(this article is not corrected yet...please read at your peril)
I don't think I can imagine an art show that was less fun visiting recently than the Montreal MFA presentation of canadian art collected in the past few years by our major canadian art institutions which include them, the Art Gallery Of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada.
Not that the art was bad in itself, just that put all together, the whole felt drab, conceptually dried to the bone, and irritatingly self-conscious.
The premiss was to focus on photographic and video art, though I already had accused in the past some institutions (especially the Montreal Museum Of Contemporary Arts, who are not participating in this survey) to exagerate their interest for very cold conceptual image-based works, when so many artists in other mediums, especially sculpture, have yet to get pertinent museal representation in this country. Wrether it's David Altmejd, Michel De Broin, or even Jessica Stockholder which we have seen so rarely in Quebec, there is definitely a gap going on in our public collections, and I am afraid this has a little to do with curators working a little too hand in hand with certain gallerists who definitely stand by their bias by taking a long time before being interested by new artists (and when they do, it is mostly because the new artists reflect interests already explored by their roasters). Being an artist who secretly works in video art I feel strange to decry what I perceive as an over-interest with the medium, but I have always been more interested in defending good art than my own career or a specific medium over another.
I am appalled that all the interesting stuff that I saw over the years in art centres rarely end up being shown in museums, and somehow, at how this exhibition made me realize that simplier formats like a photograph or a monoband video are indeed more likely to find itself part of a national collection, perhaps because they are easier to manipulate and sell, which results in tingling my senses that there seem to be a provident danger for young contemporary artists to feel attracted by creating art merely because it is suitable for museums (most photos shown here are expressly formatted for museum spaces), instead of really trying to move somewhere.
Let me be clearer.
Many of the art pieces shown here, if they are representative of communal canadian interest in the arts, seem to be attracted by researching end alleys and culs-de-sac. There is a definite relent of nostalgia for the conceptualist 60's that has been aestheticized, "re-arranged" (rendered slicki-er), and personalized (or psychologized). The couple artists who do not conform to what I just described at the very least remain much entangled in their respect of severe art traditions or are paying homages to earlier artists.
There is no real bad asses here. If you've seen one, it's faux-bad-ass.
(ok..maybe Janieta Eyre is slightly off the mark...)
To resume the show, rarely I have met so little expression of true personalities. The art pieces presented here seemed more like attempts to quasi-scientifically decipher various processes of perceptualism (how images are made in our heads and transformed culturally, when artists are not bluntly showing you, ohhh wow, how the camera works...or was I that stupid?), when not offering art as an alternative for anthropological research.
There is this tension in many works between being overdead-serious but filled with just enough a punch tag claiming "you-know-I-didn't-really-mean-it-...-I-wasn't-that-deadly-serious" that it left me really ambiguous and untrusty about what artists are really trying to do with investing so intendedly, ie., parasiting, our art collections with so many cold essays that look more like ponctuations over precedent historical artistic epitaphs, all this when they are still artists with true fire left in them that are being ignored.
Ok I realize I am being a bit rough on here, when they are actually quite a few pieces which I really liked in that show (many I had seen before), so why don't we go through with the art that I find so problematic?
Geneviève Cadieux, "June" (1999): One of the four artists presented as influential over the canadian scene (with Michael Snow, Rodney Graham and of course Jeff Wall),
Cadieux re-iterated her interest in photographic pigment by associating it to an image of a "landscape close-up" so to reaffirm the painting quality of photography that you are now able to compare to a Riopelle. I keep wanting to refuse to like that work because I deemed it too blunt. Actually the work is not ugly in itself. I just feel the project is trying to ponctuate on abstraction, but that field have seen many dead ends and the people who excell at it these days are so well beyond the apparatus of a Riopelle that I canèt help but find this work retrograde. I mean, De Kooning did say that he painted some close-up of grasses so why prove it 15 years later? This is more like an exercise than real art to me.
Mark Lewis "Algonquin Park, Early March" (2002): Lewis is getting dangerously close to making snippets worth your cd-manual instructions on proprieties of camera tricks.
He used to explore the realm of cinema in engaging ways but he has become a little too radical and there is a point where the "boring" has eating up the "interesting".
Tim Lee, "The Jerk, Carl Reiner, 1979": the guy seems so gentle and sweet that it pains me to critique his work but, again, while some of his other works can be very humoristic, this behind-the-gag complex "theoreticalization" (is that a word?) on the theme of portrait and identity felt way too over the top (there is an half-hour explication to this work) to ..err, suspend my disbelief if you will, and while the homage to Graham sounds nice it also felt a little poussé and not too "à propos". I had seen the other work "Funny Face, George And Ira Gershwin, 1927" (2002) so many times already that the first laugh effect on me had disappeared and now I was left mesmerizing myself at thinking "hmmm...Is this really really a great work of art or just some silly pun?". Is it something Tim Lee got away with, so to speak.
Angela Grauerholz (excerpts from) Privation Book (2001): I do feel sad for Grauerholz for loosing all her library collection in a fire, but the more I see samples from this series of scans of her dead books (3 are on show here, no. 8 (front), no. 55 (back) and no. 181 (back), in case you really care), the more that I think that this essay on Borgesian lost knowledge or Smithsonian entropy is not too pertinent, especially when it entitles the works of art to outlast the books, what I find paradoxical at a times when they are other performer artists who simply burned all their personal belongings willingly. There seem to be some grief that this work is living badly. This work replaces the loss of material by effigies, images meant as monuments, yet images are too evanescents to make this project palpable. And why should I care about these dead books after Alexandria? Why?
Pascal Grandmaison, "Verre 4" (2003): not a bad idea, but way too blunt for my taste. Yes we are enthrusted in our own perceptual bubbles, separated by impenatrable screens, but Grandmaison wants so much that I don't care about his subjects that I end up not caring. I think I am more interested by art that attempts at communicating than by art that just reminds me of how things really are. And let's be honest, the photos look like they've been shot in 2 minutes and maybe that provokes me a little. They scream "So easy to be an artist, huh?" and I just feel like wanting to refuse them that category. I need substance, imagination. This, what Grandmaison shows me, I had already figure out, so I felt like the work was not bringing much to Platon, more like it was the poster ad image for the myriads recent texts about "body-screen". When will Grandmaison break the glass, so to speak?
Kevin Schmidt "Long Beach Led Zep" (2002) looks even more like a Youtube folly now that it is shown on a full size wall, sparing a whole museum room, instead of the previous postcard tv format seen here and there. If it had been sincere I could have laughed but the way the work is described in statement is just adding way too much pretentions, stuff about evoking this nostalia or that utopia, the museal envelop actually drying out the excitement I could have had about the work if I had found it on Youtube. Sometimes you are trying too much, you know? This is not pure anymore, it's a demonstration of cultural exotic dead ends. I was hoping the guy really enjoyed playing led zep on the beach. Can you see what I mean?
Kelly Wood, "Continuous Garbage Project Year Three (March 15 2000 - March 14 2001) (2001): Like an evil grind pun on pop art ("Fuck Those Campbell Soups!!"), this project really made me hoped that now that everybody and everyone will have shown their garbage in art galleries and museums, than maybe afterward we can start wondering about really interesting things. And how are Wood's garbage bags not that interesting? Well, what first looked like an anthopological project about the artist's life and her surroundings (which I had to question the amount of interest I should involve in), quickly turned into an age-old attempt to reveal a cul-de-sac with ready-mades and what can be turned into art ("Hey, have I beaten Manzoni just yet? Or am I truly interested by my own garbage?"). I mean, yes the piece is art, and yes it has multiple colors in it and is all cutely mosaical, but it is this obsession with contemporary arts to dig with the down, the low, and the minimal that I find tristounet (and sometimes redundant, as "thrash alert" turned into art is far from being at its first round). I understand that Wood means to "warn us" by revealing the "unseen" in everyday consumption, and how I'm supposed to feel mirrorred by this project. But is the art of Kelly Wood a symptom of human ecological defect or a symptom of an artistic failure to deal with such defect? Where am I suppose to go after that? This project felt like screaming "dead end, goodbye, I've got no more to say" so I was left confused about my best way to react. Why not use larger green bags and less of them, for a start?
Stan Douglas, Cuban Buildings (a series): This looks like an excellent documentary project on how cuban buildings have been transformed since the Castro revolution, but.. Well, I can see many great documentary photo shoots in Paris Match and elsewhere and I am not sure why Stan Douglas's version should hold a special place in the art department, all this because he does other works that happens to be art. The photos don't look perticularly personal nor filled with any technological bravado, nor special sense of poetry. And top of that, it's not a diary. It is just like good photojournalism, period.
Alexandre Castonguay: 3 photo-portraits of people which are in fact multi-layers of photos morphed back digitally into one. It felt more to me like an experience with gadgetry than anything specially moving.
Rodney Graham "Stanley Park Cedar, No. 7": As if saying "If I can't redo Ansel Adams (or Friedlander, or...), at least I can enlarge it and put it upside down". Graham is actually one of my fave artists but the upside trees are only good when the trees look good, so it's all more about cosmetics to me than a truly interesting project.
Scott McFarland and Isabelle Hayeur are each "re-inventing" landscape (or interior) photography by digitally collaging parts of photographed worlds that don't necessarely belong together. The results are interesting but what I would be attacking here in this article is how the artists have depersonalized their art in the respect of their methods. Methods which, once replicated by many artists, could dangerously make them redundant. What warrants a nice Hayeur is still her ability to create nice images, but the way her "method" is described in the statement sounds like affirming that each of her photographs should automatically be interesting when that is not always the case. In fact the precise work shown here ("Refuge", 2002) is quite ordinary compared of what I have seen from her elsewhere. So, outside of stubborn theories and obsession with precise art traditions, I fear that Hayeur is bypassing the fact that she is mostly an excellent collagist. I mean, when will the work finally reveal that it's all about collage? Will we ever know? Or how do we know? Etc...
Steven Shearer, "Guitar No. 5" (2003) is a big collage-mosaics of people playing guitars. Again it remains in the "anthropology" category judging from the statement.
It's an "ok" work but it doesn't beat an Ydessa Hendeles museum of photographs of people holding teddy bears, hence here I come back to the fact that most works described until now seem to have been made large enough to not fit in everyone\s living room, but small enough to be manipulable and fitting the wall of a museum collectiv show. Note that they are at least 5 "Guitar" works in existence what made me wonder why the artist never made them all into one work. His other piece "Activity Cell With Warlock Bass Guitar" (1997) looks like a pun on Rirkrit Tiravanija more than something truly original, and that I think is what happens when artist reduce themselves to minimal wooden motifs and forms: you end up looking the same as another artist, just like all galleries are white cubes.
Rebecca Belmore, "To Rest And To Dream" (2001) and some other photograph of her enveloped in drapes, is quite ambitious in trusting her audience to really fulfill their gazes with an image of herself presented as an "exotic artefact" aimed at "piquing our curiosity". Hmmm....Has Native culture ever yet wanted to remain so self-preciously unatteinable? Or what's the point? Again this work sounds like a demonstration of something than a real artistic exploration, but I am not sure what it wished to demonstrate.
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Ho boy did I even like something in that exhibit?
Yes I did, those who passed my radar test are below:
Jeff Wall, "Stereo" (1980) could also be accused of being cold and removed and merely interested by historical attribution. But I can't help but feel that the photograph is emotionally invested. You want to like this guy. You want to be there and say "hey..what are you doing naked on that couch?". The fact that we know Wall is replying to Manet (and the likes) only adds a touch of humanism to the work instead of removing it. The work stands for a major missing nude in art history. I deem the photograph to be extremely political. And human.
AA Bronson, "Felix, June 5, 1994" (1994-99): this is not cold page documentary but couldn't be more invested. It's a way for Bronson to seal for good the heritage of General Idea, a group that has worked so many years around aids issue, and at the same time it was the first work of his solo career, in a sense. It's a necessary photograph, representative of a whole generation and art community worldwide. And because the picture is so graphically wild, yet it pictured a dark moment (the physical suffering is obvious), I think it will remain in memory for long. A classic of contemporary canadiana.
Janieta Eyre, "What I Haven'T Told You" (2003) + "Red Like Meat" (2002): dealing often with motherhood and other women issues in post-biological trauma settings, this local version of a Matthew Barney has made quite a face of her own and is radically detached from what others are doing, including in this exhibition. I remark a strong character and personality in this art (like it is absent in most other works here). Her akward taste for kitsch is recognizeable series after series.
Nicolas Baier, "Planet" (2002): there is always something going on in a Baier photograph that is too quirky to have it reduced into, say, as the Cadieux above, to an attempt to homage abstract art and its options for photography. In this case there is the homage to Paterson Ewen but, first Ewen was not abstract (and the title of this piece doesn't induce that it should be abstract), then there is the confusion about what exactly we are seeing (often a surprise with Baier to discover the trick behind the photo), then there is the humor (it's a goddam scratched bar table), than the playing grace of keep looking on for a couple minutes and discovering surpriseful details (a design of two people in some garden). Somehow Baier often suceeds at making his art fun to look at (apart from that it is often simply ravishing), so really I cannot tag him as a cold conceptualist as those I have listed above. I don't know why. Maybe because for once I can sense a real joy in artmaking.
Rodney Graham, "Rheinmetall-Victoria 8" (2003): I can fall for an hard-edged theoretical work when it is that well-expressed. This follows a similar idea than with the Grauerholz images of dead books (above), except that instead of being concerned with the disappearance of knowledge, Graham is concerned by the disappearance of technological means to bring that knowledge. Commenting that the digital era and computers might soon forget cinema reels and typewriters is one thing, but doing it in a way that the whole look as slick as Sugimoto, yet filled with the aura and originality of early surrealist cinema, that made this monster steps above so many other works dealing with the exact same topic. Graham just excels with romanticism. He keeps wanting to get things cold but it's always with the heart that he is reaching back at us. Or am I simply being corny?
John Massey "A Directed View (The Third Room): Some Other Union" (1980): Ok, this "sound puppet theatre", which is simply a sound work played over a replicate in miniature of the artist's studio was so AHEAD OF ITS TIME by 1980, you wonder if Janet Cardiff ever invented anything. And to think the artist refers to this as a photograph? At last a work filled with enough mystery that it doesn't need dwell on de-fabricating or analyzing the ways of artmaking. Or maybe it does, in a sense, but far from being specific it finally leaves the audience breathe with imagination in an exhibit where most work seems to attempt to attack or deceive that very imagination. I...happen to like art, you see?
Evan Penny, "L. Faux-Tri X" (2001): I was already amazed when I saw this guy's last solo at Sperone Westwater in New York, but I never knew he was a canadian artist.
Hooray for us! Yes, he's your next Ron Mueck, but his art relies often on wall reliefs (between the 2d and 3d) rather than the strictly sculptural. In fact he is included here because his sculpture looks much like a blurred photograph (at least from a distance). Impossible, Irreprehensible craft, I have no idea how he managed to reach this effect, to sculpt this. But as I said in the beginning, sculpture is strong in Canada and here is just one more name that I would not even have thought mentioning. This attempt to 3d-ify photography has been one of the most interesting venture of art in the last couple years. I should curate a show about this. This artist could be big, time will tell.
Althea Thauberger, "Songstress" (2002): ah well I have seen this series of videoclips multiple times but it remains always great fun to hear these young woman sirens-wannabee sing in the forest in this absolute utopian, homely version of a Lillith Fair. Yes, we laugh, but at the same time we are charmed. It's the same effect as being in Walt Disney World passed 19 years old.
Michael Snow, "Conception Of Light" (1992): this man should be gently spanked for having brought a dark influence on drying up and hyper-conceptualize the canadian contemporary art scene (read about all the works I hated above), yet, Snow is one fellow who has kept over the years a strength and maybe an easyness in reaching the sublime in places where many others only reached the dead theoretical ends. These two large circular photographs of pupils should look like nothing that never had been printed before on a Resident music album, yet they still look brand new in 2006 as they reclaim their authenticity as works of art. The statement, wanting people to stay aware of awareness, and the simple reference to painting, couldn't be more obvious, but the fact that these two eyes are implicated in ways that shall constitute sort of the Romeo And Juliet of canadian contemporary arts is unexpectedly enlightning. A great work about, well, love, basically. Who'd seen this coming from Snow?
I'll end up with a work that keeps me neither in the cold nor heat: while I agree that the Lynne Cohen photographs are architecturally very pertinent, I cannot amend myself to filled these spaces with equal amounts of mysteries, so I tend to prefer the spa and laboratories photographs over those presenting halls and classes. Sort of like a Candida Hofer, maybe her works should always be presented in strict series rather than intertwined as they were here. I wish they would have presented, say, the whole Spa series. I think Spa is one of the landmark series of contemporary photography. But isn't this your typical documentary, like I accused Douglas of doing above? No, here the shots seem calculated for their plasticity: the effect
is often flat and acknowledging of a grid. These are structural studies. while ome of the Douglas photos seemed almost touristic.
Ok well, 14 works I didn't like versus 10 that I liked means that it is not so bad
afterall. But my problem was with the 14 works I disliked being works
I strongly disliked and mostly how even comparing the works I liked with those
I disliked I kept coming up with flat conceptual canvases. Maybe I am a little
annoyed that those flat canvases still consist of the majority of what museums buy as contemporary arts, probably even as we speak.
I am afraid that by revealing trends, museums are simply telling artists what they want and the art that they should be doing.
I am worried of unrepresentation and fallacy caused by
lacks of means, or by museums listening too much to collector's
tastes who are buying art for their living room, or worst,
the hall at their corporate buildings.
Suddenly I realized how grey, soft blue and white
was popular in that exhibit. I am worried that a Lynne Cohen enters the museum easier because it looks better at the dentist's office who bought it.
Is that what this exhibition was telling me?
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
