaced by my experience with Daniel Laskarin’s sculpture. Criticisms I’ve read of Alberto Giacometti’s work leap to mind too late to save me. Peter Schjeldahl, David Sylvester, and Jacques Dupin all detected a tie between object and observing eye as surrogate for the artist’s absented concentration. Enveloping the viewer in the largesse of an artwork’s undertaking, it is the promise of undecided form weighed against the threat of overall disintegration. Like the money that comes in dreams only to evaporate upon waking leaving somehow less than nothing, the plays of possibility that had appeared initially enter a vacuum as the work becomes obdurately, inevitably present. In the way that only dreams and artworks can steal back something never really owned, the viewer is suddenly indebted.

At the opening of Sticks and Stones, his recent show at Deluge Contemporary Art, I was with chair, one (2008), alone despite the crowd, feeling backed into a corner. The chair resembles the one occupied by the music teacher of Matisse’s The Piano Lesson (1916), both body and chair as skirted fetish, sternly listening. Blocks suggested by a cube emerging from the chair’s seat and the filled void beneath it are reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s Cast of the Space Beneath My Chair (1965), in which a displaced mass speaks to the residue of an absentee author. Recall Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Poetics of Space, in which the accumulative nooks and crannies of domestic memory become the warrens of creativity’s accretion.

But Laskarin’s chair is not a residual artifact, it is an interactive device. The chair’s solidified voids respond to the viewer’s body through agencies of sheen and sound. When I saw the chair in Laskarin’s studio, he paused as we spoke across it, his voice taking on a rustling ring, “Hear that? It registers.”

The hollowness of the chair as both throne and bell supports the authority of its profile, a traffic cone defining the centre of an accident scene, expanding to become a cone of silence enclosing the room, an inquisitor’s cap dropping down around your ears, shutting you in against a ringing throng (thunderous something-not applause-surrounds…)

Back at the opening, I was thinking, this work makes me feels stupid. Plenty of things make you feel stupid in passive principle, but this work was doing it on purpose. On first take, it might be like a painting by Luc Tuymans, a shivery proposition cum preposition, not the thing one thinks but a construction of the mind, a revenant placeholder for lost politics, resilient as a complex. The person to whom this chair belongs has felt stupid (second take), the person for whom this chair has been made was persecuted as ignorant, (third take: tortured by education).

On the wall there are three pictures and then somehow more of a building wrapped up plus a monument with a golden statue on top (and yet, and, 2009). Blue-grey wrapping, grey sky and gold statue compose soft relief nestled in a grey niche. They present themselves sculpturally, if sculpture didn’t seem to always be moving; the impression is of the medium pointedly denied its dynamism.

You watch each picture for the plot but each is the same. Now you are wishing you had not constructed this line of thought, as obviously wrong-headed as it is when all of these images are readily irreconcilable (the pleasure of stereo being, for instance, not in reassembling two sounds into one, but in becoming two places musically). It becomes a taxing match game, double-checking for story and scale as the hypnotically bland beauty of each image demands estrangement from its doubles. A companion piece to Laskarin’s more demanding objects, the photographs compose a vanitas to both the travel snapshot and the public monument as two languages stranded on the wrong side of time. A digital-age moral lesson ensues, in which the pangs of multiplicity pay for the pleasures of spastic relativism.

Nearby a large, boxy object (like a postbox, or the filled cube/skirt of the chair) flattens a punch line beneath itself, evidence appearing in a comically still-there blob of plasticky resin, a throbbing, blood-red, thumbs-up (the trouble with longitude, 2009). You feel the freight hit its mark, but the sanguine exclamation doesn’t quite surrender its absurdity and become a full-blown joke. The box is really very smooth and rhetorical, and floats before ever it falls. The crimson curl is not crushed -a supine quotation mark or deferential comma- so that the impact of the statement (it falls) never settles (‘it falls’; it falls,) but rests…

Dupin writes, “The purposeful indefiniteness which readily isolates the objects and figures, expresses my separation from them, leaves them free, that is, in a position to choose among various possibilities.”

Like those phenomenological reads of Cezanne’s brushstrokes that assess each one as representing infinite choices, the posture of Dupin’s argument assumes that the counting doesn’t cost, configures a viewer who is not bound even as the work is made free.

In three separate works, a small figure-bust with head down -not to chest, but like a dog offering its concentration- broods. The most consequential-seeming of these is at the end of a plank counterweighted with books (considering the quotient, 2009). A uniform brown in concert with the wood, the books once belonged to artist’s father, and speak of schooling stacked up on a distant, dusty grade. The axis is a chunk of industrial flooring still surprised at itself, and below it all a pole negotiating a kind of tripod or jack rigged with improvised shims.

The handcraftedness and precariousness of everything but the little man make it look as if things are as they are for a reason. The books (mathematics and improbably, Macbeth) offer a column of causation we’ll never grip in one hand and saw off with another. Such is school. Plank and man form a kind of jumping-off point for a line of thought about texts that won’t be penetrated, places that can’t ever be reached, or retaken, from the memories that have yoked them to one gaze, when that gaze turned down and followed its feet, observing nothing, shoving whittlings of wood into the crevice between bed and wall, all this time spent alone with one’s words, working without talk.

Silence is what you can measure the spaces between the artworks in, a matte silence belying the striated, fractious destinations of your body. The effort to stake out silence is undertaken with seriousness by the duped photographs, by glassy planes rendered in CAD, by prosthetic antlers crisscrossing in several directions from a dandling hub, or a tiny bronze rocket and what resembles the dross of its casting. What do I mean by silence? It isn’t choosing not to speak in aid of asking something, offering consent or (as often happens in dialogue) indictment, but not offering to speak regardless because withdrawal is a finer expression of the gesture of instruction. The works would make us silent too, neither looking and asking nor looking and acknowledging, but watching and waiting, not expectant of a reply.

Midway above the stairwell down and out is a video monitor of the endless steps of an escalator, each stair rising up to fill the frame. The hovering plateau completes one wedge of dark and shimmering parallelogram of light before coughing up its double (there’s a slight lapse, things shudder along less sharply than expected of simulacra.) The drop from which you view the monitor is not rhetorical: the suspension of the loop in the confines of time-space read as tread/riser/riser/tread should be obvious to your arms and legs, but your brain has clasped itself around the theories of stairs. Everywhere else in the gallery you suspected it but now you know it in your bones: Laskarin’s work robs you of your place in this world, bulls you back into the season you just passed through, because, after all, it is an art in aid of an origin, and an eyewitness to the intellectual drift of its adventure.

For a static equivalent we could think of the drawings of Charles Sheeler who, like Giacometti, organized visual surveys whose signal motive was a massively tactile effort at disambiguation, electrifying with doubt whoever stands in the lighting rod rectus of the watcher’s shoes. Laskarin has expressed his admiration for critic Richard Shiff, who writes of doubt (and related experiences identified as prophecy, paranoia and projection) as ‘interference’ phenomena in the communication linking viewers and artworks.

In a recent exhibition at Vancouver’s Access with Toronto artist Jennifer Hutton, one of Laskarin’s works appeared adjacent to a Hutton text piece that read, “Things, not pictures,” echoing William Carlos Williams’, “no ideas but in things” the little sails of these italics blown by a breeze we’re all made to feel when we read,

“so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

An earlier body of work by Laskarin, Agnostic Objects, borrowed from illustrations in 19th-century farming manuals, re-plotting horse-feeders and fleece-crates in a way that lent them the virtuous virtuality of minimal sculpture. Take Laskarin’s interest to be sincere, and apply the will to animate objects of utility intimately linked-as in Williams’ “variable foot,” both arch and plain- to his testing of the sensuous thresholds of cognitive dissonance. Like Williams, Laskarin builds knockdown plays of form propped up by oblique semantic gestures. Treacherous to the prejudices of the educated, commanding in their contingency, they read as operating manuals for anti-academics.

Wendy Welch at Open Space, Victoria BC.

[First published in Coagula, January 2010]

When Wendy Welch was a grad student at Cal State LA in the eighties, she tore up an Ed-Moses-style abstract grid painting on paper she had made in front of studio mate Barbara Kerwin, throwing the pieces over her head. “Does the world really need another abstract painting?” This story could be a fable about the way painting’s playing out of its own demise has developed into throwaway theatre, the acrobatic humour of Welch’s gesture itself prophetic of her future work. Welch’s recent exhibition, Circuitous Routes: Excess/Abundance features six new works that expand upon the artist’s evolving commitment to drawing and installation, while at the same time using castaway matter in a manner that recalls painting.

Welch’s pieces are assemblage via cutting and culling: doodles or scribbles are cropped and coloured, landscape photographs are snipped into spiralling double-binds, and domestic objects are sorted, braided and taped. The latter has led to a reading of Welch’s work as a critique of consumer culture. This understanding should be investigated more closely. Her objects are clean/bright rather than soured/stained, recalling the instantaneous waste of bulk-buy stores instead of the homely old artefacts of Rauschenberg or George Herms. In this, she comes closer to Jessica Stockholder, who has been known to rhapsodize over red plastic gas cans (“they embody colour, their colour goes all the way through”), while at the same time making their material’s innocuous gratuity seem like the elephant in the room. Like Stockholder, Welch is not interested in the abject glamour of everyday waste, but in its license to elicit sympathies located in the body’s wishes.

Welch has said, “A huge investigation for me is the ‘natural gesture’…I have a fascination for how people doodle, how these marks have an authenticity whether or not the person who makes them is an artist.” Welch is also the director of an independent art school, undertaking on a daily basis the weaving and weeding of gestures, the democratizing of riffs.

I am thinking of these points as I follow the curling shocks of a piece called Circulation (Administrative). Elegantly boxed in a taught network of call-and-response, they evoke an athleticism that classy art critics might relate to both Pollock and Poussin. I can’t restrain them in such linear spin-offs; tracing Welch’s cut and paste demands a willingness to think plural. The drawings were scrawled on envelopes in spare moments then pared carefully, along or against the mete line. Consider the editing room’s splice and jump, the piled-up days a store of gestures made one way then another, like martial arts manoeuvres or the finer points of table talk. Deployed, they uncoil into miraculous transformations of white wall into stolid or foolish commentary on space and pace.

Central to Welch’s show is Tumbleweed (Reconstructed), a massive tangle of recycled objects in primary hues: vinyl roses, plastic tubing, coloured tape wound around Christmas lights…a cultish collection for a forgetful flock. Looking at this work suspended centrally in the gallery is also looking through it to the surrounding walls, an act of reordering in itself. Its masses soften optically into a dangling diagram, the cluster of shrubbery choreographing a lover’s tryst in an Italian garden. Comedy and tragedy turn on symbiosis…the assemblages of paper, painting and photography on the surrounding walls are Tumbleweed’s metaphysical support-network, underwriting its fact as pattern and distraction. In another universe (across the room, over the shoulder) Tumbleweed becomes a ghost at the banquet, deepening our engagement with the threat of more object-hood, more knowledge, more history, more undoing.

In fact, Tumbleweed is ten years worth of Welch’s materials reconstituted for this event, and it risks unravelling the other works, relocating their logic in the unmanageable drag of waste-as-place. It is a credit to the integrity of Welch’s structural tact that this never happens. Instead, the piece is an organ grinder, a monster still-life in which colours surrendering their objects and objects enacting fantasies of spoiled credulity are disciplined by a composure that becomes both order and offering. Its apocalyptic narrative, reorganizing desire in the face of truth-or-consequences, gives way to a freedom from fault, a paradise of perfect placement.

Robert Youds at Diaz Contemporary

[First published in Border Crossings, August 2009]

A year and a half ago when reviewing Robert Youds’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, beautifulbeautiful artificial field, a phrase popped into my head: ‘commercial commons’. I found myself comparing the tug-of-war within the work’s aura of commodity and possibility to the liminal drift you are prone to while loitering in airport kiosks and shopping malls…the sense of free-floating leisure that sometimes emerges in a way that feels parasitic to your intended timeline. These “temporary autonomous zones” (to borrow Hakim Bey’s phrase), are blind spots in an age of self-imposed surveillance, in which the search for an authentic sense of the present amounts to a creative act.

Originally a painter, Youds identifies his work as “structures”; his material vocabulary resides in the designed environment, including Plexiglas, fabric, foam, LED and enamel-coated aluminium. The resulting work, while clearly not painting as such, invokes painting’s effects if not its means. It might be accurate to say that Youds makes ‘specific objects’ that are best discussed within a criteria of perception, projection, and transport, all the more freshly-mobilized for not displaying obvious debts to the matter of painting. In trying to locate the in-between-ness of Youds’s work (between painting and sculpture, domestic and public, manufactured and tinkered with) I’m reminded of a phrase the late David Foster Wallace once used to describe his writing: neither self-reflexive ‘metafiction’ nor minimalist realism, but “meta-the-distance-between the two.”

The foam structure Youds calls Jesus Green Tofino Sunset leans against a wall. Propped up and plugged in, its gentle oscillation of coloured bands gradually initiates viewers into a feedback loop; sensation and afterimage become casually haptic. The overall installation resembles a staging ground, open to intervention from the outside world. The real Jesus Green is itself an anomalous commons at Cambridge University (one field guide has it as, ‘a quiet retreat to roll up a reflective spliff.”) Adjacent to the larger Midsummer Common, it was originally intended to be a railway station, featuring a line of picturesque plane trees, but also an anachronistic specimen of open-air swimming pool called a lido.

The marginal utopia embodied by the lido is cited here because much has been made of Youds’s uses of luminosity as a linkage to a Romantic heritage of ravishing lyricism. I think this interpretation misses the point. Despite the impressive “finish fetish” of his structures, Youds maintains an intimist’s economy; his wall pieces address a single viewer. There is something catalytic in the baffled frontality of his presentations, Like academic landscape’s Cartesian metaphors of chamber and window, the framing devices and concurrent shadows of the series entitled “X,Y,Z,A,B” suggest an ethical dimension in their conspicuous contingency. Here the event is the viewer’s immanent sense of restraint, as it gradually recapitulates and dissolves the pretence of the scene.

The real test of the exhibition may be embodied in the seven spun-aluminium stools collectively titled Verner Panton’s very best day. With their hand-painted tops and dedicated plastic mats, the stools resemble a kind of votive stand-in for a viewer’s investment, both offering and ashtray. Their narrative titling, recalling the Danish designer’s immersive, chromatic interiors, suggests stakeholders in a failed -or fantastic- seriousness. There is an urbane irony here, a flattening out of possibilities. It is an important part of Youds’s operation, projecting the shallow, cubist backspace of his structures into reverie’s narrative theatres.

This can be evidenced in For Everyone a Window, which takes the viewer through a six-minute cycle of shifting colour and time sequences that suggests a much longer duration. This mnemonic lapse had both temporal and spatial dimensions for me, a few moments drawn out into the eternal wait separating Jay Gatsby’s lookout from Daisy’s green beacon. By now, the collegiate connotations of that romantic story have doubtlessly become both more poignant and less useful than they once were, acquiring a polish of irony that does not diminish their currency but preserves it at a wishful distance. Youds’s angling play of coloured light feels a little like those shafts beaming down on the verging words of an Ed Ruscha drawing. Being both artificial and affecting, they announce a moment that is already over with, vacant, but in the light of attention cool and trucial.