There's Snow In Your Windshield: "Weathervane" at Uqam Gallery

I grew up thinking of snow as a luxury you visit. John Landis




My mother is helping me out this week to visit a couple art shows
until I am able to go by myself. Isn't she sweet?

Therefore I was able to catch Weathervane finishing this Saturday at
Uqam Gallery (September was such a rush with medical institutions
that I didn't have much time for art).

Actually I was going to reply to a Chris Zeke article about it, as I seem to always have more fun replying to people than writting my own stuff, but his comment section is membership-tied at the moment.


Weathervane is one of about 4 or 5 contemporary art shows I have seen in the past couple years dealing with the theme of weather. It is possible that even 2 of them were presented at the same space (Taran Gallery at Saydie Bronfman Center), but my memory is quite feeble these days. But not to want to accuse the originality of Karen Love's curatorial project it must be said that Weathervane is already about 2 years old and have been travelling in many places before reaching Montreal.


Like many collectiv shows these days when art endeavours in this country are being badly subventioned, Weathervane is merely an assemblage of small, less important works, some of which would probably never have caught attention if they weren't brought in such context. It is really the kind of exhibit that takes shape because of the curatorial premiss, and in a sense, mostly underlines an art in curating more than it really provides us with works that can have an impact. Though in this specific case, Karen Love remains both honest and generous with her offer, having mixed up artists from very different backgrounds and approaches. It's a wonder how she fell on remembering or including some of these works.


The best piece, by 10 grade above anything else, and the only one absolutely worth
the detour to visit this show, was Seifollah Samadian’s video loop "The White Station" (1999), which is simply sort of a moving canvas, a minimalist documentation of an iranian woman waiting for a bus during a snow tempest, until the bus arrives and another women gets out as she enters (this intercutted with shots of birds experiencing the same weather on their tree branches). I know, or I expect, this to be a metaphor about the harsh condition of living as a woman in contemporary Iran (chadors and all), but even universally, outside of politics, I felt the image was striking. It's not only about human survival, I am more interested by this idea of a flow of assaulting energy and how one is being removed from it, like experiencing relief or redemption, until that energy is passed unto someone or something else. I was thinking of oxygen moving through blood or other stretched comparisons, but really the only negative critic I could think for this piece is that the loop was "interluded" by the credits at the end when it should have been going on and on. Otherwise, the way I perceived this piece, it was perfection (the crude handheld camera being much more affirmative than the usual cinematic prowess of Shirin Neshat).

My mother, not as accustomed to art as I am, watched it three times in a row because for her it was a soothing, relaxing sight. It is the only piece that she truly enjoyed from the exhibit, though I was there to "explain" her everything else (some of the pieces here are highly conceptual).


At this point I must stop and comment that all the works in the show could be separated in two categories: works about snow, and works about wind. So let's move on through the snow category. The piece by Tania Kitchell "Fargo" (2004) must be one of the most bizarre artwork I've seen in a while. What's the point? Covering a large paper band on the wall she presents photographic fragments of the popular movie Fargo (Coen Brothers) combined with a text that analyses the weather conditions in the movie. Now I wasn't sure if this was an analysis from the artist herself, about how that "filmed weather" affected her internally, or if she meant to point out the visions and intentions the filmakers had about the weather aspect in their film, while sort of comparing these intentions with the results, revealing the irony of a situation when men are pretending to have control over nature. Now to come back to a comment I was going to reply to Chris Zeke, I have nothing against an artist appropriating images from popular cinema, especially in the context of a work that is specifically ABOUT that film and proposes an analysis of an aspect from it (the Coen brothers should totally feel homaged, or at least curious about this commentary), but I think the artist here simply didn't choose the best format. As it is the whole looks more like a large bizarre publicity subway poster for the film. Some images seem more interested by the stars and action in the movie than any specific filmic weather. I really question the format (which by the way is unusually large for this artist). It's like a photographic graffiti. Why not present a short clip from the film instead? And why Fargo instead of The Shining?

Following from the snow movement, the show included three funny drawings by Tyler Brett and Tony Romanu ("T&T" is the monicker they prefer), that sort of stood in nowhereland between the cartoonish and the prototype-design proposition. They depicted quasi-surreal futurist-meets-folk scenes, like postcards from the next glacial age, including a trappist holding a solar energy cell-plate on his backpack, or a bunch of snowdogs drawing a pile of white cars on snow, them turned into metallic igloos. I was frustrated that there were only 3 drawings featured as, if ever there was a larger series done about this, I'd be curious to see them together in a catalog. This is the type of neo-folk art akin to Marcel Dzama that could easily get popular, and I wouldn't want to miss on yet another deleted publication.

Am I already done with the snow? Ooops, yes, because I made one big mistake. The two Paterson Ewen works included, though appearing from my sight as depicting snow, were actually interpretations of the rain movement. Or I'm not sure about the older drawing from 1971, which was just a bunch of blotted dots on paper, looking more like a constipated Pollock than anything remotely engaging, a mere study being presented obviously because of its signature. The larger work, a probable crowd-pleaser, is at the opposite, magnifiscent, though one could visually connect how both of them came to fruition and how that was certainly the point of Karen Love to have them replying to each others as they were. "Rain Over Water" (1974) to me sort of pursue the Van Gogh project, a personal, lurid, vivification of a landscape vision, while adding a little spice of entropic menace, as here the art seems more like attempting to represent weather as a phenomenon larger than one could actually possibly perceive it. I mean, the way that Ewen scraps his wood is very insisting, like he means to add, to exaggerate the intensity of the real event. The stratifications of this rain look rather violent and painful when otherwise the background landscape doesn't seem to be that afflicted by it. To me this is as if the artist's method (the effects of raw woodcarving) almost meant to reveal the whole hidden energetic process supporting the event of rain itself. An expressionm of the outre-natural, as such. The rain and the aura of the weather project permitting it.


Ok we're on to the wind and skies works:

Rodney Graham's "Weather Vane" (2002) gave both the title of the show and the cool catalog cover logo. This is what happens when you make it that big in the artworld.
Otherwise, his steel multiple is mostly a pretty functional object that will show you the wind's direction thanks to a "wind shield" taking the shape of the artist sitting in reversed on a bicycle so to make sure he is always moving towards the "wrong direction", if you will. It's obviously an object filled with cuteness and romantic nostalgia but I don't think there is any reason to dwell unto its meaning for centuries. Put in the right place it would be the sort of art piece that would still functionate once people had forgotten about it, so there should not be a need to put it in a museum or gallery (where its purpose is destroyed).


Mark Lewis's "Windfarm" (2001) is a 4 minutes loop showing a park of wind turbins somewhere in California. Hmmm...Beautiful but...So what? Well, if we remember Mark Lewis we know that all his work is about the medium cinema more than it is about anything else (including weather), and so this piece is supposed to reflect the very propriety of cinematic loop itself, by providing a cycle of turning rotor
blades that apparently are moving in a manner that "echoes the spinning movement" of cinema "reel revolutions". The problem is that the work is shown on dvd so..err..it obviously looses in a raffle the opportunistic subtlety of the link with cinema, and as a visual tableau in itself (a painting...or more like a postcard) it is not entirely deprived of grace, but it is simply nothing that sounds like hard work enough (or hard "think" work enough) to deserve a spectator's attention for more than a minute, regardless of the effort to impress our little human sizes by having the projected screen filled the largest wallspace possible. Pfff..nice try, you guys.
Better to go visit the park in person.

Richard Rhodes is presenting an assemblage of 3 quite blunt painted "portraits" of skies, which are at first sight confusing because each of these "portraits" are themselves segmented in 4 or 6 small rectangular canvases, yet they are all shown aligned together on one wall without clear separation between the three different works. I thought this project was supposed to underline the possibility of filling a sky with identity?? Nevertheless, these "portraits" are fragmented simply as a mean from the artist to acknowledge the human impossibility to encompass a whole sky through representation. Apart from that, the specific lieux and hours where these events took place are rather anecdotical (who cares about the sky above this or that mall? Oops, well ok, Richard does), and the paintings don't do that much more than being aesthetically pleasing (especially the assemblage which revealed a more pinkish oversight). Let's just say that if they meant to share complex ties with minimalism and landscape, I'm throwing a Stephane Larue. These are still decorative works. Contemporary, but decorative (which is no more of a contradiction these days, anyway).

Following from a similar, almost performative, vein, Alan Storey (which by the way
made me have fun at the recent Sculpture Biennial in Trois-Rivieres) presented us a maquette and a photograph of an actual prototype of a giant "hydrothermograph",
which are these little temperature reader machines sitting in the corners of museums that caught me more than once laughing and saying "wow..this is the best art piece
I've seen in this room..." (mostly when visiting with friends and bored by the art). But Storey had the imagination to install a gigantic version of this machine outside and use the recorded temperature activity as a medium for pieces of abstract art, in themselves presented as large paper bands (of which two were included here). Honestly I thought the work was worthy for its humoristic aspect, but taken from an intellectual side I am not sure I would be that interested in putting artefacts of pseudo-natural causalities on my walls. Maybe if the machine could have recorded different variants in colors, but in black over white it was a little too tiger-crude for my taste.

Where are we now?

Next to this was a Marlene Creates dyptich, or at least it seems like it was a dyptich after reading the title but for a while I thought they were two separate works. They were photos of landscapes with road signs presented as central motifs, these strangely warning possible passerbys about weather hazards. The first one seemed to be captured from a desert, as the sign was warning "us" from wind dust (or more like tumbleweeds), and the other, shot from a mountain view, announcing the menace of falling rocks. I am not sure if there was some kind of metaphorical link to be made between the first wind and the latter falling rocks (dyptich alert), or if the artist simply meant to demonstrate how civilization has come to fragment elements of one large butterfly which is nature, but the project was (is) somewhat cute as a documentary about human struggle against nature. For deep Lacanesque interpretations about language versus events and how all this is forming inside our heads and digested by culture, you will need to go read another critic's take.


Moving up the stairs from Uqam was an unusual inclusion of an old experimental film
from 1974, which most people would mistake for a Michael Snow work as he is easily the first artist who comes to mind when faced with similar minimalist recording interventions of landscape through cinema. But "Windmill III" (where are the other two? another missed opportunity here) is by Chris Welsby, an artist I know little about, and it is simply the video transfer of a 16mm camera shooting a whirling mirror-blade in a park, this blade being activated by some sort of wind captor. So basically, half the time as the wind makes the blade turns you see the camera shooting itself, while half the other you see the scenery of the park behind, and as fast as this manoeuvre begins to accelerates, the image unfolds into a wild flicker effect, as though the calm sunny aspect of the park becomes suddenly endangered by some very heavy rain, or some improbable blizzard (I wrote "blister" in my notes).
So what started like your typical 70's "demonstrative art" (pure cinema conceptualism) soonly becomes a very genuine take on Monet's impressionism. Who would have thought? I liked this work, and so should you (my mother hated it, but you know, it does take patience and the will to "perceive" this one).


Finally, gosh, I was almost forgetting it, the show included another unexpected artist, the legendary anti-object minimalist Lawrence Weiner, with another of his wall sentence that functions like a visual poem (or maybe, a physical poem?). These two sentences are put in red one over the other, separated by one dark line:
"ODDS & ENDS TIED TOGETHER / AS THE DAWN COMES UP LIKE THUNDER". So you see basically
the thunder is "under"neath, menacing odds_and_ends "tied" (& looking like a knot, or something as literal, or can you excuse language for being literal?). That's the idea. And with Weiner, ideas are all what truly counts so no need to embellish them or complicate them. Just write them down on a wall, make it look like a theorema. Yeah that is it: pseudo-theorema aesthetic. Not a bad idea since we all love a T-shirt that can scream, but, nothing that I would pay big bucks for when I can just stencil it myself on my wall. Can one share an idea? As for the inclusion here, well, it was an original way for the curator to demonstrate how entropy (remember that show is 2 years old, right?) can truly be communicated in all sorts of strange mediums, heh?


The Montreal version of the show was missing the video installation by Diana Thater
(some clouds behind a window on the ceiling, or something similar that sounded like a Yoko Ono ripp-off). Is it because it was too expensive to get it travelled? Is it because Thater is the larger than life artist invited in this project? I'd like to know. I'd really insist on curators getting their shows travel properly. I would have loved to judged the work in person instead of speculating from descriptions.



Whoah, my window opened abruptly, the autumn's cold air has made itself comfortable here, so gotta close that one down,


Toodles to readers;-)

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


PS: some images of the show are here, but if I can see better links to each work I'll change this text tomorrow.


"Weathervane"
8 September - 7 October 2006
Galerie De l Uqam
1400 rue Berri
Montréal