Back From Abra

I'm back from a New York trip (including a small hop in Philadelphia),
which was extended a couple days.

I think I reached above a 100 exhibit visits ?
I didn't count.



I'm going to TO very soon.


The surprises in NYC were not where expected, but it was generally
a better season than usual. Well...I need a few days to recap my thoughts
about it.








(image feeded from the cool New York Times article here)









For now I'll just mention a few thoughts about
the Abramovic PERFORMA 05 series of "performance interpretations" that was one of the major planned stops on my schedule.



Though I couldn't be in time for the "Lips Of Thomas"
re-take of Marina Abramovic at the Guggenheim Museum, which was
(expectably) the best of her series judging from general opinion, I was present to see the whole last 6 hours of the final, and only new, performance, and to
my surprise I discovered that the museum had an installation of monitors
placed nearby where each of the 6 previous nights' performances were playing
on at the same time ! So wandering from the main event to the monitors I simply managed to see the whole darn series of Abramovic: much cuddles to the Guggenheim
for that!!

Abramovic is an artist who is known for having blended the fields
of performance and installation, sometimes to majestuous scale.
And so, most of the "landmark" performances she chose to replicate
for this ackward event were (indeed, all but one) in fact works
that involved installations, or visual arts "artefacts" (sculptures,
art objects).


The thing that striked me at first sight is exactly how she had
adapted and made her own these various and varied performances: she
transformed them, if that was possible, into "minimalist" versions
of the originals.


She installed a circular white stage (made of painted wood) in the middle of the Guggenheim main floor, on which she sort of proceeded with her "essentialist" re-lectures of both the settings and actions of the original events.



Here:

For the Nauman piece, all dressed in black, she replaced the original gallery
alteration by a simple thin wall of glass in the middle of the stage, on which she pressed herself in different positions (and on both sides) over many hours.

Similarly, for the Vito Acconci piece, the original gallery construction/installation was reduced to Abramovic being under the wooden circle stage, with a small adjusted stair ramp permitting people to climb on it and talk to her through the floor, as speakers were transmitting her voice as, of course, she masturbated (this is the Guggenheim, don't forget).

For the Valie Export piece, which was the only piece originally non-installative, with the artist simply walking in a porn cinema, Abramovic simply sitted on a wooden chair, her crotch out in the open thanks to a cutted section in her pants, and holding a machine gun. There was a second identical chair next to her, but the guards didn't let the people climb on the stage (which I find bizarre).

For the Gina Pane piece, she got rid of the original slide project, simply layed in a white dress on a shallow metal bed that included a couple rows of burning candles from underneath, that she had to replace at some point during the performance. Her dress as she lifted up seemed a little burned from behind, just giving hints that the experience was more painful for the artist than she had let apparent. I think they were a pile of cloths nearby, or it could be boxes of candles.


For the Joseph Beuys piece, she replaced the original "pictures" installation with
7 small empty school blackboards, put on 3 easels (not sure if it's 3 or 4), some of them on the floor. She dressed exactly like Beuys, had her head exactly like him (gold leaves and honey), and wore the same things on her foots (felt and iron).
She goofed around while holding a dead hare for the whole time, in what most people agreed was too much of a theatrical rendition of the original (maybe resulting from the downsize of working with a small stage, as if in a freak theatre show). The emotion wasn't there. Not the one we had mythologized from seeing photographic portraits of the original Beuys.


For her own piece from 1975 (Lips Of Thomas), she respected most of the original
set-up, except that the "stations" for it were now enclosed near to each other, forming a tight ensemble. Her giant ice cross was splendid, her objects, including many razors, were put in row on the floor at the upfront of the scene, as the table
and the other station were pushed to the back. She varied the order of her original actions, including eating honey and drinking wine, flagellating herself, cutting a star on her belly line by line (one razor and one line only per period), and sleeping on that ice cross with a heater suspended right above it (she's totally naked in this piece). She added political overtones by wearing an army hat and holding the cloth featuring her blood as a flag. That is just to summarize rapidly an event that received a lot of strong reactions including faints, people crying, or shouting at the artist to stop. You didn't think this could still happen in 2005: wow !


The final night had Abramovic stand high in the air above a gigantic blue sparkling robe, enveloping and hiding the circle stage for once and for good, like a giant musical doll. No more black and whites, no more pain, the final event was radically different from the previous, except for the minimalism. It was the best night to climb the Guggenheim museum ramp and meet the artist's eyes at an higher scale. She looked gorgeous! She was repeating some very precise gestures (lifting her arms, twisting slowly, looking at the crowd, posing her hand against her robe, palms toward the public, at times breathing deeply). At some moment during the night she started to move faster and faster, sort of rolling around herself to caress the vision of the public around her, making eye contact with everyone. I had the impression that she was inviting us for something. The piece was titled "Entering The Other Side" (2005), and I couldn't help but think she wanted us to go under her robe. I talked to somebody there that seemed of authority (a curator?, she had a special badge and was explaining the work to a friend). She thought my interpretation was interesting, but that from what she knew the artist only intended to be this living sculpture for the whole night. I could see that I left her wondering, as I insisted that many Abramovic pieces involved participation. Much later on, some people with more balls than me (women, in fact) decided to open up the robe but were stopped immediately by the guards. I went to ask the head of the guards if the artist herself had told them specifically to not let anyone touch the robe. The answer was yes. I am still not sure what it is she meant with that title. I'm not satisfied with answers invoking gaze and "unnatteinable desire". I still want to know what was under that robe.





But for the whole I think Abramovic won her bet.
I think that the fact the series was presented by
such a landmark performance artist as Abramovic,
and within such a museal context, added an hyper-aura
that functioned more like an opaque glass that needed
some reflective time to erase or forget, but still, the exercise
prove how re-interpreting performances could be an interesting
way to re-evaluate their importances and meanings.




The Nauman piece, for example, here left me with a strong
impression of being not much more worthy than for historical
value, a work representative of an era when artists where gauging
or delimitating the mediums they used or the spaces they inhabited.
It was good for 10 minutes, but then you really got the point fast.
You can make this in your bathroom in the morning if you really
need this work to imprint on you.



The Acconci piece, on the other hand, has not loose
an itch of its power. The issues of intimate and public spaces
are probably even more resonating here in the context of such
a museal experience. This re-interpretation only confirmed the
importance of this piece. And the fact it was done by a woman
sealed the piece's universalism. Bereft of any sign of
representation, or any transfixed cultural codes of gender,
men and women, through they simple breath, are finally levelled back
to sexual equals.


Well, not for a long time, as the Valie Export piece is all about
codes and gender image, but the blunt rendition of Abramovic
kinda let you wondered if radical feminist art really made a difference
through the decades, or if it wasn't too easily re-absorbed by porn.
Abramovic was as much an icon of fantasy that night than one
that embodied any revolt. The image was powerful, though, and I
hope some feminists out there will take this opportunity to reflect
on what it means to impersonificate this action in 2005.

The Gina Pane piece made you wonder about how re-interpreting
a performance can lead to varied meanings depending if you
leave or add details to it. The Abramovic version was ascetically
religious, and I couldn't help but link it with the religious tensions
of our present times, and how so many people are ready to die for what
they believe in. I have no idea if the religious tone was part of the original
onset, but the white dress, and the same death-pose over candles similar to
a tradition in south america of burning madonnas, made it all quasi too obvious.
It could upset some artists that a meaning of a piece be displaced as such, but in the end I was thinking how with music or theatre, interpretations always imply a part of creation. This piece is the one that prove this point the most.

The Joseph Beuys was perhaps a failure, but an interesting one, that permitted
to adress the danger of falling into theatrics with replicas of performances. Just how do you mean the work you represent? It wasn't so much a demonstration that the work can't be redone than a demonstration that an interpretation can fail for loosing or emptying too much of the original context. Or even respecting too much of that context. For example: dressing up exactly like Beuys was a bad idea. Abramovic looked like if she was attempting to act Beuys for a movie. She even had her hairs arranged so they looked short. It was as if she was posing for a great poster honoring the ego of Beuys, not getting at the gravity of the situation, the essence of Beuys's gestures. Or maybe it helped to reassign the debt of performance to theatre, with which it was closely linked in the beginnings. The schoolboards made the whole look like a kid tv show to a point when the hare started to look like a puppet. Maybe we've just seen too much death in films and on tv but we just couldn't enter the reality of the presence of a dead animal. You can blame that to "the impossibility of death in the mind of..." or simply the fact that I saw this event on a monitor myself.


The "Lips Of Thomas" (1975) performance was as radical as the original,
and proof that if you have a set of actions that are up to the level
of shaking your audience, they will at any times. The witch torture chamber
composed of the ice cross and heater is obviously one that will fascinate
for a long time, and replicating that piece probably brought Abramovic new fans amongst the young goth-enthralled or piercing-aficionados crowds. To me there
was a retro feeling to this work, since recent artists are less pre-occupied with
strong catholic symbols. It was like rediscovering an old horror movie that we love so much because none others are made like it these days. It really acted more
like a polished reprint than an interpretation, but as with anything else these days, bigger, firmer, crisper, and hyper than the original, and here I really mean the context of having it played in a widely accessed public space. Judging from the reactions: we were back in the 1970's for one full night.


The last performance is not a replicate but still an easygoing living installation
that could be redone anyday, anywhere, and always the robe that need
be confected for the occasion would constitute a strong part of the work, almost
more like re-interpreting a visual art project than a performance. Unless there is details that I missed (what was under the robe????)it was the softest work I had ever seen from this artist, more like she had become Colette, but I guess this is normal when some of the recent works of the artist referred to bouddhism and relaxation.





At any rates,


Now I know that if I'm uninspired and feel like doing something
I can always go out and redo a Chris Burden action for you,



Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com




PS: I pun Burden because he refused Marina to redo a piece of his,
which I find ridiculous.


PS2: I'm fully aware that the demonization of the Venus star is a cultural fallacy,
and of the implications that might have the communist party as critical ground for Abramovic. The link to goth-horror aesthetic still stands: that art piece scares the shit out of the audience, it is strategically thrilling.

Candy Power: Wil Murray "Fated Fêted Fatted Fetid" at Zeke's Gallery

Another very cool exhibit just seen today:
you got until the end of November (it's been
extended) to cath this demarking installation
of paintings by Wil Murray at Zeke's Gallery.


I say "cool" but in fact I really do mean standout.


I've seen a couple of the big shows recently
announcing the resurgence of abstraction painting
among the new generation, and Wil Murray's art could
be put next to these young heroes any day.

How can I describe it...

Franz Ackerman on acid (ie. literally:
a melted down Franz Ackerman), poured over
a Gary Hume.



A retro psychedelic version of a
François Lacasse, replacing geo-biologic
textures with the irrealism of
bubblegum pop. Almost but not quite
a mapping system made with melted candies.

You could think of the violent shapes and colours of
recent Rosenquist, Elizabeth Murray, Kenny Scharf,
and you're not there yet. This stuff is categorically
screaming. It's goa. It's vynil kitsch. It's an artistic
disorder, something that wasn't supposed to happen:
an abstract version of kawaii art. I have no idea.




The titles of the works seem
to be extracted from pop songs ("Baby I Want To Buy
You A Cadillac", "You're Made From Pennies And Ashtrays",
"Ride My Seesaw", "Guess That's Called A Good Thing Lost")
or totally embracing references to kitsch ("Jean Talon, Pantalon", "Pink As A Rooster's Dink") or psychedelism ("Sometimes Use The Sun As A Tambourine",
"Run Through Candy Floss Field Forever").


The technique of using polyutherane mousse
to create strong 3d reliefs usually serve as the
base upon which is poured a variety of
wild fluorescent colours that are fixed into
adjointed patterns of varied design (marble, stripes,
splattings, gestural ellipses, etc..). The result
would look like eruptions or oozing canals of
the formatting geographies of a comic
book universe if it wasn't for those
patched-in fragments of designs borrowed
from a 60's "a-gogo" aesthetic.

The toyish appearance and textures
of Murray's paint sounds like he's
at the carrefour of a few art tendencies:
the coulourfield use of industrial products
that erase human touch, the expressionism
of a style that reasserts its place with the
early gestural abstract painters, and a
pop-eyed aesthetic that ambiguously pull
at equal distance between op art and pop art
(pop because of the comic book spectrum of colours).


It's a wonder that someone could manage
to digest all of this, but that is what it is:
an art digestive of all these celebrated tendencies
from the 60's. A synthetic art that performs
a flamboyant synthesis of the achievements
in painting during that era. For now, a little bit
overwhelming, but don't forget this is the first show
from this artist.



Definitely an artist to follow.



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com




PS: Rumours say that René Blouin might take him on his roaster.
It could be his best decision since Nicolas Baier. Time will tell.

Emotional Rescue: Glynis Humphrey "Breathing Underwater" at La Centrale.

"Every day the fat woman dies a series of small deaths."

Shelley Bovey



"Thin people are beautiful, but fat people are adorable."

Jackie Gleason





Montreal has been a lucky week with good exhibitions,
and the one I just saw today is categorically excellent.
And I almost missed it to attend an Abramovic performance !


Luckily, you readers have still one week to catch it.



I'm talking about Glynis Humphrey's installation
at La Centrale, an artist from Halifax whom I
had never heard from.


At first, the video that she presents
in the window of the gallery, visible from the
outside at night, looks like a bad rendition of
a Bill Viola installation (simply
because Viola's use of slow motion
turns his people underwater into
sublime creatures, when Humphrey's
editing is much more abrupt and runs
at a much more urgent pace).


Things start to get really interesting
once inside the gallery, as a series
of giant balloons adorned with speakers
vibrates through the contact of manipulated sounds
of heartbeat and other body noises.

These sounds are played at low volume
so that you-the-visitor is forced to come close
and touch the balloons, pull your head
close to them in order to fully
experience the work.

The rumblings are very intriguing,
and soon you start speculating
notions of inner body worlds,
and maternity, while you watch
the woman in front of you
moving around in her
own aquarium.



"This woman is hardly surviving", I thought,
as I was recalling works of Heike Mutter
from a few years ago, that used a similar
visual approach to similar effect (what a bizarre
coincidence: the curator for that show
at Optica was in the gallery at the same time
I was there !!).

The three big balloons, being objects
transformed by the performative act
of blow, now appeared like the perfect
reply to a tryptich in glass called
"Souffle" made by Geneviève Cadieux
from some years back, but instead of
conceptualizing a monument to
the precarity of life, Humphrey opted
for tangibility and experience. The installation
is alive, and gasping for space as you
move around it. These are fragile bubbles
that could explode any second, and destroy
everything that they're trying to hold on.
I think I can use the term visceral to describe
how this mere thought affects the viewer emotionally.

Moving near the wall, passing by a smaller
monitor video that shows the artist suspended
in water from a distance, like she is being surveilled,
I read an inscription on the wall: "dedicated to my daughter Carrie Johnson
and to the memory of Emily Givner (1966 - 2004)."
At this moment I interprete this as a confirmation
that the work is really, as I perceived it, about
the difficulties of living, standing at the constant threshold
of life and death, and the metaphorical trap of amniotic water,
both a prison and the condition of existence.



But I was totally wrong.


And this is one thing I love to do
with art, and that is to read the press
release or title after my exploration
of the work to see how much I got from
the work itself.

The artist had another agenda,
and to her credit that probably
renders her project less facile
than my interpretation would have let
you guessed.


Get this: the work revolves
around "grotesque".
It's about the difficulties
of living as a fat and (ugly?)
individual, unfitting to any
wanton of sexual gaze ! The artist says:
"my work articulates my experiences as a large
middle-aged woman who does not conform to
North-American society's restricted vision for
femininity and sexual desirability."


Wow... Splendid.

Seriously, let's step back a little:
I remarked that the lady in water was
a little chubby, but I thought that was fitting
with the idea of being a grown up baby back into
her mother's womb. The idea of "ugly"
never crossed my mind, but that is probably
because, having to deal with similar problems
that the artist summons (I got a little chubby
in the last 3 years, growing from 168 to 190
at 5.10), I've come to naturally suppress any
endeavour related with human desire (which is not to
say that I've abandoned sensual pleasure
in any way, que no: I just lived it through food
instead of human contact. I feel entirely
responsible.)


And so, the interesting part occurs when,
actually sharing a vital sentiment with the artist,
it didn't help me envision the work in
the right way, simply because the artist
addresses herself to another crowd,
the average people, or rather, above average,
since the video is playing in the windows
at night in a district where a lot of the
fashion people pass by.


And if you think I'm stretching, here is an example:
while I was at the gallery, a gang of cute arab guys
entered the space. They saw the video
from the street and wondered what all
this was about. They were obviously
there to goof around, but I was scrutinizing their
reactions as I thought it was interesting
to meet people unknowing of contemporary art
entering a gallery for their first time (I'm projecting
a fantasy, bare with me). They looked at the large
video and I'm pretty sure they found it comical
(they were laughing, goofing together),
and left (only one of them took the time
to come to the bubbles).


Now this image, considering
the topic at hand, becomes
extremely powerful. These men
coming in, goofing, not expressing
any emotion at the image of a fat
woman nearly drowning in front of
them, and leaving just like they came.
What would have been their reactions
if a young porn model was featured
in the video instead? (well...I would
have laughed anyway...)


So, as I was on my way to leave,
I thought about how this work shifted
strongly depending of who is watching.
And how much the artist succeeded at mirroring
these inequities of sexual gaze, as an art
expectful of the spectrum of reactions, and
that keep meaning something regardless
of the type or quality of these reactions.



But just right upon reaching the door,
I decided to lend a quick look
at the book of commentaries left
from visitors. That was revealing.
First, I had never seen such an amount
of comments in a gallery book since
a while, and than, at least everyone I read,
had positive things to say about it.


I was surprised to read many people
say that they found the work comfortable,
relaxing, and calm. I think I underestimated
the power of the sound installation as itself,
too concentrating on its relation with the images.
It was indeed very hypnotic and soothing, and
wouldn't have been misplaced in the chill room
of a rave party (if they still do that kind of stuff these days).
Other people mentioned images of cocoons,
of a desire to get back to this enthralling feeling
of the womb, which made me realized that the artist, as large
as she claims to be, had a power to trigger another
kind of desire: a fond for motherhood. She
was embodificating the goddess of nature!

The response to the work was not only
emotional, it was sensual. This sort of
sensuality that makes a child want to rub themselves
to their parents or grandparents. The artist
had become a symbol of that psychological affect:
wanting to pause from the general worries of life,
the responsabilities of adulthood, and reach back
to this primal state of abandon to a life once careful
and tender. I think that it is not for nothing that
water symbolizes emotions in most mythologies. People rapidly
make abstraction of its dangers: for them water
is an expression of comfort, a reminiscence
that every living creatures was once conceived by the sea.


So, as I was walking on my way home,
I thought to myself: is it all that important,
that people interprete this work as
either tragic or soothing? That I saw
in it an expression on the harsh conditions
of living, that another grinned at it while facing his own
repulsion, or that someone else found it as pleasurable
as being in a spa environment ?


This work functions on every
of these levels, because unlike
programmatic intellectual art, but
much more like the experience of music, it reaches
to deeper levels of the emotional, which comprehend a
vast, spreaded and abstract realm of perspectives.


And so all I'm left to say as a critique
is that I think the piece is worth finding
out the emotions that it will trigger in you,



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com



Glynis Humphrey: "Breathing Underwater"
October 20 - November 20 2005
La Centrale Powerhouse
4296 Boulevard Saint-Laurent
Wed 12h - 18h
Thu, Fri 12h - 21h
Sat, Sun 12h - 17h

Performance As Score

These days I am missing an IMPORTANT series of performances by Marina Abramovic
at the Guggenheim,
where she replicates a few landmark pieces of performance's young history.



My schedule is tight, I've had things to do here, and now
I'm rushing to get a place to stay in New York to see if
I can catch the end of that series.

Tonight I am missing a legendary reprise of the Beuys piece
"How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare" (1965).



My big consolation is not so much that there will be a book
and video published about this event, but that Marina
made me realize one thing, that performance
art, really like theatre, can be performed again and
again by whoever feel the need to perform them.
That instead of watching Marina doing it, I can
just go and start talking to dead hares myself.


In fact, Diane Borsato herself rendered her homage
to the famous Beuys piece recently.



I am astonished to hear that some performance
artists refused to Marina the right to replicate their pieces.
Apparently, the artist didn't even need those rights, but
insisted upon them considering she was going to stage them
in a major institution, and publish a book about it.
She insisted that the original artists get the money from
the publishing of the book. (read the interview yourself,
here)



I don't think anyone should own copyright to actions.
I think performance, like theatre or ritual, is
an art of the social, that it should belong to everybody.
Its history, linked in great part to the Fluxus movement,
specified from the beginnings the ideal performance
as being a score.



For an author, the act of writing a theatre
piece is an act of abandon of authorship.
You are committing, as a writer, to let your piece
unfolds and transformed by the various interpretations that
other people will eventually make of it. This is the essence and
beauty of this craft.


Performance artists like to think that they
come from the visual art sphere, but truth is
that they share a lot with theatre.
Most of the time. performance is a spectacle, to be seen
by a public or through the screen of documentation.

It is perhaps much more close to ritual than
theatre, but theatre actually evolved from ritual,
and rituals, though usually directed by a cast
of initiated, are also performed from generations to
generations through a process of tradition.


If you want to nail yourself to a car tomorrow and
pay homage to Chris Burden, I don't see why you can't do
it. I don't see how performance can, or should be,
copyrighted.


On the other hand, if you start selling pictures
of the performance as art pieces, than you are objectifying
your actions, and in visual arts you can get problems
for replicating another person's work.


For example, in a perfect world, someone could replicate
a Vanessa Beecroft, for a couple nights events, but
selling the pictures of that as art would become problematic
(t any rates, these laws are so complex and shift so much
from countries to countries, you could as well
move to a place where laws aren't too rigid and do the heck you want.).



But to ensure the viability of performance art I think is truly
to understand that when it can, it should be re-interpreted over
and over again.


And that is where lies all the splendour of the Abramovic "festival"
in that it will upheave a great misunderstanding within the field.

That human experience, finally, is more important than the tagging
of documents, objects, and egos.


Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Art is everywhere but in art

I've been thinking and claiming this since many years,
explaining to people here and there why I was so reluctant
to present my stuff into galleries.


But, well, I'm just Cedric Caspesyan,
and sometimes you need one big respected
theorist to nail it down for you.



So here, from Jean Baudrillard himself,
who just launched his new book
"The Conspiracy Of Art" (and it IS a conspiracy
and most of you artists out there suck at it):





"Art is everywhere but in art, art is no longer where it thinks it is."




"There is no more 'formal' difference between art and reality, Art has now collapsed into the aestheticized banality of everything else . . . a 'pornography of transparency' that we can only experience with irony and indifference. It claims to be null: 'I am null! I am null!' But it is truly null!"




Haha !! I luv it.


The question is:

What have we done to ourseves?

What are artists thinking they are doing to shape
the world ?



Why are artists hiding in their ivory towers,
presenting their art in gallerie hoping to make big
bucks from them, just because they release so few copies
of this and that edition, and then not present any images
anywhere, not being available for discussion unless in very controlled
environments, like that high-end magazine, with that other curator that also
lives in the same ivory tower, and why do these people accept so joyfully
that architecture be wasted to present their objects, when we live in a world when so many people have a hard time finding a place to sleep.

Did any artist yet thought of just using their gallery space to
let street people sleep in during the time they're slated ?


What are artists doing to the world but just adding up to a profusion of images
and designs, negociating space simply hoping that their objects and their designs will lift up from the general disparity of everything and say something about themselves or the world we live in ?


What is the signification of a work of art displaced from the museum into public sphere, say, in a Macdonald, without any sign or board announcing it as a work of art or its provenance? How powerful can that be, in 2005? How can it not blend with everything else ?? Whatever you're saying, and with the amount of stuff out there that already exist to harass you in saying something... Don't you think you should just shut up? Do you absolutely need to come grafitti my wall ? Is communication your way of polluting me ?


Could you just leave me alone ? Can I have a talk with the squirrels instead ?



Ok. let's not pull every hairs out.


Truth is that there is still "art in art".
It's just not necessarely where it think it is.


There's no big separation artworld VS outside world, or reality if you will,
anymore.

So there is no need to distinguish that difference and proclaim that there
is "no art in art."



But it is very probable, that the "real art happening in art",
is an art that is hidden from surface and aesthetics, and
even from communication.


It can happen that an artist unknowingly helped
someone through their art having a better life, but
that may have nothing to do with the art itself.
It could be... The fact that an artist hired someone
and that helped them eat bread for a month. That can
be powerful.

I think the art's pretend for beauty (wrether aesthetic,
ethic, poetic, formalist, narrative, etc, any types of topic that
the artist believes he has a commentary to add on)
is not necessarely happening through the surface of screens
(the art work as a screen between its author and viewer).

I think it's happening in the ways that the artwork
has a tangible impact on the lives of the artist or the people
who viewed it.


If these lives stay the same as they were before the act
of art, than art is just a distraction, an entertainment,
a waste space, a drug, a plato-s cave, something that cuts
you off from reality and its possibilities. It's an escape
(and I for one am the first to declare that I my love of art
evolved from an escapist perspective).


But if the art has a positive effect on the way we live,
if it changes our lives in better ways, than it needn't stay. It could be destroyed the minute after, because then it would have done more than it could have hoped for.


And an art that changes your life (and not just through
the commodity of decorating your new house, please),
that has nothing to do with claims of an art piece
that it has this or this to tell you, or the quality
of its expression.


If one day you visit Kassel, and look at all
the oak trees that were planted there by Joseph
Beuys, and then start to ask the people
around about them, they could tell
you if that art changed their lives or not.
Boring as it may sound as an art project,
I think this artist envisioned the problematic
proposed by Baudrillard today.


Artists are at this stage when they are confronted
to the outside world, and need urgently to decide
how they are going to deal with that. What they are
planning to do, or not do, to alter the situation.
If the old definitions of art's place are still
pertinent in these contexts, and if we really
need all these spaces reserved for the exclusive
representation of art.


Let me put things in another way...


Is it not absurd, that late a night,
after a grand vernissage in a grand Chelsea
gallery in New York, that the artist and
a majority of the employees return to
sleep in tiny apartments because they
can't afford to rent for bigger.


Should an artist sleep in a couch
in a corner of his (her) huge badly
heated cold studio, in some bad part of a town.


Is art really been shaping your life the way it should.

Or is art simply at the mercy of people in power who buy it low
to resell it much higher in auctions years later, under the pretense
that they "want to encourage younger artists".






Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Reminder: 2 shows worth seeing in Montreal

You got about one week left to see these two shows happening in Montreal.


Can't review them now, don't know if I ever will, but they're both
above average quality, what makes both of them not to be missed shows.
(well, they both could have been better, but they're both much better
than anything else around here, Montreal)


The first brings, luckily for me, a bunch of artists from which I adored their
recent outputs: Eve K. Tremblay, Patrice Duhamel, Michael A. Robinson and one of my fave artist from Quebec, David Altmejd.


Each of these artists are doing "more of the same" work from what they did
recently, but none disappoints. I have no idea (yet, haven't read the catalog),
how the curator links these works to Lewis Carroll, or if any work was made
on purpose about Carroll. They don't look like it. But all the works function
as such narrative abstractions. Bizarre art engulfing hidden meanings.


K. Tremblay is still intriguing with her transgressively symbolic associations
of pictures (something about genetic).

Robinson is pursuing his white-washed theatrics like he's out from
the asylum (no offense, it's great), this time focussing his obsession on music
and specifically, an organ (with a mechanical bird present, I wondered if it was an homage or anti-homage to Messiaen).

Duhamel is presenting another video of his abstract encounters between
body, movement, and micro-environments: this time two men enclosed
in a revolving door, if you can measure the power of that image.

Altmejd is still working on his magical entanglements between beast
and beauty, the worlds of unspeakable horror reaching the worlds
of post-minimalism fashion design sets. Basically, a werewolf
changing into mirrors and crystals. These new crystals are huge
and delicately made with mirrors, so my impression was that the werefolf
is slowly getting into the ground.


At any rates, all strong art, if you're able to visit.
(I just wish the show had more artists, it is going some place
I like).




The next one if the double-entente show
between Richard Greaves and Samuel Roy-Bois.


Samuel Roy-Blois is a young artist I had never heard from.

He is presenting a work that opposes the notions of
domestic space and consumption.

Literally, a space supported by perused objects
from everyday life, either found in scrapyard or
second-hand shops. And you, what it is that you are
"living on" ?

Well-thought.



But the clue of the show is the improbable retrospective of
Richard Greaves, a known artist of "undisciplined" art in
Quebec, who frankly, if you asked me 10 years ago, I could
have never thought would happen.

This guy's art is amongst the most difficult of
the few people in Quebec who made their names
out of just doing strange things, outside of the usual
art circles.

He's been doing these "homes" with objects taken from scrapyards,
that he tightens with ropes instead of nails. The exhibit
is first a pretext to present these pieces of "land art"
(actually, more like "anarchitectures", like mentions the title of the show)
in a nice set of hanged pictures by Mario Del Curo, added with
a couple extra documentaries really worth your time if you can
manage to hear someone talk about piss and shit so many times
(actually, that is in french, I don't thinkthey have subtitles).


The next part of the show is an installation by Richard
Greaves that lookslike a meeting between Mike Kelley
and Jason Rhoades, but actually smaller than expected
as the curator orginally wished that a house be built
in the Quartier Ephemere space (so that would be
the reason why the show is not as good as it could have
been).


Nonetheless, and if you can also spot the sculpture on the roof,
this project is a knocking addition in this serie of retros
of undisciplined artists that Quartier have been programming
in recent years. I'd really love to hear the ever self-important
Renzo Piano comment about it.


I don't think I've seen a more powerful comment on the subject
(of architecture) since Cedric Price !! That is a lot to say !


This project is going to Andrew Edlin in New York,
the small gallery who repesents Henry Darger amongst other
fames. New Yorker can catch it there soonly.





I suggested a name for the next retro of a Quebec undisciplined
artist, and was told to simply present the project myself.
I'll give thoughts about it.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


PS: I'm having to push back my reply to Mayer and my Mois De Photo
report. I got to run to New York. Already missing stuff as I speak.

The Beauty Of Compassion: Edward Burtynsky "The China Series" at Nicholas Métivier.

(image from gallery Nicholas Métivier)

He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.

(Rabindranath Tagore)

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

(Edwin Markham)

A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered.

(Felix Adler)





You know, this season there's been an incredible quantity of photography
exhibits all over the place, in museums, in galleries, and in festivals (Mois De
La Photo in Montreal). But there is one that was perticularly important and that
I wanted to come back to, which is the recent exhibit of new works
by Edward Burtinsky called "The China Series" at Nicholas Métivier Gallery in Toronto (another selection from these works was shown at Charles Cowles gallery in New York).

This show, and more substantially, the book that it supports, is an instant
landmark both in the artist's career and for contemporary photography,
because it is the first public exposition to the new phenomenon of techno-industrial
societies in China, which, if you ever got an idea of what the term industrial
society meant in the western world back in the old days of Zola, is highly exponential from whatever occured in our soils.


Some of these pictures are so filled with people, in buildings so humongous, that you wonder if the artist didn't use digital tricks to repeat and extend some recorded patterns. I personally never seen documents of people at work of this scale, where instead of focussing on the harshness or work conditions, these earth-from-above photograph seems to want to
demonstrate the amount of people being on utility. And you would have thought
these industries used machines, nowadays ! (note: the images I am linking are all from the Nicholas Metivier website where you can see much more, and buy if you feel like it)


As the artist expressed to Sarah Milroy in a recent article in the Globe And Mail, the idea of going to China came from a desire to move on from his usual past focus on source fields and wastelands: the before-and-afters of human industrialization and consumption. As he was looking to portray the actual act of transformation of industrial matters, he realized that the big industries like those he used to work in when he was younger weren't happening that much here anymore, but that all the big work was now done in Asia and other foreign places. He had already been photographing some self-imposing scenes in Asia of boatship cemeteries, or the broken dams of a river in China, that are now part of his retrospective that travelled everywhere around, and is now playing at the Brooklyn Museum Of Art. So the trip around China probably was the next logical step (actually, read Sarah Millroy and he'll explain you why).




Apparently, the artist was the first to ever receive a chinese government
permission to enter these manufactures. The government, described
by the artist as being a mixture between communist and capitalist,
was somewhat worried about how they were going to be perceived by the outside,
at a moment when China is slowly opening its doors to the rest of the world (thanks to China, we've seen many marvellous exhibits recently, like this one
of dinosaur skeletons that I just saw last week).


Well, here's exactly where we're at: how can I,
being the outside, describe my feeling
towards these pictures ?


Let's get down to it: these pictures speak of an empire being born again. Not exactly Han, more like the rebirth of Qin. You cannot ignore the phenomenon. Socially, these workers all look like clones, like an army of living machines, and from what Burtinsky said , they're also pretty proud of having these jobs. These images of manufacture activity brought back by Burtynsky could as well used the help of entomologists to describe them: they are literally the representation of gargantual, technocratic, hives. (!)




My feeling was this: a vertiginous impression that a cultural clash
was now made visual between the western focus on individualism,
and the representation of a nation that really seems, at least on surface,
to function as one entity. This is of course a sentiment merely conveyed
by aesthetics, and which might not represent the truth at all.


This is the problem with the new work of Burtynsky,
that it treats about humans the same ways that it
does about pieces of crap piled in a landyard
(the exhibit contains a portion of those too, residual terrains from mainland
China). It focusses on layers, geometry, repetition, symmetry,
within an extremely rigid formalism, that turns photography
into an art as eugenistically modern as possible
(a Mondrian turned to life scale...hmm....look
at the interlacing between those gray grids and the blue
dots...beautiful isn't it...). The work is almost more authentic as form play than as documentary (hold your breath, the artist agrees of his contradictions).


We don't get to know these people,
yet even see their faces. The process
is as cold and inhuman as possible.
Here we are interested by the impact of
mass representation. The project is not
about humans, it stands above mankind.
It is about what mankind is doing to the world
with a big W. It's could be as well
a message bottle sent for extraterrestrials.


But to know that Burtynsky refute
the politically inclined position of photojournalism,
but then opt to sell these works in galleries
for a minimum of 15 00 dollars up
to 50 000 $ (!!), somewhere affirming
the elegancy of art's distanciation,
to me pose a serious ethical problem, when
we know the wages of these people are a fraction
of what they would cost in Occident.


Now don't get off your horses,
ethic problem doesn't mean bad art,
and that is where lies all the problem.
These works will obligedly be remembered.
As "art pieces", they are the only
"tableaux" that we've got yet to
compensate for a lack of a more
socially-inclined report on the matter.
They are obviously more an expression
of wonderment than indignation.
Or rather, if noone is ever upholded for using these
photographs to express their indignation, the images
themselves really focus on the scale, the order,
and the majestuosity of these enterprises.
They could as well serve to promote
their success (if we all started to fall for marxism
again and convince ourselves that collectiv work is the true power, etc...).





I am not trying to diminush the fact that the artist
is a politically engaged individual himself. He is,
among other things, involved with the World
Changing website, or at least intend to promote it. And he has plans to promote services of education concerning ecology.


In fact, the simple gesture of wanting
to communicate to the world things that are
happening in some regions and that are not
well communicated is to me a highly political gesture.
Maybe that intention in itself should erase any scrutiny
related to any process or methods used for photography.



His photographs, though lavishly
posed, could after all very well pass for
photojournalism, if we forget an instant
the artistic pretentions of the artist. There is
no need to pull hairs about it: here he is
showing you current China, take it as you see it.



But I am just annoyed by this belief
from the artist that by doing art instead of journalism
he is letting people decide what they want to see.
Art is just as manipulative as photojournalism.
It just doesn't share the same interests.


And there is where I stand: there is more going on in these photographs than art. And by that I really do mean that at some point the pretentions of art start sounding indulgent and irresponsible considering the matters at hand. Like trying to picture you mother on her death bed for a fashion magazine. Something not quite right. You think I'm outstretching? Well, I'm not
sure Burtynsky's art would function that well without all these wonderful
world problems. I think their inherent beauty lies in the spectaculor awe that
they can provide. They play on the oscillation occurring between visual abstraction and what we finally recognize from them, which I think is a fair game when dealing with garbage, but I find a little impertinent when dealing with the lives of other folks. This shouldn't be tableaux that one is willing to spend 20 000 bucks for. It really should've been about information.




Maybe they were some workers in there who
were hoping for more than being presented
like beautiful (legendary?) pink dots in a gigantic techno-futurist
symmetrical scenery. Maybe some hoped that the photos would be received as an outcry. But the outcry here isn't the ultimate subject matter.
It is subdued to form. It hides between the pretext of art:
the audience decides what they want to see in them.
It makes me wonder about the boundary between art and documentary.
Is documentary an art form? Can art serve as a documentary
for an historical event? Or do we call that an artefact?
What would a photograph by Burtynsky be an artefact of?
Of the history of China? The history of the western art world?
An account of the personal life of the artist?



The surface outlook constantly focus on anonimity:
these humans are like lab ratsfor Burtynsky's new art theme or
visual experimentation. The photographer assumes too much that
what he sees might be the society that he is representing.
There is, spurning out from these clinical photographs
as grand and cold as architectural plans,
this condescending argument that existentialism
is an absent notion for these chinese people, when actually
chinese artists are battling to express the contrary,
especially with the new generation of young cineasts. I remember in contrast films like Baraka, or the Qatsi series, which always included their segment of facials
to humanize their content, sometimes to kitsch effect.


But then, to do a social reportage of this
scale, it shouldn't function just like picturing nice objects.
What you leave out is as important as what you put in.
We are speaking human conditions here, and these perticular
ones don't seem quite easy. And to use these working conditions as
an art form (with photography the art is really the subject matter)
is to me taking strange detour with aesthetics, whatever the intentions. The perspective of these photographs certainly do not contradict the powers at play. The only way they are is through their juxtaposition with other images of defunct industries. How was that my mistake to not interprete these juxtapostions more closely?


In the end, I'm only but confused about how to interprete
the new Burtynsky work. I'd feel more comfortable
hearing a debate between photograph and ethic experts
about them.


I just feel like if I had been in China exactly where Burtynsky
was, and had taken the same bird perspectives shots as he did
(how can you help but being astonished by those views),
I don't think I'd have the gut to present that material as art.

I think I would have sell rights to a magazine and that would be
tagged photojournalism. No ambiguity.

And then my only reproach to these otherwise mavellous compositions
is exactly what others embrace in them: their ambivalence.



Thing is: I don't believe in an art bereft of ethics, in which all
is put on the viewer's shoulder and their reactions, and what they
are going to do about it.

I believe art is ethic, and speaks much
more of an artist's way of envisioning the world,
than the one of the viewer, who's merely thrown out
information that's been already filtered by
a wide array of layers (medium, politics, art, "the making of", etc..).



And for someone who had been working in industries himself,
I find Burtynsky to be taking too much of a distance
with the people that are taking part of the downfall or upheavel
he is trying to portray.




Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com




Edward Burtynsky: "China (New Works From The China Series)"
September 29 - October 22
Nicholas Metivier Gallery
451 King Street West

The Last Minute Show Man

Hello,


I'm back from doing many things.

That includes a (re)visit to the Mass Moca, which is perhaps
my favorite museum ever.

I can't think of another museum that is this top notch.



And I'm not talking about programmation, but about logistics:
the atmosphere of the entrance hall,
with the music coming from the café, the way they let visitors
breathe through the spaces and the art, the way they publish
cards with all the necessary information, the architecture
(including some cool restrooms), etc...


I was there to visit Cai Guo-Qiang, who is one of my fave artist,
and who just exhibited one of his best work ever in those spaces,
a work that will probably end as my top favorite show for the year
2005.


I was there last minute, a day before the end, so there is
no way any readers here could attend, but there was another
show that includes at least 6 works worth the detour.
This show is titled "Becoming Animal", and for now I will only name
my fave artists from it: Kathy High, Patricia Piccinini,
Mark Dion, Rachel Berwick, Michael Oatman, and especially,
Sam Easterson (who wins my trophy for that show). I will
come back to it.



What I really wanted to say is that I've been visiting
many shows lately in the couple last days of their schedule,
if not the very last day. Considering the amount of shows that I
visit, I would say that it's normal that I'm forced to push
back my visit to some of them (actually not even a fifth of
all that I see). And usually, these last day shows are shows
that are either set afar from where I stay, or which I am
reluctant to visit.



The strange thing is, there is this man that I keep
encountering during those last-days visits. He must
have an agenda like me, with dates of ending
shows marked so that he rushes to visit them
when the times come near.


I think he's embarassed to see me. Or shy.
Or maybe it's me, I'm such an anti-social.



Here are places (and last minute visits) where I've seen him
recently:


- Dino-Fossils (But hey...I announced on this site that I was going to be there last minute.)

- The Last Spike: National Icon at Musée McCord (I soooooo didn't want to go to that show, and indeed it did bore the hell out of me. But it was part of the Mois De La Photo so I HAD to go, on the very last day).

- Quatier Ephemere (Ok, this was actually my second visit to that show. I came back for a series of conferences and performances that turned out to be kinda boring. Just a talk from Atsa)

- Les Impatients: Noir Et Blanc 2 (I was there last minute because I wasn't too interested by that show, which turned out to be better than I expected)

- Vox: Iain Baxter (I was there 4 days before the end but I had a good reason, being very busy with a film festival)

- Digs In The Zone at Maison De Culture Notre-Dame-De-Grâce (I was there 3 or 4 days
before the end, because it is very far from where I stay)

- Neverlands + Glooscap at Maison Frontenac (This is another case where I returned to the show a second time, because the first time I thought Glooscap was too exhaustive for me to grasp all at once. Still, even the second time was about a week before the end, so that one is pure coincidence).


That's all, but I also saw him at the film fest, so that is like,
8 times in 3 weeks? To me that's a lot.


Maybe it's simply the effect of the Month Of Photo
being so exhaustive, so we all get to visit
these shows late. A friend of mine was saying
"ce mois qui n'en finit plus de finir" (this month
that never finishes ending).


I used to be able to spot the cinema
fanatics in the front rows of cinema festivals.


Perhaps now I'm slowly starting
to notice the regular art lovers
in this city. I mean... I remember
I used to see Emmanuel Gallant in galleries
a lot. Caroline Andrieux too. Gennaro
Di Pasquale too (saw him tonight at the Mac).
Some guy from Syn-Atelier. Some woman and her boyfriend
that I don't know who they are. Bernard Lamarche: very
often. Pierre Landry (from Mac), a couple times last year,
which frankly surprised me (I never see museum curators anywhere).
Nicolas Mavrikakis: never. (which goes to demonstrate how this
game doesn't fully work)




I do wonder about these statistics.
How many people visit galleries
regularly ? Maybe a gallerist could know.
Who do you keep meeting when visiting galleries?



I know people recognize me.
They recognize me in New York,
a place where galleries are packed as hell.
It is sometimes embarassing, but I do
wonder: if they were that many regular
visitors, they wouldn't be able to remember
me, would they ?


I'm really starting to wonder just how small
is the circle of art fanatics in this city.
The ones who visit more than 20 shows a year.



That guy whom I meet everywhere
certainly is one of them. He's not a journalist
or he wouldn't visit the shows this late.
I think he saw me quarrel with
an artist many years ago.



Speaking of artgoers and mois de la photo,
Mike Patten released his
top 5 choices for this event. We have different tastes, but it's interesting.


I need to write mine, then,


Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com