Artquebus

2008: New Life + My Rules As The Artist's Audit

2008-04-19T12:16:00.000-07:00

Hello,

Thought it was time to give some news.
I presume no one ever looks up here
anymore and that's totally logic.

My interests have shifted from the visual arts
recently and so there is not much reason for
me to be here either. I do think this is only
temporal and I will be back into arts within
a year or two. But more likely I would attempt
to communicate by simply making art moreso than keep
on with blogging which the artworld has never
really shown much interest for (apart a couple
exceptions).

One thing is for sure: I have settled
new personal rules for my future art visits
and intend to follow them religiously.

It is very simple. In the future I will
only indulge in visiting art shows that
follow these precise criterias:

I will only visit art exhibits where:

1. The visitor is allowed to photograph
or videotape any work that they like.

And/Or

2. The gallery offers a full checklist and catalog
of every work shown in the exhibit, either in a publication
form or on the web (most important international galleries
are already set up like this, so it is perfect).

And/Or

3. The artist exhibited owns a website where each of their works
are titled and thoroughly documented (including generous video extracts
in the case of video art, not just photographs).

I will let you ponder why I decided to set these rules,
but the big clue I can give you is that going recently through
all the exhibit PRs I had amassed throughout the years, I realized
how ridicule it was that so many things I have seen in my life
was lost to memory for being merely described in text, and how much
of a chunk of my time now feels like it was completely wasted.

I also came to the realization that the most important works
I have seen in the past are often the most well documented, so my
presomption is that if you art counts, than it gets documented.

The same goes for films and music: I am always able to acquire the
pieces that I enjoy the most. It is never bereft from me to access
that information like it has been in so many art circles, especially
art centres, small galleries, and middle-level contemporary art museums.
This is all going into the loot: sorry. I am not interested in collecting
blank PRs anymore. I'm not interested in having to write in notebooks
titles of favorite works in exhibits (when gallerists allowed me, I've
been known to photograph title cards in the past). I'm not interested in
ephemerality eitheir, except in the case of performance art
(ephemeral performances don't have to abide to the rules above).

So those are my rules, from now on. Take it or leave it.
Artists too paranoid about their copyrights: go to hell.
Or leave your art in the ivory towers of the few who
can afford them. That's fine by me.

Voilà ! That's settled.

I think I have just reduced by about half the shows that I
will visit from now on, especially in Canada.

Other news: my health is going mighty fine. The doctors
aren't calling me anymore. I thank the good Lord for that.

I think I'm going to see a few major museum shows soon.
Recently seen Geoffrey Farmer and Yannick Pouliot (in Montreal).
I'm sorry but I hated Farmer. There is one great piece,
the now famous installation "The Last Two Millions years"
(sort of "ok-documented" by Farmer's gallerist and the publication,
though it could be better), which indeed propose, like every journalists
described, a great monument to vulnerability.

But apart from that, Farmer imposes too much of his personal
sentimentality onto every stack of rubbish he can amass.
Do you remember that old album by the band The Cure called
"Three Imagnary Boys"? It had that sleeve art featuring 3 mundane
domestic objects representing human characters. Back then, this was
just a cute image. Farmer got obsessed by this concept X 10 times.
Plus in the retro, all the in-situ poetry of the original art
was completely lost. A retro of photo documents of the original
installations would have made more sense than trying to level up
the rubbish on sets of pedestals (be them facto or imaginary).

Yannick Pouliot is very opposite to Farmer: his elegant "siamese"
furnitures and stencils are very museal and it's no wonder he was picked
at such a young start by museum curators. The man already looks like a dilettante
(ref, the cover of Hour weekly), and so does his art retain the necessary
campy fetishistic luxure that goes well with that. Surreal furniture
is nothing new in art but his pieces follow the one from the next, and the
thesis for them is proposed in a spectacular architectural installation
which mixes Nauman's "Corridors" psychologic claustrophobia with unapologetic
rococo aesthetic. It's like being in the Twilight Zone of period sets at the Metropolitan for a few walking steps. The best art piece seen in 2008 yet. Not bad for a starter.

I don't know if I'll ever come around to complete my 2007 Montreal Biennial
piece which I see here as half-written in the draft folder.

Allright, that is all for now. I'll let this blog know if I encounter
any major art events (as long as it's not ridiculous prices reached by
baubbles in pretentious art fairs), but keep in mind that these days I'm
hanging in geek places where art has little to do, or spending a lot of time
away from cities. I think I finally came to grasp how to enjoy being
a cultural nuisance: someone utterly insignificant and uninteresting. Is that
what people define as complacency ? Ah well, it's just a phase. I'm sure
I'll be back with my pretentious BS soon enough. ;D !

Cheers !

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Down The Memory Lane

2007-11-22T04:03:00.000-08:00

Hello,

So I've received the results of my latest scans:

1 - there is no trace of cancer

2 - the kidney show no evidence of malfunction (no loss of fluids)

3 - the belly hernia is non-strangulating (not in a urgent need to be operated)

Of course, the usual mention that I'm an extra-terrestrial because my vena cavea and my aorta cross as an X, and all my circular system is reversed, kind of like I am a living reversed photocopy of a normal human being.

I must say: I was pretty worried because I felt dizzy this past season, and my blood tests are showing that my creatinine is increasing. We will have to check that creatinine closely (I hate urology tests!), but there is a possibility that I'm doing a light form of chest angina. And so, you know, high cholesteral and all
that are pretty common problems.

I have one year left of frequent testing. After that they only see me each 2 years
for 2 or 3 other times as possibilities of cancer returning dramatically decrease.
But the first year is the most important to go through.

Right now I'm in the process of going through all my archives. Putting together the materials of exhibits I've seen, articles I've read, and works I've done (most never exhibited). Every objects I ever acquired is passing through my hands.

I plan to move out from where I am and find a larger place to live, so that's a step towards that. So I will still be off the artworld for a few months. In fact, I don't think I'll be back to my normal rhythm of pre-2006 until January 2009, and by then a lot of things might have changed (I still haven't completely given up the idea of simply show art and stop babbling about it).

So that is not great news for this blog, because I can't see much motives in keeping it active in a near future, but I'll sporadically come here to write about the most fantastic things I see (I still plan a trip to New York by February, if not December), and also write about some of the old findings, maybe write a couple words about old shows that everybody has forgotten.

As mentioned before I also have plans to study 3D animations in 2008.
Lord Of The Rings Online is one of the great art piece of 2007,
wrether you like it or not. There is a shift in social design that
these system offer that shouldn't be underestimated by artists.
Romanticism just don't seem to want to die. I used to think
people defending neo-masterism in art as the only valuable
avenue (for the near future) were speaking bollocks, but I never
understood that they are other ways to neo-masterism than painting.
We are close to the technology that will make possible the engulfing
of a viewer inside a Reubens. Would it be that people would preferably
seek to get engulfed inside a De Kooning? That seems unlikely to me,
for now. I just see romanticism as refusing to die, and as sucessfully
having found all means to bypass art which rejected it, and remain
vital in the global conscious. There is an aesthetic to dreaming,
and one that has hardly ever changed since millenaries. Why
have contemporary artists been trying to reason everything, and
aim against the natural flow of dreams?

Maybe art was never supposed to make you think, maybe
it's supposed to make you dream.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: I know I'll hate that last sentance in 2 days. Just let me be in my kid mind's bubble for 2 minutes.

Art Engines: E-Art At Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts.

2007-10-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

This has been my thought for so many years: why are technological
artists always been pigeonholed inside special events sourrounding media
research and not simply adressed for what they are trying to communicate
as artists.

Yesterday I went to the Museum Of Fine Arts to attend what was supposed
to be the wrap-up conference by Marie Fraser for the Mois De La Photo,
which last edition ended a few days ago. You get used in the artworld
with these kinds of blockings in communication, but it turned out the conference
was cancelled. This led me the time to peruse a new exhibition
at the museum which was all about technological art: E-Art, the collection
of Fondation Daniel Langlois.

I was happy to find out that this exhibition included the works
of artists I had been wondering since a long time why I had never
seen their works bought or installed in museums. Mainly, these
3 artists which I believe had created landmark works in
each of their own investigations: Lynn Hershman, Eduardo Kac,
and Jim Campbell. Three artists which under my humble
opinion I thought deserved some career recognition by major
institutions.

What is very refreshing about the Daniel Langlois collection
installation, is that it gives generous space to each
artist it presents, sometimes offering up to three rooms for one artist.
I have never yet seen this happening for a major museum
group show, where usually each artist is stacked
into a corner. For this amazement along, the parcourse is
well worth a visit. A full retro of Jim Campbell
is even included !! About time, considering
he is one of the few canadian voices who have a
true international career.

Unfortunately the works in the exhibit themselves are not
always fascinating outside of the inherent gadgedtry
that they involved, and you're gonna have to excuse the mandate
of Langlois' Fondation, but the whole premiss for the show is again
waving the flag of technological advancement in artistic research,
which make it hard sometimes to try to join works together
when talking about the show. The whole prospect of media
sometimes diminush or exaggerate the true impact of the proposals.
One thing for sure, almost every works included here involve computers
and monitor screens set-up in dark rooms. So there already I am describing
one cliche outlook of a technological art aesthetic, but maybe
I want to say a little more about each work, but I'm warning you
that I am as scientifically illiterate as most beings on this planet,
so this will have to involve the transgression of daring to speak about
objects I don't fully understand.

Upon entering the dark blueish walls of the first room of the exhibit (the set-up
was designed by Atelier Big City, the local architectural firm whose name you will find linked with much of the contemporary art scene in Quebec), one get soon entangled inside a banging installation that gives the impression that the whole exhibit will rock. It is called "Hyzoloic Soil" and it is a recent work by architect Phillip Beesley. Sort of a complex plastic net taking the form of dozens of stalagtites united at their source into an akward grotto-like miasma, from which hang delicate translucid-plastic sculptures that whirl as you pass near them (the work involves an orgy of movement-censors which are hardly hidden among the structure), this work is a quasi-monstrous, semi-abstract web of oddities meant to be lived through (there is almost no escape, no way to pursue your visit without
experience this work at its fullest). It is a pity that I never yet finished my promissed review of the last Montreal Biennial, because in it I was telling about the work of Bill Smith that I thought it was ready to expand beyong the solo sculpture. Well this is exactly what I meant: it is an expanded version of a work by Bill smith, and both artists share a similar theme of bringing together principles of natural life with the artificial. This is obviously pure coincidence, but I
think both artists should know the work of the other or collaborate. Mr. Smith is
usually more precise in his revendications of replicating the natural, while here
the attempt is more superficial and approximative, but the immersive aspect
gave it the charm of a thrill ride, or a place where you would want to invite
some friends for a cocktail. It looks a little bit fragile though for a project
proposed by an architect as a case for "responsive architecture"... Compared
with your average market window door, that is. Intriguing nonetheless.

The Lynn Hershman portion of the exhibition was filled with surprises, refindings, and deceptions. I felt joyful to be able to see a work that I had never seen in a long time. Room Of One's Home (1993) was this tiny sculpture-video work that you could have seen in Montreal if you had been lucky enough to attend the large exhibit that accompanied Isea 95 symposium when it reached Montreal in 1995. I remember it very well, it was either at the beginning or the end of the exhibit path depending of how you started. Since then I had seen this work on magazine covers and featured
in documentaries on video art, but always wondered which museum had bought
the original. Well, it was at Langlois Fondation, people. It's a 30 seconds video loop that you need to see through a periscope, and which aesthetic announced Janet
Cardiff which was debuting at the time (at least as a video artist). The work
had a lot to tell in a time when every student was reading essays on video art by
Rosalynd Krauss. It was about mirror, gaze, feeback, voyeurism, the whole-shebang, and of course, feminism. It's simply this little micro-puppet-theatre featuring the images of a women saying to stop looking at her but to look at yourself instead, on a small tv set which featured a video feedback of your eye watching through the peephole. A coolish, pertinent work that hasn't dated an inch, it's a classic of video art. Soon after Lynn Hershman would start working with more sophisticated technologies that pulled her apart from the standard artworld/exhibition venues. It turns out I also had seen Dina (2004) when it was shown at her gallery Bitforms where it was premiered. I remember being very perplexed by that work, because to me it looked mainly like an adanced avatar-friendly version of the good old program
Eliza from the 1970's, the first program which meant to simulate artificial intelligence by presenting a catalog of a choice of responses depending on how the spectator communicated. As far as the delicate intricacies and differences between the technologies (this time the avatar responds through an implemented voice recognition system), it is hard for me
to decipher what is actually intelligent about "Dina", and how does it
improve exactly on Eliza. There didn't seem to be much point to the conversation
when I talked with Dina, and I was shocked by her lack of reaction when I mentioned
Eliza. Oh come on, Dina, return to school ! Next to this piece was a series
of extremely long video works (4 pieces of about an hour each), which will
remain a pain for the duration of the exhibit for the casual passerbys. How
can curators organize things like this? Hershmann should just sell them as a dvd
compilation, so her audience could allow them the patience they require.
Nevertheless, some landmarks of 80's video art are included here, like Electronic
Diaries (1986), which was a refreshing addition at the time when all artists were making introspective films about seeking or promoting their personal identities. But skip that, and you find yourself in the next room, unprepared for the real treat of Hershmann's participation to this show. A full installation of a new work, which current-state-of-technology appeal is very hard to deny. It is an entirely virtual work of art ! Called "Life Squared" (2007), it is one that occurs in the domain of Second Life, the online-services 3d virtuality application. Hershmann used the domain to replicate a work that was sabotaged in its real life presentation
in the 1970's. Here of course it is hard to fully grasp the wittyness of the project
at first sight. We see images of 3d animation on the wall, artefact documents and
photographs concerning the original project in a long glass curio, and an interactive system where you can move a character into Second Life, seen on 2 monitors from 2 camera angles. Only an obscure documentary film in another corner will explain you what this all turns down too. Nevertheless, once you grabbbed a pen and wrote down the name of the project, most of this can be viewed from the point
of view of your home, if you apply in Second Life for a visit to Hershmann's archives. Because in the end this is what is the most fascinating about the project, that the artist is using the virtual world to both archive an art project, and make an art project with it in the meantime. This represents an entire cut or separation from the reality of exhibition space that I find very important. A revigorating reframing of the stage of visual arts is proposed and I think that you should pay attention and follow Hershmann for a few moments.

The next artist in the exhibition is Catherine Richard, which installation
"Method And Apparatus To Finding Love" (2000) was highly recommended
to me when it was exhibited in Ottawa a couple years ago (but I bypassed it,
evil me). What brought hesitation then was that the description talked
of a work on text, involving a system of visual flickering while looking
at the text. I was worried that there was going to be too much to read, and
I felt somehow that I already received much of the work from its description.
But the fact that this exhibition appears in a collectiv show
about technological art is interesting so much the work actually ironicizes
science, and once you let yourself abandon to reading bits of the text,
it is a more accessible piece than the scary scientifical words
and mathematics on prints would have let you presumed on sight.
Drawing from Marcel Duchamp's Great Glass (1923),
the Patent text (read it here on the web (PDF Alert)) describes an impossible machine
which could be described as a walkit-talkie of love, an apparel able
to distinguish likelyhood in receiving the signals of similar apparels,
following complex schemes of electromagnetics and data mining
technologies, influenced by personal user input into the machine. I
am not sure if I'm exact because I really went through fast (sorry, artist),
but a similar device of censoring human heat or magnetism
is installed on a table where pages of the patent are aligned under
glass. It turns out that pages either illuminate or disappear
under opaque glass depending of how the censors respond
to your body. A statement on the deshumanization
of science, pehaps, or the disembodification of communication systems,
but you get the punchline very quick. The rest the text, of which large
extracts and drawings from art historical figures are printed on the wall,
is quite an interesting essay if a bit hardknocking on the history of
the psychology of desire and its affect on aesthetics in general. It is
a works that takes a lot of turns before it delivers its fun,
yet which wit you can apprehend quickly by walking across the room
if you read the slightest guide about it, like you just did here.

Next room is Luc Courchesne, the Quebec guru of technological
art if there ever was one. He's simply everywhere
in this province when an event about technological art occurs
(and I think he is among the people who started the Sat, that space
in Montreal that was supposed to be about art, but for many years turned
into a post-rave-era dance spot, until they delivered their basement).
I will tell you what I think about Courchesne's art in a glimpse:
the man used to astonish me with his interactive film
installations in the 90's. Then there was the Panoscope
which put everyone in awe in 2000. Then from there
it's been repeat of the same trick over and over again.
Actually here there is an artistic statement implied since
his new film Horizon (2007) is meant to be an hommage
to Michael Snow, as the circular camera moves
from a dense scape into a place of pure circular horizon.
But I don't know if an intellectual relecture of panoscopy
is necessary anymore. Maybe Courchesne could publish a huge book
of his travel photographs aka La Terre Vu Du Ciel (Yannus-Bertrand)
and it would be very popular and would resume
his legacy on that topic. He even did a whole 360
degree shot of Sept 911, can you imagine?
(yes, he was there). There is an undeniable
beauty to 360 degree cinema, but attempts
in panoscopic cinema actually have an history
before Courchesne, and I'm sorry to say that I haven't
yet been moved on an artistic level by what he has done
since The Hall Of Shadows (1996) and
his other interactive film which featured passerbies in
a park talking to the audience (Landcapes One? (1997)). Or even
his public videophone bench ! Hey, stuff was happening there:
I remember seeing a drunk man showing me his cock at
2 am on that machine. The exhibition here opted
instead to include Portrait No 1 (1990), a tiny and
early version of Courchesnes' interactive cinema, but this
one looks so much like your average cd-rom art nowadays
(even though its technology preceded cd-rom art), that he should
probably just put it on the web: there shouldn't be a need to
go see this one in a museum.

Next is Marie Chouinard, who amazed the gang at the Elektra Festival when she started
to produce micro-frame video performances which borrowed a lot from early Granular Synthesis, but in a much more humourous way (Elektra are also big fans of Granular Synthesis, which by the way, I am too. Not interested in buying some of Granular Synthesis art, Mr. Langlois? I want a retro of their work NOW. Make it a canadian premiere. Come on, man, I know you can). But back to Chouinard. This version of Cantique No 3 (2004) is the "toy version", which features an application where you can edit the work yourself (I am confused regarding wrether the original title was
simply callled Cantique and this interactive version would be the third format). Personally I think they should have exhibited the whole original which involved multiple screens. This "gadget" version looks more like the sidekick that could be publish on cd-rom and sold for fans of the original show. It is annoying to have to watch other spectators play with the darn thing when none could ever be able to spouse the precise rhythm and exact evolution of the original piece. But media aside,
what could series of repeated milliframes of two faces (a man and a woman) gargling at each other could be telling us? It seems to parody the rituals of facial sexual seduction. A couple is making facial mimicks to attempt to attract one another, but the game is exaggerated to absurdity, and often involves forms of rejection. As the repetition of the video occur, vocal sounds are provoking a rhythmic drone, the
resulting edit proposing these as a musical micro-opera which never miss a chance to make the audience laugh (surprising when so many choreographies in Chouinard's ballets (yes, you are supposed to know that she is a respected international dancer/choreographer) evoke the tragic and dramatic). Another canadian piece that got me wondered why it hadn't show up in museums, and I'll repeat that I still miss the original. Bravo.

The work by Jessica Field, a new artist which you are likely to have never heard from, requires a little patience before you are able to understand what is at play.
What first grasps the view is an aesthetic of robotic retroness almost harking back to Robot B-9 days from Lost In Space Tv show (and which you can now own a replicate
version for a mere 24 500.00 US dollars at Hammacher Schlemmer). This again
brings irony into the whole "avant-technologies" circonstances of the exhibit
purpose, and proves that Langlois is selecting his choices with less cold seriosity
than when he was sponsoring Bill Seaman installations, and that can only be a good thing. A the moment you stop screaming at the machines of Jessica Field, expecting them to react or reply in any way, and focus on reading the red text printed in kitsch-scifi-laboratory large leds right in front of you, you start realizing that the two structures in front of you are actually communicating together about your presence, and that the sound they emit are underlining these statements. Semiotic Investigations In Cybernetic Behaviour (2004) is another work which involves a scary title and which attempt to dumbfound the spectator with the sillyness that it is
actually presenting. To me this was a nice farce on artificial intelligence, or the
utopias that science reserve regarding it. I will be curious mostly to see in the future where this artist's aesthetic world will being her, because it is undeniably original. Don't we love technology when it is so visually... insisting?

I am sorry to have to say that David Rokeby interventions in this exhibition
left me cold. Actually, let me reiterate: the first video 4-screen panorama from
Venice, which I had already seen at Pari Nadimi Gallery within a set of similar
video canvases some years ago, is actually of flamboyant beauty. The complex
hierarchies of time that their video superimpositions and subtle edits involve
remind us of past works by Jim Campbell, but the choice of filming
Place St-Mark indeniably adds to the piece the impact of a reunion
between video technology, art history and the Renaissance masters.
This would probably be the true "artful" moment of the show if a dozen
Jim Campbell wasn't following it. But alas, the two "digital poetry" installations
that are presented in the next two rooms bored the hell out of me. I understand
I was supposed to be wowed by the lacanesque experience proposed
by The Giver Of Names (from 1991, but I think this one was the latest version,
the one I had seen at University Of Ontario, because there were many
older versions of this piece), but the problem with this piece is that
it offers no clue to the viewer as to understand how the work actually
functions. What is the catalogue of the text, and how is it connected
with visual data? What sort of data? Actual object forms, colors, frame
topography? Most of the babbling oozing out once you have installed a few toys under the video scan sounds like old age dada cut-up poetry. Why these words? Why this rigid tone? Why not select random-breathing-singing-choirboy (that's a standard edit in digital voicing)? It's an installation about toys, man: make it more fun! As
far as an artificial demonstration of the connection between interpretation and language, it didn't convince me. I doubt we are yet ready to reflect the conscious with computers. This is a simulacra of the artist perception of singular forms and colors and it is all inscribed in the way the artist have connected his words to the shapes that they should respond too. It's all about programmatic.
It's the artist attempting to exercise hiw own "Lacan" retroactively and I'm not
getting a bit of what is going on through his head. His last piece here, N-Cha(n)t (2001) (which won an important price at Ars Electronica) offers a much more interesting premiss: 7 computers are working their way through pronunciating random words out of a similar catalogue than used in the precedent work, until they all "fall" on the same words which they keep in memory and re-use until the text pronunciated it at unison between all computers (hence the reference of the title to both computer chatting and religious chanting). But things get a little complicated when a microphone is added to each monitor, giving the opportunity to the spectator to "disturb" the piece (which he will do willingly, without really understanding what is going on), and a system of video codes is implemented (the main visual aspect of the piece: an image of an ear with 3 possible hand gesture), apparently communicating to the human intruder how it is about to receive this new extraneous data. The major problem here is that the main intriguing aspect of the interface, the fact that different digital "gleaners" slowly but surely come together
when they have amassed enough of the same data, rarely reach its optimal state
because there is always a lunatic (I was the first) that will come in and disturb, confuse, interfere, destroy the whole thing ! So what the visitor is confronted with is actually an even worst chaos of intellectual cut-up poetry as offered through the previous piece, and to really experience the magic of the whole thing would seem to indicate for a secret visit at 2am when even the museum guards are asleep. Interesting idea on paper as it was, I wasn't satisfied by the product as a work of art. I suggest Mr. Rockeby to turn the Rubik Cube's of his investigations once again and find a more audience-friendly elocution, something that would make his art bang-obvious from the first sight-ear-ing.

Speaking of art that comes with a bang, Jim Campbell is probably the most
successful part of the show, probably because his art respond well
to the museal context. This man is like the Monet of digital art. Most
of the works here (there is a retrospective worth of them) take
the format of small to medium-size canvas made with small to large
leds (or sometimes, tiny bulb lights). These assemblage of lights are used
as gigantic pixels from which emanate video data, often in the form of shadows.
There is a blurry evanescence that accompany a good portion
of the works, hence my link with impressionism, but other works
explore effects of light and memory through different means.
Though at first sight many of these videos seem to use the same trick
of filtering leds and bulbs, there is a striking difference with each work's approach to the media, except when the work is presented as a series. Most of the video signals are utterly simple: people walking, people near a church, image of water at sea (in a very beautiful homage to Wavelenght by Michael Snow, second
work in the show to quote the same source), flickers offered by the contours of a landscape (in a work strangely reminiscent of Dan Flavin). Some of the later works offer less breezy subjects, like automobiles or cyclists, but their
forms are stretching light to a degree where images are turned into abstractions. Another canvase even offers 12 images of war protest superimposed, and even though you can hardly decipher its subject, it just "feels" like it is a work about protest. There is something to be said about the meanings of light and colors in these works. How much visual info does one need to get before the memory strikes on a recognizeable figure. Did the message in its pure light format first affected the viewer on a subconcious level? The images of Jim Campbell seems to stand at that flicker moment between definition and the unintelligible, between familiarity and chaos. Asthetically, their effects are rather titillating. Some of the old works by
Jim Campbell have much more anecdotal agendas but are equally fascinating. Here, a copy of the bible hangs on the wall, with a speaker reading parts from it (the entirity?) in a digital voice. The piece is called I Have Never Read The Bible (1995), and I suppose the artist has indeed created the gadget to read it at his place. On a more humanistic scale, the emotionally-filled pieces are the
two portraits of the artist's mother and father, which flicker between complete definition and blinding blur, as a translucid crysto-liquid screen is lighting on and off over them. Personally, though I know nothing about the history of Campbell's family members, I thought the piece formulated a strong case for the
topic of death and the evanescence of memory. You have to see this show !

Subtitled Public (2005) is a work that presents itself as an empty dark room.
If you happen to be alone in the museum, it will take a while before
you grasp what is happening. A system of surveilling censors is
throwing projections of words unto the viewer. Words that
could pervertly affect the perception of strangers of your persona
if they happened to read them. Indeed when other visitors start
coming in they usually giggles at some of the most embarassing
etiquettes. The technology involved is so genuine that it is hard
for me to grasp how this system work, especially now that I know
that, apparently, the work is able to tell when one person is touching another,
cutting off the subtitle effect on any spectators that are in physical touch with
each other. How does he do it? And why does he do it? Some comment about
the current civilization of surveillance, and the no-intimity of government
civilian files data. But why does the surveillance trick stop when we are touching one another? I am amazed by that part. Is it proposing some form of humanist intervention against the cold dead realm of technological society? Or is my reading too naive? The important aspect that I retain from this artwork is how
much it is immaterial and quasi-invisible. And also how it hardly functions with a single member in the audience (just like when playing the original Pong from Atari). I am not sure if this is the great art of the future, but I was marked by the originality of the artist's approach.

The final piece in the show is from an artist whose art we rarely
have the occasion to see, but whom I find have developed a couple
landmark projects in the realms of everything contemporary. First
he was a big step in the use of interactive videos and broadcast
performances in the 80's, and they are works of his from this
period that I have seen described for as long as I have read about
technological art (that would be around the time of Images Du Futur
in Montreal, late 80's), but that I have yet to have seen in person.
No one seems to want to show Kac, and that is probably due to the controversy
that his more recent art brought up. That is, the "transgenic" art from the 1990's.
Genesis (1999) is another "classic" that I had waited to see for many years.
How could this work not have brought controversy? It used Bible quotes to transform
them into genetic bacteria, almost as if aiming right at the religious integrists
and saying "see how I defy your God!". I mean, this is only one facile way to
read things, it actually could be very religious art, but, you know, there has to
be a signification there about using the Bible, and I think using the quote had the effect of making criticism bang its head on the walls trying to decipher
what the artist truly meant (when the work first came out, that is). What matters here is that life have been synthetically created. A new form of fluorescent life, created by gene imititating the shape of a Morse Code which itself transferred from the Bible this very unenerving phrase (you are allowed to giggle, or if you are like me, to be moved): "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth". Hmm...Kind of a relief to hear this when I count all of the earthworms I walked on inadvertently during the rain. Thanks God ! But Eduardo used this sentance quite...err...literally by creating the gene for it. The gene of dominion,
you could call it. And this is what brought some tangible controversy in art symposiums from defenders of ethic in art and science, or simply from anyone fearing the biological impact these little experiences could have on the world in a billion years. I don't think I'm overstating when I say that there's been quite a few debates about the art of Mr. Kac, but that was many years ago. A lot of dust have fallen since. And now, lucky spectator, you are finally getting the chance to see in person this famous work that had been hiding in I don't know which vault for so many years. Are you saying that this was in Langlois' Ex-Centris basement all this times? Damn...I live 2 blocks from the place. So there, what you see is what you get inside this work: one curio with the actual bacterias inside, a large circular projection of them on the wall, a fluorescent print of each the french, the morse code, and the gene version of the Bible text on the walls, and a discrete computer presentation offering more details about the project. If this is not the very advances of technological or science art, I don't really know what Langlois could have come up with to end the show in such a clash. It is likely many viewers will end up leaving the exhibit rethinking this last work over and over (to the damage of the other works featured). I'm not sure art involved so much about the mystery of life itself or God since the time when artists were anonymous monks. My favorite personal question: Is our life also an artistic experience? There is also the political aspect: because of the very recent application of genetic science, the work
is also inevitably framed by our fears of the outcomes of such technology. Now it is merely fluorescent skin, but what about tomorrow, what genetic harm could a lunatic create over the terms of a moonlight? Kac already responded in interviews that science merely exists to serve man and that it is the responsability of man to decide of its outcome. Amen, but we know by reading the news everyday that they are quite a few desperate of these men out there, and seeing applications such as genetics already appear in art, must means that their applications in other less entertaining domains might not be so far. The piece actually looks quite banal on a first sight, but it holds the potential of bringing numerous reflections for many weeks after you've seen an exhibit. And that is what is great about it, because if you don't allow yourself these kinds of reflection, than what does the work really offers visually but the playfulness of halloween-design contact eyelenses? This was all fluo yogourt, folks ! From the distance of medical application, this art could simply be a genetic joke !! So there is a prevalent humor to the work, but that is gloomed much by personal beliefs and values. Is Genesis supposed to be austere art or humourous? Is it a religious art piece? Is the artist appropriating religion from an atheist point of view or is he himself entangled in doubts and mystery? This art in the end brings much more questions than it answers.

My verdict on E-Art is that you should definitely
visit this exhibit and observe how behind the gadgedtry,
Langlois was able to enhance his collection with quite
a couple decisive pieces from the contemporary
arts of the past 15 years, pieces from artists that people
probably know less simply because they have been poorly shown,
but there's some serious chunks to bite here
for any wannabe-thinker about the future of
aesthetic research (as long as you remain cautious
to the idea that this advancement must
or should always pass through improvments
in technology).

I still want to add: is it just me, or isn't this city proud
to have someone like Daniel Langlois?? Behind all my critics of the show
I am amazed by what this man has done to this city (Montreal), and
as a collectorhe must be one of the most original in the world,
as this exhibition proves. Any artist should feel proud to be part of it,
and I hope we will be able to see more events like this in the future.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: the website for the show, featuring images
of most works and more, is here.

PS2: I just realized that there was a second title to
the show, "Communicating Vessels", but only
after writting all the above.

E-Art: Communicating Vessels
Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke Street West
September 20-December 9, 2007

What's Your Motif, Baby? (Autumn 2007)

2007-10-22T03:33:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I'm not there.

That's the title of a film I saw last night, but it really
resumate why and how I've been abandoning blogging for a while.
I just ain't there. I think I need to let things go by a little
until the artworld is able to charm me again. For the moment
I am less interested by art when I see it, than everything that
surrounds it. I am obsessed by the behind-the-curtains
of how we've come to set up and stage these things that we call art.
In most of what I experienced recently I could resumate it in 3 words:
absurdity, money and aggressivity. Most art piece now that I meet now
I see it as a bully. Yes, it is a big bully and it's trying to kill me.
No, seriously, what art piece of recent is not seriously attempting to damage
the significance of the viewer? Which curator, gallerist, or artist even
care about the viewer anymore? The artworld is a wheel of its own.
There is no dialogue, everyone does their own little thing, and festivals
happen, a few critics write about them, and most people are obliveous to all
this like curators are obliveous to, say, whatever some Cedric Caspesyan
would have to say about their darn PR on some forgotten blog. It's
this whole "this is MY program, baby" culture that I am growing very wary of.
I don't understand why art happenings are not curated by a mass, by vote,
by groups of 20 people and more. I am tired of events that are programmed by
the same unique voices since so many years and are presented as the official
cultural voice representing how things of cultural significance and
impact shall be remembered within a certain geography because that is
all the civilization in that same geography could ever afford: the means of selecting 3 or 4 candidate artkings or artqueens who will decide what goes on in national museums or important national-international art events for a certain number of years.

This is why I don't feel like writting about what I feel anymore.
I have nothing to say about Mois De La Photo, Festival Du Nouveau
Cinema, and all other-related art events I have attended in recent months.
It would be just pointless. Just like criticizing the museum
shows that I've seen. The people in these institutions practically own
these places. They've been in seat since years and years.
Who would pull Marie Fraser away from programming the Month
Of La Photo? Or...Why??!! "Oh so you didn't like our program? Oh that's ok, Marie will surely have some fine good ideas next year". (please understand I use Marie as an example, I don't mean to attack her personally).

Actually I'm not trying to accuse or make anyone lose their job.
It is perfectly understandable that people keep their position for
a long time. It is in fact much more weirder when you see the employees
of a institution or festival completely change year after year
(Festival Du Nouveau Cinema was almost all new people this year).
So there is comfort in recognizing the people sometimes, especially
when they are able to recognize that you've been a longtime client
of their events (they rarely care in subventioned Quebec, to be honest, but in New York people in a gallery will recognize you while there is no way anyone at Montreal
Skol gallery would ever recognize me as it's filled with newbies every second year,
and who cares what shows I've seen there back in 1988? Or what show was there anyway?).

So I'm not really sure what it is I am after here, I'm not about
people loosing their jobs more than concerned about developing stages
where more voices are jointed to decide of cultural events AT THE DEVELOPMENTAL stage. Sort of a pre-fest public vote. Let's see who the public think should be invited in your biennial? Or what theme it should be proposing to the invited
artists? "Expand" your jury. Make it 12, more than 5. And gosh, make it hard for artists.

Because indeed life is either hard or easy for artists these days depending of how
they manage to interact with the very few people in power to show them in institutions. In Canada, if a curator in high position likes you very much, they
can make your show travel a dozen place, and make you sound like a much more
important artist than you truly are, simply because there is that little means
to get more of curators in place (it's all government paid jobs, follow me).
It's a bit dramatic when you see these choices being made by people you are,
for one simple non-significant amateur, able to judge as having little to no pertinence, this decipherable by them being constantly out of loop or a couple years late with the criticism the same you-amateur has observed happening in other spheres of the world. It is scarier sometimes when you learn more about the people on administrative boards who decide what curators will be in place ("what bank did you say you work for, again?").

And then there is art, and what the artist is trying to say...
More importantly: their motivations. Because in the end an artist
always speak about his/her motivations.

Some motivation:

"I want to be loved, AKA Please make me popular: I think I'm good and deserve it, and what I have to say hopefully have some importance because my survival depends on my need to feel pride"

"Pouah: I'm the best, period. Just admit it"

"Darn I hope I'm going to make a lot of money...so tired to live in a pithole"

Sometimes when you're lucky, it's:

"I hope this art responds to this art or issues well. I need to tell this (these) artist(s) that I admire him (them) very much (I'm the groupie, afterall)"

"Wow, this is amazing, people should see this"

"hey what the fuck, I'm only here to have some fun! Wanna play?"

(I deleted the other motivations, it was just grotesque).

It's like this: I find art to be a pretext for hidden artists psychological
motivations. Maybe things are interesting because they're not so obvious,
but I feel a profund distrust of most art proposals these days.
I think I'm hitting the nail of sincerity. I don't know.
My personal motivation is probably "hey! I'm stupid!" these days.
But I just keep asking myself "Why do they do this? Why did they do that?
Why?". I think the Why has drastically replaced the What and the How in
my recent interpretations of art, and the answers, or my presomptions of these answers, got most of the time too boring to give me reasons to write about it. Luckily I'm not up to the Who yet!!! Most people you talk art with will run to the Who fast enough !!! "Ahh...Rembrandt". I read press art articles that are mostly about which personalities attended which art fairs. And that was the only substantial art articles they had in a while (La Presse, last thursday or friday, article about Frieze and billionarism). We should call these festivals the Who Fests, they're not really art fairs. Art has less and less to do with them. The last Art Review magazine had hollywood-star looking Pierre Huygue and Matthew Barney on the cover: it's all about the Who now.

So, Who's Cedric?

Cedric's been to New York lately, and yes, has seen quite a few art shows.
Mostly 3 names made the season: Richard Serra, Keith Tyson and Mike Nelson.
I'm purposefully namedropping because that is what you want. So dig the rest
of the info yourself, you don't need me. Chris Offili had also 2 sculptures that will stand out, I think.

I've been visiting about half of Mois De La Photo in Montreal (selected merely the best spots (that is, architecturally, I meant what I said about "art surrounds"), but also many were showing old stuff I already saw, so I skipped). Grosso-modo: thought too much of it was pretentious no-cinema cinema. Cineasts pretending to be visual artists, (or vice-versa in the worst cases) and curators obliveous to an age-old experimental scene in cinema. Mind you some of my art would have fit perfectly with this theme, in a Sam Taylor-Woodiesque way. But I think they all forgot Sam Taylor-Wood there. The Video Room in St-Henry looked like an imaginary great gallery space, but was quite uncomfortable and cold as a cinema.

Speaking of cinema: I missed a good portion of Festival Du Nouveau Cinema, though I had bought the festival pass as usual (I attend this festival since 17 years!). I had
a week of medical exams. My creatinine is going up too fast. I even missed
the technological art part of the fest which is usually my favorite part
(but now curated by people I never heard from). No films this year at FNC impressed me as much as David Lynch's "Inland Empire" that everyone hated a couple months back. I kind of hope it was a bad year just to feel less sorry for not having wholly been there. I made the mistake of trusting the big names and they all disappointed me. The surprises were all from the newbies (find the list of this year's fest's winners and you will see).

Artefact at Ile-Ste-Helene (Montreal) was one of the best art moment of the year. A lot of the art was ordinary, but the show had guts, felt ambitious, and set in fantastic settings. All future art shows should look like this one.

I visited a couple other places too. Who wants to hear about Renoir in Ottawa?
Didn't think so.

I'm in the process of finding a new place to live, pending on what goes on with my health (I feel somewhat in shape, there is just some checking to be done, but no
doctors are running to call me so I am guessing nothing too urgent).

I sometimes comment on Edward Winkleman's blog these days.

I'll be back,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

How To Get Away From Bruce: "Elusive Signs", Nauman's Retro at the Montreal MAC

2007-08-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

Bruce Nauman, "Helman Gallery Parallelogram", 1971

Hey, wow...Haha....I LUV the gigantic pic effect for this article !
Totally fits the idea. Let's leave it like this.

Hello,

Summer is nearly off and though the weather wasn't always nice it has been
quite a passive-contemplative sitdown for me.

I am totally off the arts, and in fact, the biggest question since I ever had
health problems was not going to be wrether I would survive them or not, but if the visual arts including this blog remained anywhere pertinent to my new life anymore. I feel almost like I just entered a big psycho-destabilizing religious sect, and I don't know if I can describe this as developing a sentiment of absolute vacuity (maybe they did lobotomize me during my last operation?), or if I've just recently been feeling some sort of self-conscious, anti-or-above-intellectual plenitude the way a buddhist would. Have I become suddenly wise, or numb? I just know that something's changed. It's as if art had been this evil obsession all this time and getting a little away from it made me breathe for the first time in years. Or maybe I felt like my own ghost crossing across 1000 of exhibits with everything seeming so irrelevant to some post-living immaterial and imageless state of reality. Having faced death. Having met the edge of one somptuous dark cliff. Then stepping back, turning, and decide "ok, now, where it is that I haven't yet been in this picture?", and embrace this opportunity of living everything anew, but from a different angle (at least different as possible when tainted with back experience). I call it my zombie phase. Sometimes I get the overwhelming sense that I simply turned into a zombie. Or maybe Cedric's not really there anymore, maybe somebody aka me-with-no-name just took this body when Cedric left it, and I'm receiving all this confused info from the past that I'm struggling to comprehend. Who am I, now?

So I've been lurking towards the technology world recently, trying to understand how basic things work. I feel like a child about to return to school after a very long obscure summer, or not even yet: like touching electricity for the first time. I just crave at understanding machines. And so because so much of visual art has become dead-obvious to me, maybe because I've experienced a little too much, it's been less titillating lately.

For example, I felt the exhibit of Bruce Nauman in Montreal to be for the most part (80 per cent), utterly boring. The way I perceive things, Nauman will remain an artist that will have influenced many others, but that will become less important for future generations when other artists will have outdone or outplay his way too blunt and simplistic approach to artmaking. I mean, "The True Artist..Revealing..Mystic Truths" (1967) was a fantastic pop art pun (wisdom questioned by beer-bar aesthetic) that resumed a good portion of his art for many years to come (the Mac justifyingly hanged this show-stopper right at the entrance wall), but re-establishing the ying and yang in all spheres of langage and non-langage possible for me sounds like a futile exercise. Why not just grasp Ying and Yang in the first place and keep it to Ying and Yang?? Or why not address 1 + 1 = 3 for that matter? The neons are just flashy and fashionable to me, sometimes looking like a shop had invested in the Keith Haring aesthetic. I was more intrigued by the amount of power boxes surrounding the works themselves, and this idea of enclosed, directional energy filling the glasses, but this technology involves a whole other kind of ying and yang
that goes beyond anything attributable to human values.

The performance videos are desparatly autistic, and would make sense as an art project if a dictionary or some kind of registering of these videos enveloped the project, but as sparsed pieces they just bubble up in fragmented perception of space
that are just frustrating to me so much etheir space or body remain constrained and unsoluted by their stubborn limits (them, very resolute). I bet all the Nauman videos could have fulfilled one nice, form-explorative, dance choreography, and I'm sure somewhere someone already thought of that, so why beg my patience through 3 or 4 pieces presenting one gesture each, over 60 minutes? Is idea best expressed when underlined 60 times or repeated in eternal redundancy? Is the human condition the condition of stupid not being able to grasp a simple artistic (formal) fact?

Nauman's sordid clowns are neat, but again they are deconstructions of things I've met elsewhere. Stephen King's "IT" clown for that matter, was way more scary on paper. I mean, effective enough to grasp an antagony of clowning and pain, or evilness, if that's what you fancy. So Nauman, like so many other artist, is merely extracting the narrative juice of everything to the core, to present us the conceptional bones of reality like dead insects in a laboratory. I've been growing wary of this approach, especially when it concerns art made past 1980. But the art snobs... I guess they just like to take their bath dry. I don't know. Can't you guys see how facile it all is? Coming up with your life's achievment by playing a violent clown stabbing at an old joke for 2 minutes in an afternoon?? Why does the artworld always seem soooooo unaware? I am shocked by the whole unawarenes of it. I bet 500 pounds that Nauman never saw an early 80's concert of french punk band Bérurier Noir when he made that Clown Torture piece in 1987, that so many consider his best piece ever. And way before, Leigh Bowery, and then, etc... Violent clowns will be violent clowns, which means they remain cool, but don't come and argue how someone invented the wheel because you've never been interested in anything else than reading art books, which must represent the most culturally filtered artefacts ever. The other video installation, Anthro/Socio, was interesting as a lyrical piece, as if it had been a micro-opera by Ligeti or Penderecki, some sort of tense drone made out of human screams, and as an interesting metaphor about human's primal scream, I find less to speak against it except that it's again a blunt punchline almost entirely bereft of sensibility so much the atmosphere is animally agressive. Is this really about human condition? Probably more about the pre-psyche "Need" and how it fosters agression to the more elemental beings. But in life, a true horrendous whine can't last that long without a relief, I believe, and that's what this art doesn't offer. Here, the only thing less subtle would have been a loop of a newborn being slapped by the doctor forever.

At any rates, the one thing that Nauman did that really makes him (in my opinion) interesting and "landmark", if you will (trying to reason here how someone can become the most important artist alive, after reading the polls), is the architectural structure. All these 70's self-enclosed variations on minimal spaces and lighting presented as early forms of installation art, which represent exactly the path someone should have taken right post the 60's minimalist movement. Nauman took it in almost uniqueness. Of course, these "built galleries" look over-simple by today standards, but for their times they remain spectacular, and again the idea that a "register" of those spaces could exist, sort of a language of basic architecture, would sound to me as a dramatically important event in art history, as most architects would have not ventured in exploring their theories through human-size, "livable", experiential settings in non-commercial avenues, and that is where art can proof its pertinence in that it's not only about the ideas, but about the "theoretical" things made with these ideas, and Nauman, throughout the dole redundancy of his neons, found the time to realize these large slabs.. of pure space, what I find absolutely amazing. Indeed, the only redeeming retro of Nauman would consist of at minimum a dozen of those spaces, but it's hard to imagine the museum with the available rent to present them (they are about 4 in the Dia Beacon basement, next to "Mapping The Studio", with all its zen gone awry dead-cold ambition).

Finally, the Hundred Fish Fountain (2005) in the retrospective looked neat, just totally out of place with the rest so much it is baroque. Looked like fishes decrying an agonizing ecology, like if lead forced them out of the water. Expectably about the only work my mother enjoyed. Comes as an irony in the corpus of an artist who had been striving towards taking the "Fountain" out of the urinal all his life, concentrating so much on the idea of language as a pure object.

So toodles for now, I will probably finish my Biennial review before Christmas 2007, but I'm just going very slow as I've been caught by other interests.

Right now I am attending the World Film Festival, with its array of moodish and over-sensitive films, where the avant-garde would seem to linger.

So these brief suggestions goes to anyone with more heart than reasoning:

Travelling With Pets by Vera Storozhevais is the most beautiful film yet seen, a touching portrait of an orphan woman who's given a chance by destiny to live her life anew again, starting from scratch. For the image of a bride travelling in her own wagonette in the empty russian scape, totally worth seeing.

I Served The King Of England (Obsluhoval Jsem Anglického Krale) by Jiry Menzel, is an intelligent film standing on a fragile line between humor and drama as it recounts the events leading to the czech bourgeoisy loosing everything after WWII.
Events that have affected my family personally, so I might be biaised, but the crowd really seemed to have enjoyed themselves judging from the warmth applause at the end.

Ben X by Nic Balthazar is another fine, crowd-pleaser film, about a man suffering Asperger Syndrome (which by the way, also afflicts the person writting here, aka me, but that deficiency never seemed to have restrained Gary Numan from becoming a pop star, did it?). Poor Ben either was stroke really hard or didn't receive the good help that I had, but in this film he is having a real harsh life apart from reaching 80 in online video-gaming (demonstrated by magnificent computer sequences). His story will certainly move a few hearts, and if you pay attention there are surprises to fulfill you until the very end.

I also suggest The Orchard, Eduart, Beaufort, and strictly if you enjoy watching old torture intruments being used, Opium (Diary Of A Madwoman), in the same festival, but I'm far from being done yet.

I wrote an opinion, in french, about the situation of canadian film festivals here. Basically I sort of give in to the idea that TIFF (n Toronto) had about the same amount of time than other festivals and they used it to become THE most important film festival in the Americas, and I doubt we can only inflict that on sponsoring choices from the government. So my idea is let Montreal keep the art Biennial and make TO where the films happen. I might even attend the TIFF in the future if action in that sphere dry out in Montreal. Most of it is entertainment anyway. "Have a ball - Let me piss"
kinda drill.

Allrite, then, see you in a month, or less. It's September after all, might be wandering on computers a little more.

Cedric Caspeyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Delay

2007-07-20T14:05:00.001-07:00

They'll be a delay for my Biennial review. First I decided to complete it (I'm about halfway through) instead of publishing it by parts. Then it's summer, so I tend to get away from the computer.

Freedom is the reason I don't work for the artworld, or in fact have anything to do with it. ;-)

So I'm sort of taking slow boat rides to China all summer long.

Cheers,

Cedric

(nope..I'm not "really" in China....but I might be somewhere else much closer but as exotic...wanna come?....uhh?....What?....oh....you're working on your largest installation ever....Hmm...I see.... well, maybe another time....oh that's allright, don't worry, good luck with fame and all that...)

Hello, Baby

2007-07-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

I'm back from my year-with-no-art hiatus, at least for 1 or 2 posts.

Fact is I couldn't resist attending the Biennale De Montreal 2007, and soon here
I'll propose a countdown of everything that was shown there, from my least favorite to favorite artist (all bias, as always).

The reason I'm doing this is that I thought the biennial had been badly covered (with exception of Sarah Milroy), with most articles mentioning the same names over and over in over-optimistic call-outs, and more often than not sounding like promotional PR. This is probably due to the fact everybody knew the crew behind CIAC had been having a hard time getting funds in recent years, with rumors heard here and there that the event could move out to Toronto, or in the worst of scenarios simply call it quits. God, are we really at this point?

In my usual manner of waiting after the shows to talk about them, so as to make sure only looney art fanatics would ever come across this post, I thought that the countdown format would force me to talk about the good, bad and ugly at the biennial without embarassing myself with the guilt of bending too much towards this or that aspect, or making the mistake of only naming the same names as everyone else.

I should have a few entries ready before the end of the week, then I'll edit
the post back with the new ones.

But you all want to know first: Was it a good show?
Yes and know, that's the point. It was really the middle of the road.
I heard people who embraced this edition as the best yet, others who were telling me it was all crappy undergraduate stuff. It was neither, but maybe somewhere in between. More soon.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

The Art Of Living (With An Hernia)

2007-05-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

Hello,

Just a couple words to make sure everyone knows I'm still alive.

I'm in Montreal now. I passed my regulatory scans a couple weeks ago.
I'm happy to announce that no traces of cancer were found in my body !!!!!
My next scans are in 6 months but I should be fine. ;-)

On the other hand there is another lesser interesting news: I developed
a large post-incisive hernia. That's kind of a bubble in the shape of a small football that is in the middle of my belly. It's large enough that my clothes don't fit anymore, and to make everyone think I'm fatter than I actually am. I'm unsexy as ever (though mine is half as large as in the picture in the link, + it's more upper-middle the belly).

Is it painful? No. Is it dangerous? We'll need to compare with my future scans
to see if my muscles press against vital organs: if yes, than I need to
be operated again pronto, if not, then my doctor suggests that I wait 2 years
to make sure cancer never show up, so then I can decide to be operated
for aesthetics, but unfortunately with my type of hernia, it can come back
after a failed operation. Whatever, as long as I survive this. ;-)

I am pretty off the artworld these days. I've been kind of in an "all art sucks" mood. I practically haven't visited any exhibit this year apart from the big clusters. I do have a choice for "best artwork seen this year yet" (last year
was Tara Donovan's landscape with plastic cups): I've just seen the Ron Mueck Retrospective in Ottawa and I gotta say that his large sculpture "In Bed"
is some of the most impressive art I've seen in recent years. And it's not
because I suddenly fall for neo-master-hyper-realism, it's because I felt a strong emotional connection with that image of the anxious women in bed. They are just so many women I've known being portrayed through this sculpture. Women being concerned about being pregnant, or worrying about their child, or being abandoned by their lovers, or being concerned by the health of their friends. Or maybe she's in the hospital bed herself? The sensation is "universal" enough that it could also be attributed to man, but somehow, the white bed setting is owned by that woman. It's the quintessential expression of an emotional state: it's a cliche but the true emotional beings I meet, at least the ones whose emotions are transcribed through their bodies and motions, are much more often women than men. Especially young women, before everyone dies around them and they get used to it. I especially love the way that we are meeting "In Bed" from the size of a cat, because I think that its this physical play of gravity that enhance how much the work is marking us. This artwork is simply perfect from every aspect.

Speaking of "emotional beings", one of the thing that has been attracting me a lot lately are "nice people". It's bizarre, I have a hard time finding them among the art people. Usually they work in a cafe or a library, or they picnic on the Mont-Royal, and seem to live very boring lives. Nevertheless, as I've been feeling like I've lost a few brain cells since my last operation (I literally feel more stupid than ever, or have a harder time concentrating in my intellectual activities), I
tend to be less demanding of conversational stimulus. Not like if Rosalind Krauss would have ever found me interesting anyway. ;-)

I think the problem with the art people, just to make sordid generalizations, is that they easily accuse you for being ignorant or naive about the smallest details. Maybe I'm wrong, but there is a social pressure in the artworld that I don't feel a necessity to cope with anymore. Or maybe I've just been unlucky. Since my health problems, I've also realized that so much of art was about surface. In fact I don't think it can easily escape surface, I think that it is its major concern, purpose and pleasure: to explore surface (in the sense that "In Bed" would have left less of an impression if it had been a 12cm sculpture, let's be honest about how superficial we viewers can sometimes be). So I started to think "hey, what's the whole high-heels attitudes about?? You're going to snob me over a Donald Judd??? A Jeff Koons?? A Barry Le Va??? About Ikea simplicity or junk on the floor???". But I don't want to talk about that right now. That's the whole point. I'm living through sort of a non-art year in 2007 to see if I can find like the ugly duckling my space elsewhere, see if I can tumble in places with open, welcoming arms, without self-contemptuously engulf myself in complete nullity.

Basically, I've been attracted by 3D animation a lot lately. I feel extremely deprived from not fully understanding how these systems work and plan to take courses in the matter, if not simply serve coffee and bend in large salutes for any qualified director in this domain. I get the impression that people in the animation world never completely left childhood and that's probably where I fit. Not that I don't reproach a movie like Happy Feet to be awfully mainstream, but I do believe that its 3D design is state-of-the-art, and that they are things I must learn from that before moving anywhere.

That doesn't necessarely mean that I'll ever be a creator myself (I keep pushing my projects back, though I believe some of them could be fun), but for the moment I just need to make sure that I'm playing in the right playground.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS (Addendum): Oh BY THE WAY, and to follow with the title of this post, there is an excellent new piece by Annie Thibault standing as part of the "Deconstructions" exhibit of recent canadian art at National Gallery in Ottawa (and which will last until September 3, 2007). I forgot the title for now, but it's mainly two walls filled with agglomerations of thin plastic "cells" (of various sizes) containing a vast array of bacteria cultures (elevated from pieces of rotten fruits, I'm guessing), which makes the whole sort of a "living" painting which change colors over time. The way that the "cells" are spread look rather like the museum is suffering a strange infection, but there is a candy-eye beauty to this installation that envelops it in ambiguity. There is also a small video in a bubbled-shaped monitor that adds motion to the structure. All in all, this exhibit serves to support my claims that the art in Canada (though I don't think Tricia Middleton is canadian, the exception here) is some of the best you'll find anywhere.

Better Watch Out For The Skin Deep

2007-02-18T08:38:00.000-08:00

Hello,

this blog is down until further notice.

I will be off for a long trip in Arizona.

I've been taking time off from everything.

I haven't done any art visits but local stuff since my last post.
That's about 4 exhibits since 2007. And only 1 that I actually enjoyed.

I'm still participating in other art blogs, but 2007
will bring big changes for me, and I'm taking time off
so I can, first watch how my health is doing, than decide how
these changes should unfold (basically, decide if I'm quitting the arts
for a while to pursue activities in the sheer entertainment world).

I know there is one exhibit slated later this year that I don't want to miss, which
is the Richard Serra retro, so if I visit only this one in 2007, I should be happy.
We'll see. I doubt it will be that good, as there can't be that many monster works
entering the Moma space, and Serra is mostly good because of the monster works.

As far as Autumn 2006 retro that I promissed....Arf...hang in there, will you?
Maybe later, maybe never. My fave was Huang Yong Ping at Mass Moca, which sounds exotic but that's the only big trip I made with Dada at Moma last autumn, and so because I found Dada quite "ordinaire" (contrarely to popular thought), the rest would all be local Montreal stuff, with the gallery that rocked the most being Skol, presenting a couple immersive installations by Cooke-Sasseville and Brendan Fernandes (by the way, their last from January was pitiful). Also, Serge Murphy at Oboro offered a chance for me to realize how much I changed view on this artist's work since 15 years ago (when I truly hated it). Now I call him a baroque Richard Tuttle by way of Michel Goulet, the way that he groups his sculpture as installations. Another big big standout was the Karilee Fuglem installation at Quartier Ephemere that looked like a cathedral made of silk. And the Cristof Migone retro at Uqam, organized by Nicole Gingras, was worth a museum event, so much that things were a little crammed in the spaces, but maybe that's a relief when I've seen so much whitewall emptiness filled with quite mediocre works in the past. I should also mention that Uqam catalogs are IT. They are fabulous. Finally, the Matthieu Beausejour installation at Vox ("1 1/2 Cote-Des-Neige") was a fresh good laugh, in an otherwise austere programmation for this space since a while.

Did I missed anyone? At least those are the ones I remember from top of head
(I'm not mentioning the bad stuff.). Oops...I forgot the Gong Potato work by Rodney Graham which is another big fave of last season. But I should mention that the Rodney Graham retro at the Montreal MAC left me down a little. I thought it wasn't half as great as the AGO retro from a couple years back, very probably because it concentrated on recent works of the artist, and he's been a little too anecdotic for my taste lately. I still remain curious enough to follow his whereabouts. The Neo Rauch is not mentioned as I had seen most of the works in a few different places before.

Ok, have a nice season.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Ref: Skin Deep

Gimme My Life Back!

2006-12-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

This blog is off until I'm in shape enough to visit exhibits I really want to see (or until I have news abour projects of mine).

I still need to give a lot of time to the rewarding activity of....sleeping, but that's the aftereffect of nearly 10 hours general anaesthesia from my last operation which is hitting harder on the system than expected (but truly not painful at all, just annoying to feel tired after 3 hours up). My problem is I should be exercising
but I'm too lazy to start up. I think I'll be seeking "encadrement" at this point.

Whatever was 2006 in the arts, it was not meant for me.

They are a few blockbusters in New York that I might be visiting during the holidays or in early January, depending if I'm accompanied. I forgot how many of these have the name "Picasso" in their titles but that fact is beginning to tap on my nerves.

Expect a general autumn review before the New Year, but it will be mostly local stuff, and don't be surprised if I have missed your show. In fact it's tough luck
if I have seen it.

It sounds like I totally abandoned blogosphere, but truth is that if I assembled all the written commentaries I keep expelling every day on other people's blogs, simply because I desparately crave for some interaction, I think they'd be enough to fill a whole book. I don't think blog is dead at all, and I don't want to seem like I just followed the general peak wave and went down with everybody else: fact is they are excellent blogs out there that I would have a hard time coping with their disparition, and I just feel my "way" of blogging for the moment is replying to them and learning from other peoples' input.

If I really want to launch a discussion, I think I'll be doing it through some art.
That's the direction towards which I'm heading.

Se you later,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Wherabouts

2006-11-09T05:34:00.000-08:00

I'm late on reviewing a couple stuff:

- Festival Du nouveau Cinema

- Mass Moca

- a bunch of exhibits seen around town

I still sleep a whole lot, and I'm trying to get a social life back
so I've been accepting a couple invitations to parties lately.
I'm sort of seeing less art and more music shows too, so maybe I
just should start reviewing them?

Anyone catched Lady Sovereign?
She's the next hip hop star.
I love her, she's like a new Tony Basil.
Well ok, more like an early Eminem, back
when you only heard two tracks from him and thought
he was fun before discovering he was actually some sad pathetic
hatemonger. Though SOV hates the comparison (hear Blah Blah),
I think she provides the best answer to Eminem's relent misogyny,
and in general to the darker hip hop that's been killing the genre
since too many years (at least mainstream-wise).

It's all teenage stuff (she's 21 as we speak but all this was done before),
but she's talent, and I keep coming back thinking about her dead hamster in Love Or Hate Me, haha, poor thing, anyways, judge by yourself:

Hoodie

Love Me Or Hate Me (indeed isn't it the question) (Love the homage to Tetris)

Random (club anthem if you ask me)

Blah Blah (hmm..great track but please SOV don't yet turned into another pisser)

9 To 5

9 To 5 Remix

At any rates that was my interlude of the week,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Stuff Not Seen: The Grey Alley Cat

2006-10-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

This is bizarre night for me again as I am standing here
waiting for a dying cat to make its call.

I'll explain later, i'm here to change my mind.

I was just tumbling on my September art schedule and it got
me depressed for a moment.

Back in early September, I had no idea I was going to have
to cancel my trips for an operation. In fact, had I known, I would
have prolonged a quick stay in New York so that I could have catched glimpses
of the opening season.

In retrospect, here is the list of what I most deeply regret missing:

New York:

- Annette Messager's new installation at Marian Goodman

- Jessica Stockholder's new art at Mitchell-Innes And Nash.

- Joseph Kosuth at Sean Kelly (because it sounded like a little retrospective)

- Anish Kapoor's installation at Rockerfeller, one of my fave artist, but I doubt I'll be able to be in NYC before the end of this (Oct 27)

- Zaha Hadid: yep, I am missing the retro at Guggenheim. I'm angry if the Montreal CCA can't invite her.

- Damien Hirst drawing retro: very unlucky with Hirst as it's been two shows from him at Gagosian that I've been missing these past two years. He's not my fave artist
I must admit.

- Strange Powers: collectiv exhibit in a haunted apartment. Damn.

- Everybody Dance Now: seemed like a silly exhibit on dance videos.

- Jim Campbell exhibit.

Elsewhere:

- BGL new installation in Quebec, arrrggh.

- Rousseau retrospective in Washington, ARRRGGHHH !!!! Ok, this one I am gonna have to buy the book.

- Champ Libre in Montreal (the first one I missed).

- Early Japan Art exhibit at Pointes-A-Callieres, not so much something that I can't stand to have missed but more that I just feel very guilty to have procastinated so much about visiting it when it was on play during so many months prior its ending.

Since I was out the hospital, I had seen two art shows thanks to my mother helping me out, but today I was able to visit two other shows by my whole self, not counting the fact that I also went to see the band Mojave 3 yesterday, so I guess things are getting back to normal now. Basically, I am just here hoping this October 16, 2006, could be the first day of my life regained for the longest time possible.

Tonight, alas, I am missing the opening performance at the Festival Du Nouveau Cinema, something private that I had to get myself invited to (I hate these fla-fla
vip events, I really just wanted to see the art, and I'm still amazed that this was
reserved for the "special crowd"), but unfortunately, there is some stray alley cat around here that has been hit by a car and I've been looking for it all night.
He's hiding somewhere. This poor cat used to come to my door each night as I was providing food, but try as may there was no way I succeeded domesticating it or have it come anywhere near me. As of now I already take care of one stray cat, that was intelligent enough to let himself approached and invited in my home. I named him Rex because he is quite vigilant with other cats, a true warrior, a cat that was destined to survive. I am forced to let him out each night as he is used to life on the street, yet I am still worried that he will end up being hit on the streets. It's kind of horrific to just be here while a cat might be suffering outside but the neighbors and I have searched everywhere. The lady who hitted him said the hit was quite harsh, and in fact she was hoping to be able to let the SPCA finish him. In the eventuality that I find him with a broken leg, I will have it repaired. I will look again tomorrow.

Errr. what am I saying, not tomorrow, I'm going out right now again to try to find this cat.

So there you go, from tomorrow and on I should be at the Montreal Festival Du Nouveau Cinema, reporting here on what I see.

ADDENDUM: ok, the grey alley cat is fine. It is the neighbor's cat that got hit by a car but apart from a scratchy leg that cat is fine, is being taken well care of, and will more than totally survive. I need to build a little niche for the stray car as I already take care of one and these two couldn't possibly get along. At any rates with cats like these they can be hit at any times but they are used to being wild so I let them be what they want.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: remember me to pay homage to Giacometti some day.

PS2: Oh, the exhibits that I saw today were at Oboro and dazibao.
Maybe I'll write a few notes about them tomorrow.

The Museum Is The Message: "Sound And Vision" at Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts

2006-10-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

(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.

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

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

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

2006-10-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

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

Alive Not Yet Kicking

2006-10-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm alive and out of the hospital.

I feel a lot of pain now, my operation lasted 9 hours
(just to make sure they cleansed everything, I guess, but mostly
because I am a biological anomalia with my vena cavea crossing in X
with my Aorta and double renal arteries.)

Am I done with all this? Time will tell, and future exams.
With all the anti-cancer food I'll be eating I bet I'll
be fine.

To follow my previous post I am actually "extremely lucky",
because I managed to attend for a short 40 minutes the Rodney Graham
concert at the Mac last night (Thursday night) and when I mentioned attending
the exhibition opening I really meant Thursday night as I thought it was the same night as the concert (they used to do their vernissages on Thursdays at the Mac).
I mean, there was no way from the start that I could have made it for Wednesday. I was told by my doctors that if things went very very well I'd be out by Thursday night hence how I calculated this.

The Rodney Graham gig was so much more middle road canadiana rock
than I'd expected. Some very fine lyrics and a classic outlook, but I think
I prefer his older post-new-wave-folk of which he played nearly no tracks.
He did play the "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" song from his recent puppet project with Tony Oursler. A strong moment within a mitigate evening. I felt like the concert was up for the art crowd to judge how Rodney really is also a musician, but I think the second show Saturday in the context of Pop Montreal will suit Mr. Graham better (I don't think I'll be able to make it, unfortunately).

In concert Graham appears as moderate and unpretentious as opposed to what his art may seem at times. Though actually he must be the same in his art whereabouts since he always have been very translucid in explaining his work contrarely to a lot of artists.

I like the guy for sure. If I hadn't been so sick I could have as well asked him for an autograph just so that he knows he's also subject to groupies.

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

By the way I have received a fantastic art piece (mixte-media) simply titled "Cedric" (2006) as a gift during my stay at the hospital. The work is by Beatriz Valdebenito, the mother of a long friend of mine. It looks as if Guy Blackburn or Irene F. Whittome decided to go for total abstraction. It is also ethereal and minimalist, definitely emanating an hospitalish feel, including soft white bandage, and subtle figments of what seems like copper at the bottom of a 4-walled compartment in the centre. The artist won't tell me exactly the signification of everything, at least not for now. Don't know yet if I can show a picture of this, but you can be sure it will get a place of honor on the walls of my home.

The piece, though drastically personal, is in a similar vein
as this one,
which is currently showing in a group show at Maison De La Culture Notre-Dame-De-Grace in Montreal until October 15.

Here is the website for the show, that I will also attempt to visit next week, in the event that I feel better.

Hope all is well with you all,
I will still be participating in
a couple blog discussions around
as I recuperate.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

The Urological Year

2006-09-30T00:06:00.000-07:00

Well,

I'm being operated this week.

If I'm extremely lucky, I'll be able to
go to the opening of the Rodney Graham
Retrospective at Montreal's MAC.

If I'm normally lucky, I'll be present at the Tv On The Radio
show at National in Montreal (12 or 13th Octobre).

Than there will be Festival Du Nouveau Cinema
and a visit at Mass Moca later on. I have no idea what
I'm doing with New York at this point. I almost hope
it's suck season.

If I haven't written back to this blog before
the 14th of October, than there is 95 per cent chance
I'm not in this world anymore, but some angry ghost out there.
Unless my other kidney fails me or whatever and I'm
still being hospitalized but both these options are
statistically unlikely.

If you haven't seen me at Champ Libre this year or that new perfomance
festival Viva (both in Montreal), now you know why. I'm up
north taking jacuzi sessions.

If doctors can help me out I'm gonna win through this.

So long,

Cedric Caspesyan

PS: the aim of this intervention is curative, not palliative, so
you're not getting the wrong idea.

Why Is This Blog Dead? (Summer 2006 Recap)

2006-09-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

This blog will be dead until I am fully back to normal
healthwise, and it is not the case presently (though I generally
feel good) because I need to have some extra surgery done.

Well...I'll be living with one kidney from now on, it seems.

I am cancelling all trips this Autumn until January,
hmmm...ok...Well not exactly, I'll try at least go to New York
once, and maybe see the Henry Rousseau in Washington,
and definitely the Mass Moca, but that will be IT for
this year so you can all tell me if you see some cool art
because I will likely be missing it.

This past summer was pretty off too, though
I'm sure I've seen some of the great.

Rapidly:

I did a one-off to New York just to not miss the end
of DADA at Moma. I am not sure why I went. It wasn't that
necessary as many of the landmark pieces are already part of
american collections. There was the couple odd bits and exclusive
(the Kurt Schwitters), and a lot of rare pamphlets and booklets.
Overall I found the exhibit pretty didactic and historic. I wish
I had seen this when I was 12.

In New York I also saw the Nancy Rubins outdoor sculpture that looked
like a Chen Zhen, but that was it, I had to be back to Montreal quick.

Ooops, nope, I forgot I also saw the Maya show at Metropolitan, that
was nothing to compare with the Aztec show at Guggenheim from a couple
years, but still some gems from recent excavations. I really only went
thinking "I've seen the Aztecs, I must see the Mayas". Now I can't help
but think I should have gone see other shows instead that I now realize I will
be missing. Sob.

On my way to Cleveland (to get health advice, and by the way all museums
in Cleveland were closed while I was there, how very weird, like a bad omen),
I stopped in Toronto fast to see Angela Bulloch at Power Plant which wasn't
too necessary: they were selling the book of the big european retro that we
canadians are too poor to get travelled, and that was depressing more than anything.
Actually as a cross Dan Flavin and Xavier Veilhan I think this artist rocks but
one needs to see many pieces of her work to get a sense of where she is moving.
Even the main installation was a reduced version. Maybe the Power Plant is too small. The different "systems" which commanded each works were not described.
With Bulloch it's good sometimes to know how the work is made because it is often about its interface. Nearby, the drawings of Annie Pootoogook were kinda sad, but I was glad to see some folks from the great north take place in contemporary institutions. My favorite part of the whole Power Plant offer was in fact the documentary of this artist, because she sounded so removed (and dare I say, lost) from the contemporary artworld: that was refreshing.

In Toronto I also visited the extra small Andy Warhol retro, more like a large rich gallery show than a museum show, but it did include many of the early landmark films,
which was sort of to the point: for me this was a David Cronenberg show appropriating Warhol. I'm glad Istvan Kantor did what he did. I'm sure both Warhol and Cronenberg would support it. Otherwise that show risked too much to pass into obliveon.

In Trois-Riviere (Quebec), I saw the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit which was majoritarely stuff that I already saw at Mass Moca and Washington. Inopportune, the whole ensemble, is a major piece of recent sculpture history. Go see it in Seattle where it belongs, if you've missed it. The only new art for me was a hanging magic carpet thrown with arrows, and a couple majestuous fireworks drawings which would not pale next to Hommage A Rosa Luxembourg by Riopelle (well, they would, cos they're already pale, but you get the idea). I don't know if Quebec cared about this show but though it was a little short for how remote this museum is situated, I am proud that we had it, and Cai agrees with me that this place holds a lot of potential.

Also in Trois-Riviere, I saw the Second Bienniale De La Sculpture, which was my fave show of the summer. Nothing nerve-wrecking, actually, but some good samples of recent canadian sculpture, mostly of the strictly formal tendency (the show's theme was "verticality and horizontality"...wow...like we're back in the 60's). Even Michel Goulet (of course they were more artists from Quebec than anywhere else in canada, go figure...) was at his most formal, with his grillage of towers and chains somewhat deprived of the everyday connotations of most of his objects. I liked the little off-who's-who's aspect of the event, which is the result of half the works being selected from an open call. One local artist, Roger Gaudreau, impressed me with his series of suspended common fences sculpted directly from slices of a large tree trunk. Nearby was a gigantic drape (more like a cape) depicting the world map made with clothe tags. It looked like a large Alighiero Boetti but that was by Josette Villeneuve, another local artist. Michael A. Robinson's minimalist assemblage of stereophonic equipments looked like an early Alexandre Castonguay (except for the additional sound work and an accompanying video of redfishes in a bocal). Marc Dulude's sculptures of water vibrating on silicone tables felt up to date with the post-vaseline status of new sculpture, while Miguel-Angel Berlanga felt oddly out of place with his stuffed head of a buffalo. Both Alan Storey and Diane Morin did not disappoint with the intricate mechanisms that they put into place. Really a fine exhibit (in a fine, homely, mansion-museum like we miss them).

In Montreal, I saw Il Modo Italiano at Museum Of Fine Arts, a huge survey of contemporary italian design, worth seeing for its Bugatti and Ponti alone. The best Montreal exhibit of the summer if you've missed it. I also loved the Resider project by Karilee Fuglem and friends, which I had written an article about but it's forgotten somewhere in my files. That was mostly happening in a rented apartment in the far ends of St-Henri (there was a part at B-312 and another at La Centrale). Speaking of St-Henri, I visited the new most-majestuous gallery in Montreal, the Parisian Laundry, for a fine sculpture show (Archipel, made in conjonction with galerie Orange, which was itself presenting mostly wall works). Again, many older formalists at work but some damn good stuff (that series of cloned white tables of all sizes by Mathieu Gaudet, or an ambitous project featuring scales and beds by Michel Archambault). I hope this gallery delivers the goods. It took time and many student exhibits before I finally got interested. Than Pierre Bourgeault was up and around in a couple places, doing better in his Deacon-esque wood sculptures than in his installation at Quartier Ephemere, that left me totally dry (an ocean of salt blocks, what else could do). In the next room was the usual sound installation by Francisco Lopez and friends (I am saying this a bit sarcastically because he is probably the artist whose art is the most often presented at Quartier), this time a sound portrait of Montreal which you are "not supposed to perceived as a sound portrait of Montreal, because that would be lame, but more like a sound portrait of urbanity in general" (the press release translated in my words). Okidoo. The Treehouse exhibit at Saydie Bronfman Centre was cute but none of the works there can rival with the Treehouse Kit from Guy Ben-Ner coming shortly to this town. I agree that the forest framed by the Centre's windows needed an hommage, but I wonder why not invite the artists to present their works in the parc itself, directly onto the trees, instead of providing pseudo-"utopian" models. I finally had a chance to visit the CCA "urban sensations" exhibit which surprisingly covered more art than I expected, mostly, alas, in the form of photo documents (ultra-large photographs, mind you). It was fun to "smell" the city, thanks to a series of large perfume bottles. Finally, there was the Brian Jungen exhibit at the Mac, which I had seen previously, and which, for the amount of people it attracted, should have been bigger. Why was the last room filled with collection art??? (sacrificing the birdhouse and other works from Jungen???). Hey, hello, this is the MAC: you guys are supposed to command new works for the artist you are retro-ing. Maybe they did that one too fast: give it another couple years and a Jungen retro will be fastidious (hopefully). The MAC is also presenting Pascal Grandmaison, which seems to borrow from various sources, like Genevieve Cadieux, Bruce Nauman, David Blatherwick, recent Rodney Graham (whirling gems), I even see some Jocelyne Alloucherie, and so on, in his extremely clinical works which are for my taste over-simplified, bereft-of-humor takes on very basic aspects of form (specifically photographic). Some would call this a psychosocial, humanized version of conceptual minimalism but it left me cold (either the works are too theoretically blunt to offer me substance to reflect on ("my subject is boring, this photo is in fact a perceptual "screen", did you realize?"), or they speak of the precarity of human condition in affected ways ("beware my bubble the glass as I'm an antisocial fragile soul..")), but just towards the very end, finally there was some art that redeemed him, the quite cool abstract shots of border of shoes, to put in the same category as recent art by Wolfgang Tillmans. The best at the Mac was still the selection of music video-clips in the basement.

Well, that's about it.

Everything else, I missed (ok, maybe add to this a little stroll
for some public art on Mont-Royal street).

I will be back at the end of Autumn to tell about the little
I will be seeing this season (I'm sure this will include the Mass Moca
and Rodney Graham at the MAC).

I promissed the good lord to start an art career if I make it
through my health blockages (because somewhere I think I should've
but never did out of being too lazy and having too much fun watching
others do it), and it is probable that if all goes fine I will start
with a little something during the Rodney Graham show, because he has
been influential to me, and that would be sort of symbolic for me to start
just when he has his retro in town. Lol, I feel totally obliged to do this.
I mean, obligated. I'm right at this point now, totally on the edge.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: while I am absent from this blog I reply frequently on other blogs,
as I enjoy the passivity of letting others decide the subject of discussion.
I write mostly on Edward Winkleman's blog as I enjoy the activity there (many repliers), but I am sometimes on Simpleposie (will be back) and other places.

Requiem Borealis

2006-07-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Well 2006 is not my favorite year yet.

I lost my grandmother last Thursday. I was the last one to see her, 40 minutes before she died. She had asked me to open the windows in her hospital room so she could see the mountain. I feel like she made the decision to leave, she wasn't in a state of urgency when I left her, rather very calm. And she had told me stuff, messages she wanted me to provide to the family.

There's a lot I would need to say about the circumstances of her death and here is not the place. She was 91, and she entered hospital 2 weeks ago for an operation that never occured. She was otherwise healthy so I can't help but feel the health system in this country is negligent and we are dying because of it.

I am in the process of composing a small requiem for my grandmother, because I know
that of all persons in the world she would prefer that I wrote the crappiest music myself than hear the bestest of grandiloquent symphonies.

I am taking time off the blog (as usual this year) but I do reply to other blogs to keep my mind afresh. I had written a full review of the exhibit Resider in Montreal (3 exhibits) but didn't find time to polish since the hospital events in late June.

I'll be back at the end of the month.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Where does it end, when does it begin

2006-06-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

Today I saw a mini-car (not a brittish Mini but I forgot the names of those cars that look like half VW) sporting the name of the gallery Simon Blais, one of the largest commercial gallery in Montreal (their gallery space is actually quite average but they have an impressive stair entrance).

If I remember correctly, that was one of the first gallery that opted to move to
Mile-End, a pseudo-industrial sector in Montreal (actually featuring a lot of normal apartment streets), that first started to gain popularity with the art community in the late 80's and early 90's because many cool montreal musicians started living there, changing their lofts into illegal temporary concert rooms.

For some reason, and from word to mouth, everybody thought for a while that the
future art headquarters of Montreal would happen there. I remember a time when Bain Matthieu represented a symbol of that move. It was around when sculptor Trevor Gould had arranged with his class an art intervention in the once abandoned building. The Bain has since become the residence of a dance company but is offered and opened for many art events, though the interventional aspect of the early shows lost their meaning.

Then Clark Gallery moved there, a Montreal gallery that holds a certain importance
for the art community because it offers a membership workshop, and from there a couple other sparses galleries added up. The latest is one remarkable move: Articule
Gallery are going independant again (they once had a space on Mont-Royal that was relatively remote from the Montreal art scene), abandoning Oboro, Dazibao, and other friends at 4001 Berri to inhabit an old shop (or was it a restaurant?) at the corners of Fairmount and Jeanne-Mance.

A much less drastic move than with Clark, Articule's decision
to get away from the strict white cube and embrace a window shop charm reminiscent of Queen Street, Toronto, or the recent La Centrale in Montreal, is still a significant one.

Is it finally happening? Is Mile End, 10 years after it was announced, slowly revealing its appeal for the rest of the art community? Is the "second Belgo" that was once idealized around the Gallery Clark quarters a tangible future possibility?

Is the fact that you meet so many local artists when you go drink a tisane at Cafe Esperanza a sign that this is the place now where people want to be?

I doubt it, seriously.

For one, all the cool musicians that started the Mile End trend are now moving to live in the Gay Village. It is the new "secret cool spot" of Montreal Arts (go figure why artists need to constantly re-invent them). The new artists hang out in gay pubs, while leaning on towards the east on Ontario and Ste-Catherine they are fine spots opening (some already opened since a while) for concerts and art shows (it is still more of a music community at the moment). Even a second Public Bath was turned into a concert hall if you move a little further.

Second, the Mile End gallery spot is yet too far and lonely. I am sure Clark Gallery keeps a strong clientele because of his workshop, but it must be harder for them now to get visitors from outside that community. Whatever people think, it is badly situated. It is a far walk for anyone not living around it. And without wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, visitors are most likely, still at this moment, to wish to travel there solely to see something at Clark. But I'll need to admit: I am guilty myself of visiting this gallery much less frequently since they have moved on the far end of De Gaspe. I always think: "if I'm going to take this ride, it must be something I feel strongly attracted to see", and on that concern my expectations with Clark might have levelled to degrees that would be unfair to all my other gallery visits.

Third, La Centrale and Dare Dare are two noticeable Montreal galleries that have taken decisions recently to move independantly from any art communities, moving to places they thought would better fit to their individual purposes (fashion district for La Centrale, and fucked up druggish public zone for Dare Dare), so this lead me to think that the Mile End position of the next Articule is purely coincidental and entirely unstrategic to any market or scene: they merely wish to escape the cube and embrace the pittoresque.

I think what is happening in Montreal is that we're moving away from a centralization of a visual art community. There is no real markets going on here, galleries mostly subsists on government grants attributed in regard of their mandates. So the real need for them is to reflect these mandates the best possible, and these are more and more about confronting the standard public with contemporary art (since "experimenting with art" doesn't mean much anymore), and not much concerned about conglomerating artists in places where they can really exchange.

How many artists in Canada have you heard lately that told you they were more interested in surprising the unitiated with their art rather than truly address themselves to people who know art and have an experience with it?

I almost feel sometimes like artists are disappointed if I make the long ride to see their public piece and realize that I am not the total tourist they expected.

Articule are far from being the first to declare that their reasoning behind their move was that they want to attract more of the standard people from the street.

The new galleries might are opening up in the least likely of places.

I used to enjoy being a 20 minutes walk from everything, but the Montreal gallery world is definitely being dispersed, and from now on, wherever you decide to move and live in this city, you are going to be a major bycicle ride away from a couple gallery spots (if not between each galleries).

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: Gyorgy Ligeti died this week (12th June). I tried to find a song of his that I recorded in my late teens with a chorus of 5 women. That was supposed to be part of a theatre play that never occured but I have the demos somewhere and they're fun.
May the great spirits bless him.

PS2: Speaking of theatre, the Fringe Festival is on in Montreal. I missed the two last editions of this event, but this time I am intrigued to see Chronos, a 4 hours ambulatory piece, in which it is said that the main character is the spectator. The play start at 6 pm or 9 pm on both Saturday and Sunday night at 2158 Delorimier (only 25 per cent of tickets are sold directly at the venue). The play includes an eating session. It is in french.

Spring 2006 - Art In New York And Around (A Recapitulation)

2006-06-10T18:25:00.001-07:00

A little late with this but I'm still busy and without
a portable.

Dear Onlookers,

I have managed to visit quite a few shows (about 70) in my recent visits
to New York, Washington and Philadelphia. I actually had to make a second one-jump visit to New York because I was going to miss a "legendary" retro of Donald Judd that I had not seen listed anywhere in the usual gallery lists because it was happening at Christie's.

Frankly I was glad that the temperature was generally cold and wet.
Rain goes very well with art visits, and they are always a little less visitors.

Let me just cover a rapid overview of some of the art that I saw since a month
in these couple categories (these are NOT reviews, you won't see much mentions
of specific works):

(ps: COME BACK LATER WHEN THIS MESSAGE DISAPPEARS IT WILL MEAN I WILL HAVE PROVIDED LINKS TO THE SHOWS)

THE BAD/BORING SHOWS:

Antoni Tapiès (Pace Wildenstein): It's not that it's bad. It just didn't move me. Paintings of antique symbols, loose body parts, traces of figures and animals, but mostly handwritten words engraved within large strokes made with earth and/or of colors and textures reminiscent of earth and sand. Sometimes it looked like an aestheticized (decorative) version of a meeting between Cy Twombly and Ana Mendiata. I'm sure it will sell. (See the show here)

Early Basquiat (Deitch): First in 3 shows of Basquiat that I've seen (read below), this one was absolutely awfully filled with ridicule hand-me-a-minute kiddie drawings, as though Basquiat especially made them to laugh at the art market and see who was going to buy them. I suspect that in truth, someone else actually dug up all his crap notes and sketches and encased each one of them in its own canvas. Really bad and demeaning to the greater art of this artist. Art of the street? Show pictures of actual Basquiat graffitis instead. Thanks. (for the moment this show has been hidden, which is usually not a good sign. See a press poster here)

Felix Gonzales-Torres (El Barrio Museum): this exhibit had its cool moments, like a video of the artist seemingly having sex while whispering the name: "New York, New York", and a few collage-poems poster pieces that the viewer could take up from piles on the floor, but generally it just looked like a tiny didactic exhibit of the type that would accompany a larger museum retrospective. Even though it was announced that the exhibit was only covering the early years, I was surprised to discover merely 3 small windows with press clips and biographic stuff, and about 7 small works dispersed in 2 rooms. I mean this is less than you get in a Chelsea gallery exhibit and they call this a museum. The curators seem to think that it's a good idea to have the visitor stand above a window display and read the press clips written in the tiniest typos for an hour. Can't you just print them in a book at this point? I was highly disappointed: Gonzales-Torres just deserves better. (the museum only offers a boring press release online, so instead, for two shots of the best works, go here)

Samuel Palmer (Metropolitan): It's a sacrilege perhaps to admit that I was utterly bored by the small darkmoodish landscape drawings of Samuel Palmer. The pre-surrealistic ones were daunting for their era, but somehow it didnt fullfill me. Much more gloom than lush, these works only served to remind me that artistic skill doesn't mean that the art will be interesting. Or maybe I just didn't get it, but the Met have this tendency of writting up explicit wall panels for each work in theirs exhibits and this time it seemed so redundant from one panel to the next that I rapidly stopped reading. I wonder now if the art was really that bad or if it was more the blandness of the presentation that discouraged me. (view images from the exhibition here)

Bill Henson (Robert Miller Gallery): First exhibit I ever saw from this apparently important australian photograph artist, but I wasn't impressed by these post-David Lynch scenes of people (mostly young girls) standing or lying in near total darkness. There was a definite cinematographic tone in these photographs, but somehow, they looked more like fashion photographs taken in pitch dark than anything remotely Caravaggiesque (ie, of any artistic splendour). The obscure micro-lanscapes could please to some, but they reminded me that the only reason why I submit to David Lynch's dark romantic cliches is because there is a narrativ envelop that sustains them, which hereby was lacking and made everything seems pointless. Maybe the work is meant to be an inquisition of these apprehensions that I had watching them, maybe it's all that self-conscious, but it just felt too forced and artificial. Sorry. (see portions of the exhibit here)

Grey Flag (Sculpture Center, Queens): Hmmm... I usually much like the shows at this spot, but this time it was sort of disappointing: a conglomeration of semi-artstars (Gabriel Orozco, Helen Chadwick, Liam Gillick, etc...) presenting art of undergraduate quality, under the pretext of a very vague theme concerning the middles of ying and yang in all things. Unapologetic apoliticalism. Sounds great, huh? Well, not when you get 3 small fountain-like, priapic sculptures made of plaster by Chadwick, next to two boring painted photographs by Orozco, and a whole floor filled with annoying party pink sparkles by Gillick. They are blogs to get lazy on them, you know? Don't do it in art museums. Than you get a film of a rising sun by Tacita Dean and a similar document of lebanese rising suns by The Atlas Group, or some other film of fires in an industrial furnace: I guess they were all rejects of the Day For Night Biennial exhibit? (see below) Allen Ruppersberg spreading tons of post-it notes about how to rearrange his art collection could have been funny, but mostly they were parasited by the interior decoration collages that they tried to elevate, these way too reminiscent of Richard Hamilton to feel original. The only good work, Kelley Walker rearranging the Centre's wall bricks vertically, was not enough to save the show, and I actually oblige myself here to not count the poignant documentary about child sex abuse in Asia by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, because I thought that piece was tragicallly misplaced. Really, a bizarre show (thanks to Paul Pfeiffer and Anthony Huberman for hiring Seth Price to write an upsetting press release not mentioning any artwork, actually a prosaic thingie written a few years ago). (see a few works from the exhibit here)

THE OK /CORRECT SHOWS:

Christian Holstad (Daniel Reich): This exhibit had been a hot mention in New York for the past two months but it wasn't up to the gossips. The artist transformed an abandoned Deli on 3rd Avenue into an obscure fetischist-bondage shop (some handmade leather clothes hanged in very low lighting) adorned with a couple goofy sculptures like a giant green plush spider. In the basement there was a secret backroom (I think this was meant to relate to gay culture, but that was much more confusing than obvious) which contained very loud noise techno coming out a tan machine (these giant cylinders with neons that look like instruments of torture). Unfortunately, the use of a tan machine (intended here to be a climax) had been seen recently in art by Nari Ward, but I must confess that the artist succeeded at instauring a glauque ambiance and that is why the exhibit merits points for its generous
share of theatricalities. Beside the apparant first-glance humor, some closeted, unpronunceable desires and emotions seemed to evanate from this installation, emotions as dark as those portrayed in the excellent film Dealer (2004) by Benedek Fliegauf, also making plenty use of the metaphor of tanning machines. (read a descriptive press release here. Alas, no images)

Robert Watts (Leslie Tonkonow): early conceptual art of the type that detained on contemporary arts and made so many artist sell their junk because they had idiot morning-coffee ideas about how to present them. But wait a minute...At least here we get the true spirit of the Fluxus era, before this artist moved on to make chrome copies of african sculptures, which, if you can forgive how appropriative they are, are indeed prescient to Jeff Koons. Unfortunately, apart from a couple rare laughs, I just wasn't moved by anything, not even his ambitious project of attempting to patent every art terms containing the word "Pop". I guess it reminded me too much of how conceptual art was so often about signature instead of what it was supposed to be: clever ideas. And I know somewhere along Mr. Watts wishes to critique that (baseballs signed with big art names, or throwing markers at paper targets, some early pieces here that recalled one of his late work, a revolver with a bullet entering a lamp bulb), but... The best would be to bring the better pieces here in a larger retrospective of conceptual art that would serve to put the nail down for good on an era that believed too much that the governing of ideas in art meant the suppression of applied skills and craft. (see some of the exhibition works here)

Georg Condo (Luhring Augustine): Sort of like if Philip Guston or Carroll Dunham decided to go classical with their cartoon aesthetics, Condo is presenting here mostly portraits or nudes of people deformed by his surreal madpop palette that totally defeat John Currin in their unconstrained grotesque. Some of these are truly nightmarish, like they represent sad-faced monster-people, mutant victims of very dark genetic experiences. The "Jean-Louis' Mind" painting is a stand-out, with its re-reading of cubism provoked by the facelift of a deformed clown. There is not anything here I would put on my wall (you really don't know where to laugh and where to be scared watching these), because I'll admit this stuff is a little too wild for me (ok, am I the new conservative now?), but it was fun for a 20 minutes visit. (see the exhibit here while you can)

Basquiat Heads (Van De Weghe): This exhibit presented exactly what the press release said it was going to: many paintings of heads by Basquiat, a recurrent theme of his. Or not really a theme, these are not exactly portraits, but mostly a recurrent sign. A format. A method. A pretext to paint. The paintings were fine, but in fact, totally predictable, as I had seen a couple of the best pieces elsewhere already. I'm sure the fans liked this show but I left thinking that I wasn't emotionally or intellectually attained in any degree. What they retained though, is that cool anti-conformist aesthetic familiar with Basquiat, that would make any of the works here look well-situated in an east-village punk or avantgarde jazz club (I just get this constant mind image of Basquiat listening to a lot of music while making these.). Maybe what I mean is that they were paintings to bang your head against rather than to watch.The best Basquiat paintings were going to appear in another show (see below). (see some of the works here)

Ceal Floyer (Gallery 303): This artist is selling a blue balloon with a tiny projected light on its surface for 25 000 dollars, probably thinking her play on comicbook hyperrealism was a brilliant post-conceptual take on, watch your mouth, Lichtensteinian pop-art (when it was just a cute party pun), but the only thing redeeming in that exhibit (which also included a self-deceptive sound loop piece featuring an Abba sample) was the fountain video made with macro shots of sparkling water. This piece rocked for revealing some of the wonder hidden in the great banality of things. The exhibit was once again a proof that playing with the infinitely small and simple in conceptual art is a dangerous path that lead to a lot of presomptions about the value of quick reasoning, but that sometimes you happen to fall on that right idea with enough revealing subtlety to make a piece really work out. (try to see the exhibit here, but it is tricky, it will go back to the front page after a couple seconds, so you will need to find the artist page and than find the exhibit page of this artist slated in spring 2006, ok?)

Ashley Bickerton (Lehman Maupin): The second of two parts in a mini-retrospective (the other was happening at Sonnabend), this exhibit presented a variety of grotesque cartoon paintings presenting sleazy unnatural people sitting or gathering in pseudo-exotic settings (apparently they were meant to be interpreted as ecological warnings, but they just looked goofy), next to other works from sometimes drastically different periods of the artist's career, including mixte-media collages that looked like 3d glossaries of found junk, or big wall sculptures that looked like parts from imaginary scientific machines. It is the pieces from the latter category that I found the most intriguing, them from an earlier era. Extrapolating from Donald Judd without having anything to do with minimalism, you could have easily mistaken them for something else than art if you actually found them in unusual places, but yet you would have never been able to guess their function. These abstract constructions loosely borrowing from the aesthetics of security and survival appliances seemed pretty relevant with present post-apocalyptic social tenses. (see some of the works here (two pieces are from the Sonnabend show), but the best is to go to the official gallery website
and find the page for this exhibit. I cannot link it directly as it is all flash.)

2006 Whitney Biennial: Day For Night (Whitney Museum): It was thrashy !! I almost regretted having gone. It was overwhelmingly filled with bad or average "no-surprise" art of the youth. I think they're getting to show them too early these days. It was the victim biennial of the new "be a star now, die next year" market philosophy. I was already suspicious that there was a large number of names that I had never heard from in the exhibit list. The curators seemed to have preferred doing the same as what new collectors are trying to do: beating off the usual paths and try to seek cheaper art from the underground spots. But sometimes art just seems like it's meant to stay underground. Forever. It was more of a total "no future" spit pit this year for a biennial that is reputated for launching art careers. The best art here was either pieces I had seen (or at least heard about, which still add to a small portion) elsewhere, or art made by the older, established guest artists. But let's not be too harsh just for the sake of it. They were some good stuff, maybe 15 to 20 excellent artists out of 108. That is simply way below what it should be. I won't name anything as I wish to come back to this exhibit in a future post. (the site of the 2006 biennial is here but you will only see samples from the show and no images of insitu installations)

Jessica Stockholder (PS1): Just one large sculpture of architectural proportion by Stockholder, an artist whom I think has been a frontrunner of the sprawling aesthetic that has been recurrent in recent art from younger artists. I wasn't really put in awe by this new structure of her's, called "Of Standing Float Roots In Air" (2006), and made of numerous aligned, and suspended, plastic washing containers, filled with brightly colored electric cords extending out of them, among many other objects, but I was happy to finally see (again) a large piece by this artist, almost as if I had missed her art (she had a retro in 2004 but it was far and I couldn't attend). The piece here had the singularity of offering as sole position view for the viewer, a bird-eye's angle, so I kept wondering about how this sculpture was attempting to defy gravity by starting up from the ceiling as the base, and then going down in sort of a reversed climb fashion. Nevertheless, nothing unforgettable here, but a fine meeting between the domestic mundane and abstraction which is this artist's speciality. (get a small idea of what it looked like here)

Wilhelm De Kooning (L&M Arts): Nearly 15 paintings by De Kooning from the late 1970's. Apparently this is a reworking of the very first exhibit at L&M (than C&M), so the exhibit was meant the celebrate the gallery as much as the artist. The blobs and laces of De Kooning here are colorful and free, far from an early abex angst, but I like to interprete these works as being late. I'll go as far as to say that by this time they were made, they were merely decorative. It is quite plausible that they were in fact influenced by the dunes and streams of where the artist was living during this time (East Hampton), because they really looked like they could be representing close-up of sand, roots, and water, but the anecdotal intrigue that they would be micro-landscapes didn't bring anything perticularly stimulating for me. I'm not saying I disliked the show: I think the paintings look pretty. But that is where my problem lies: they look nice but not THAT nice, more like lazy-afternoon nice, more like cool cocktail-party background nice. Certainly not the best argument for the survivance of abstraction as a pertinent mode of communication. Nice, but not engaging. (you can see two samples of what was on show here)

Goya: The Last Years (Frick Museum): I had seen the film Goya In Bordeaux, which I think was about his latter days, but I didn't expect this exhibit to be filled with so many bland and banal portraits. Yes, I know, Goya is a sacred cow, and who am I to babble, but whatever, I found it hard to imagine Goya being sick and living through a bad comfort zone while looking at these honest but polite portraits of friends and family, or his late personal drawings that rarely approached the genius of his big series. They were, of course, a couple standouts, and you've all seen them in the brochure: the Self-Portrait With Dr. Arrieta (1820) was as sublime as can be, maybe one of the best Goya paintings ever (it's not just the powerful association of autoportrait and decay, but also how the picture transcended the altruism and compassion of Goya's doctor, like capturing your last erotic moment), then, the cute Man On A Swing (1824-28) was really coming out of nowhere in the drawing section, like from a surprise-cake (it made me girgle), and finally, the bullfighting drawings at the end seemed like the perfect conclusion for a career that had been so much riddled by anger. Alas, I wasn't moved by the tiny ivory paintings that were offered as a curiosity, and I left the museum thinking the exhibit was unfair to the artist as I could only remember the general tiredness, not physic (the portraits are quite firm, thank you) but artistic, of most of what I saw.(find the website for this exhibit here)

The Other Side (Tony Shafrazi): Tony Shafrazi does these huge exhibits that are very badly announced, like the gallerist wants the least visitors possible to attend. This time it's a pot-pourri of all kinds of big names from different eras since the 60's, brought together under the very vague themes of "subversion" (I suppose their main argument is that most new trends in contemporary arts begin with a subversion) and "decay" ("please hate my art because that means it's good"). Though I wasn't really deeply affected by any perticular piece, it was fun to discover some art I had never seen from some favorite or not too favorite artists of mine, like the "Male And Female" drawing from Mike Kelley (looked like an appropriation of two drawings made by kids or adolescents, male and female) or "Memory Ware Flat 29" by the same artist (a collage of cheap jewelry), or one of his more recognizeable stuffed animal, or a couple fun Untitled Film Stills by Cindy Sherman, or the very recent "Theory Of Catastrophe" by Malcolm Morley (ok, this one I have seen before but it is just damn good: an hyperreal painting of a truck accident), or the classic "Riot" by Christopher Wool (just those letters printed in large on white: I only had seen it in books yet), or yet another medicine cabinet (he has made way too much of them) by Damien Hirst ("Liar", 1989), or a fantastic "goldengunny" painting by Marylin Minter ("Bullet", 2003), or the best of the show: a prophetious image of Warhol from 1962 of a man falling down a building ("Suicide", 1962) . Far from being a truly memorable show, basically I simply enjoyed the fact of getting all this art mixed together on nearby walls without much apparent reason. (until the link change you can visit the show here)

Olafur Eliasson (Tanya Bonakdar): My first impression was: "Wow..... Quelle gallery!" He oui: Bonakdar have expanded, adding two rooms at the ground floor, and so they believed that the best way to celebrate this event would be to invite one of their best installation artist to create 4 new artworks. It was a fine idea, but as much as I usually adore whatever Eliasson touches, I was mildly disappointed this time around. It is just too easy to let yourself impressed by the fact that a work of art is physically large, or share the dimension of architecture. I mean to resist falling for grandeur and ambition when it doesn't bring the goods. And with Eliasson, this is usually easy to evaluate because most of his works are immediate: they attack the senses and in a minute you can tell if it is functioning for you or not.. His first piece here, a circular room with the shadow of a stream reflecting from a water pool was irrevocably weak compared to a similar water pool installation made by The_User last year. His other circular room playing with circling shadows of target circles (printed on glass) gave me the opportunity to realize what was starting to go wrong with this show: instead of engaging the viewer through his usually visceral, body-challenging experiences on perception and space (using effects of temperature or color, among other medias), here the artist was merely trying to conceptualize them, to resumate them in simple intellectual models, presenting the viewer a couple helpful, schoolish, easy-to-grasp lessons on the wonders of relativity. Well, thanks, Mr. Teacher! How neat and practical. How boring. The "geodesic" lustre in one of the room on the second floor, actually an homage to Buckminster Fuller, used light coming from inside its sharp angular motifs, to present yet another theoretical work that sacrificed on the visceral. Was this really the eclipse of a Buckminster Fuller, or was it rather representing the eclipse of Eliasson's creativity? In the end there was only one work that I really enjoyed: it was a pitch black room inside which you needed to stand a long time before being able to perceive tiny arrows of light flashing one after the other in all sorts of directions in a minuscule, almost imperceptible, light circle on the wall. If you dared to move on and open a curtain in the back of the room, you could discover how the little arrows were in fact pinholed from a large, hidden, neon structure representing a Rose Des Vents, like a giant shop sign, or an incongruous Dan Flavin, that flashed intermittently in any chance direction. I liked this element of surprise, but mostly, I liked the poetry of it all. It was like discovering a key, a map, a secret. revealing to you why you had felt so lost just a moment ago. It represented exactly what Eliasson was looking for in this exhibit: an image that best revealed the mechanism of human dimension. (make your own mind, visit the show here)

The Very Good / Interesting Shows:

Sugimoto: Malgré a certain austerity, this exhibit offered a blissful pelerinage down the memory lane of the works of one of our greatest photograph conceptualist Maybe I should have culled this show to the category below, but I had seen too many of the main series in previous exhibits to be able to let myself surprised: mainly, the Theatre series at CIAC in Montreal, the Seascapes series I forgot where, The Sea Of Buddha series in a group exhibit about buddhism, the Conceptual Forms series at Sonnabend, and a few of the Dioramas in museum collections. Theoretically, his suites surpass their documentarish outlook. They consist of irreprochable philosophical essays about hyperrealism, perceptualism, idealism and illusion. Though a lot of collectors would probably prefer to fill their walls with the sensual chic of the later conceptual forms series (they look like if Robert Mapplethorpe or better, Berenice Abbot had been a dada-surrealist, as their shapes caress the beauty of a panoply of mathematical tools), I still think the best of Sugimoto are his early series. For example, "Dioramas" is simply mandatory: really a visual art interpretation of some aesthetic concepts that were still recent in the socio-philosophic writtings of the time (through the writtings of french luminarists like Baudrillard). The photos, all shot in natural history museums, reveal how men, by recreating it through artificial means, idealized a concept of nature. The fun part is that because these photographs are black and white, we viewers aren't really sure at first sight of the veracity of what is represented (if they had been in colors they would have probably been too tacky to look real). It is the mental movement of jumping from one picture to the other that resolved what was so uncanny about them. This demonstrates how the series format is genuinely indispensable in Sugimoto's tactic. The "Theatre" series is another landmark. It pinpoints to an historical determination of mankind to build their own plato's caves: scrutinizing the singularities and craft of emptied cinema rooms, only identifiable through architecture, while anonymous film screenings are being reduced to mere rectangle of evanescent light. To demonstrate how theoretical claims of minimalism could be applied to everyday entertainment was a brilliant move. The "Seascapes" series follows from a similar idea, but launch us right into the middle of zen, with cold, formally perfect portrays of seas around the world. Again they question the identity of nature, or they simply demonstrate the philosophical ambivalence between similarity and difference. I hope this exhibit travels a lot because I think Sugimoto has a few elemental lessons to teach us with his art. (there is a fantastic website about the show here)

Basquiat / Dubuffet (Pace Wildenstein): Don't seek them elsewhere: the remarkable Basquiat paintings were all here at Pace. His flamboyant canvases are as colorful as Picasso or Matisse, but if you can dig through the doodly aesthetic, Basquiat also represents a visual art synthesis of punk, that is, an art that's deliberately blunt, nofuturist, anarchist, upset, quasi-puerelistic, added with tons of pop references and angry comments. These paintings are so wild and ferocious that the Dubuffet pale by comparison, suddenly looking overstudied and lacking in expression, but not too much, as the exercise of demonstrating Basquiat's unacknowledged affiliation with french expressionism is still convincing. Not that Basquiat was in any way influenced directly by Dubuffet himself (who did all these paintings in his latter days, while Basquiat did his in his early days (he died young as everyone knows)), because I don't think the two artists ever met. But somehow the show did help to historically link Basquiat's art with the early 20th century french modernists, a link that couldn't be more pertinent but not first-sight obvious when we see Basquiat's art shown alone. The best part of this exhibit was how each artist's works were inter-spaced with a work from the other, really in fact making you wonder if they had ever met, as they shared a very similar form, sometimes even similar themes and motifs, both using large canvases, and adorning them with series of doodled figures in complex agglomerations, often compartimented in boxes or squares, and of course, at times conveying political messages about the fate of urbanism. For a commercial gallery exhibit this one embraced the dignity of a museum essay, but simply put it was mostly an occasion to see many great paintings. (jugdge by yourself: look here)

Without Boundaries (Moma): many people critiqued that show of "contemporary islam art" (or art with islamist themes) at Moma for treating the subject too superficially. But I didn't read much of the curatotial text that day as I was getting tired from visiting the Munch retrospective earlier. What then grasped me from my very own superficial state of mind was that all this art accentuated heavily on craft and design, making plenty use of unattributable motifs (or at least, using motifs that I wasn't able to fill with any meanings). They were in fact many different approaches to making art featured in this exhibits: many works were political (women artists from islam culture dealt much with women freedom), others were purely formal researches (deconstructing essences of orientalism), while some were more concerned with exploring the mystics or hidden meanings of oriental symbols or calligraphy. Ideologically, the exhibit was moving in all sorts of directions, but what made the exhibit sucessful for me was the only thing that really unified all this art: the usually strong quality of technical skill. These artists are VERY applicated, and couldn't be further away from the usual junk-ladden and lazy aesthetic of much of recent contemporary western art. Yet, their art never sacrificed concept to dwell on pure decoration or abstraction. On the contray, craft here have been thoroughly intellectualized. Is this the sign of a new silk road to contemporary arts? I believe most artists here are names to follow . (there is an audio tour available here, but alas, no images....weird, huh?)

Anglo-Mania (Metropolitan): This was an exhibit of british fashion from the past couple centuries that looked more like a bal costumé. All the english decorative rooms of the Metropolitans were filled for the occasion with dressed mannequins, theatrical props, and special lightning that turned this show turn into a wacky wax museum's party. It was a short ride but worth the distraction from the usually austere contemplation that the other museum exhibits demanded. And what can beat an audio guide commentary by Johnny Rotten-Lydon? (hear a podcast here, alas, without images, but look back here later on)

Ilya Kabakov (Sean Kelly): At first I was disappointed by this traditional ensemble of paintings by master-installationist Kabakov. For once, one of his (their, when he works with his wife) exhibition looked like any other in Chelsea. But then I couldn't help but fall for these socialist russian sceneries revised by colorfield abstraction: they were simply too gorgeous. These paintings were in fact extracted from a huge installation of a fake museum that was a recent project of the artist, whom actually had been obsessed with the mediums of "museum" and "painting" since the beginning of this century. The point was that the paintings were supposed to be the creation of an imaginary missing artist (also named Kabakov) from Russia's past art history that Kabakov was curating. Sort of an attempt to marry a tradition of post-world war II socialist art from Russia with what was going on in the USA during the same time, reflecting on nostalgia and missed opportunies when the russians, apart from exceptions, had to re-adapt themselves to contemporary arts from the mid 1970's. Those large canvases, including a quasi-abstract tryptich that actually featured blurried decorative motifs of flowers, were mostly depicting idealized images of russian life in the countryside, interfered with large incisions, or irregular patches, containing layers of dark, flowery yet abstract, motifs of paintings spread in allover fashion, exploiting an aesthetic midway between wallpaper design and abex. They were completed by a selection of brand new "revisions" of some old drawings from the artist, in which he seemed to have wanted to synthesize, in large spaces around the main drawing frame, the pure gestural textures of drawing. It is in fact hard for me to decipher the reasoning behind this method. As I've said, there seems to be a mean to parasite and interfere with traditional art languages. But more importantly, it could be a way for the artist to make today the art that he wished he had made back in the mid 1970's (all the titles sports fake dates from the 70's), again, sort of desperately wanting to fill the gap of Abex in russian modernism. Strange. (the exhibit site used to be here but the gallery website seemed put down, but you can get some rare samples here)

The Garden Party (Deitch): This looked like Deitch had pre-scheduled their summer group show. But it was a little more than your average: it had a pertinent theme (rehearsing the erotic garden) and some of the work were created specifically for the exhibit. I am rating this exhibit high because I really adored some of them, like the head-burling,stroboscopic hidden fountain by Olafur Eliasson ("Anti-Gravity Cone"), or the promiscuous underwear chandeliers by Noritoshi Hirakawa (you were invited to take off your underwear off and attach it to one of the metal hanger coming down the ceiling), or the large elevated land piece in the back of the room that was offered for any visitor who wished to... roll down that hill (!) ("Untitled (Slope)" by Paola Pivi), or the series of in-the-flesh Venuses by Vanessa Beecroft. or a flabbergasting wall painting by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, or even simply the wish tree by Yoko Ono, filled with all sorts of secrets written by visitors. If not exactly a raunchy bacchanale, it was the delightful humorous show that we're used to encounter at Deitch, meaning that it was refreshingly filled with people from the artworld meaning to have fun and actually able to. One picture resumed the show for me: "5 Second Party" by Mika Rottenberg, who photographed a quick choreography of two person having a real harsh party on a sofa. Cool. (Go see it now: look here)

Hatshepsut (Metropolitan): A rare occasion to visit an exhibit of egyptian art about a precise era of the empire, which is the beginning of the New Kingdom (1479-1458 BC is Hatshepsut's reign). As any connoissors of egyptian art would expect, the art was granite pink, or limestone beige, austere and classical, polished and impersonal. There wasn't much to learn about customs of the era, as much of the exhibit concentrated on royal art: busts and bibelots, with fair portions of vases and jewelry. They were a couple seated Hatshetsup that were exceptional, much as the two large Sphinx with Hatshepsut heads. Black stone sculptures representing Senenmut, a great egyptian architect, in singular activities (including holding the daughter of Hatshetsup) were the most intriguing part of an exhibit that was a little predictable, but nevertheless executed with great care, and provided another opportunity (since Catherine The Great) to testify how women had ruled with great success in ancient history. (see a cool slide show of works from the exhibition here)

Wolfgang Stillman (Ps1): Unapolegetically "pure" abstract photography. I suppose some of them were just macro close-up details of objects, but you rarely could tell what they were (this show made me wonder if picking a snapshot out of nowhere blindly would mean abstract photography, but that is another story). The main room was lusciously filled with soft, ethereal scapes. Does anyone remember Billy's reddish scape in the third season of Six Feet Under? That looked like a Wolfgang Stillman. But how can you tell good from bad abstraction? Simply: this stuff breathes, it's soft, economic, even ergonomic: it would fit on your bedroom wall as much an on the walls of your local health centre, so much they are removed from the harschness of Stillman's earlier art. They sometimes look like the old V23 4ad sleeves from the mid-80's and later (and I must precise that though this sounds like a cliche to say, to me this is far from downsizing their appeal). The art in the other rooms (this is retrospective of nearly 80 photos) was more hermetic, focussing on explorations of "blacks" or other textures, as much as they presented "accidental" experiments that were meant to provide a link with the recent works. Some other pictures were figurative and seemed misplaced, like they were from another artist, but truth is that it's abstraction that is the "new thing" for Stillman. (there are barely two tiny images next to the press release here)

Jenny Holzer (Yvon Lambert): I picked this one out of two shows by Jenny Holzer. Most people would have picked the other, probably thirsty for some political juice about current events, but this one was a whole retrospective of her public text projections, presented in the form of large black and white photographs featuring written scripts (either personal or appropriated) that had been superimposed on architecture and landscape sites in the middle of the night. Thing is, regardless of all the babbles that Holzer feels she needs to exult, her topic remains "art", and by this I mean that it's through her associations of found texts and places that I find she is the most eloquent, more than she is when she just throw text in a gallery. Here, the ghostly aspect of these photographed spaces, mostly urban and historic, is surprising. She must have barricaded the streets to do these projects: there is barely ever a soul in sight. Almost as if it was the projections themselves that were the ghostly events that no one ever noticed at their time of being. Certain sentences, often of personal nature, thus become amazingly empowered through this method of sending them anonymously into free air. As if "shouting at the ground" was the only thing that really ever mattered, regardless "if it could hear or not" (Lamargi). Some of these phrases are dark, even sarcastic, others seem to personalized or interioralized space (as obvious in the picture of the words "My Skin" projected on a lake or public basin). The problem with Holzer's art is that it helps sometimes to know the origins of the texts she is projecting, and the functions of the buildings she is projecting them unto: why is she choosing these situations to happen? There was not much to explain anything at the gallery, you pretty much had to figure it out by yourself. Which made the scenes of the projections on forest or water seem the most powerful, because their meanings were less specific. Nevertheless, when extracted like this from the original performances, the photographs of Holzer becomes artworks of their own, bereft of any context. All you get are these words now, and how you respond to them, and I can only assume that the artist carefully selected them as such pivotal art statements for her projects before she went and enlarge them for the gallery. A truly amazing collection, for sure. I hope they are being published in a book sometimes soon. (samples from the exhibit can be found here)

Andreas Slominski (Metro Pictures): this exhibit was just plain queer, though you would expect anything from Slominski to be sort of ackward. The exhibit consisted of spraypainted colorful polysterene reliefs that looked like gigantic kid postcards. There was a definite christmassy feel to the experience as you gazed to the panoply of objects (like snow skis or scissors) that had been replicated and enlarged in foam before being collaged into loose associations featuring nifty decorative motifs for a background, like flowers or pin trees. What was that all about? This goes beyond pop art and kitsch. It's like appropriating child craft and magnifying it. Sometimes it reminded me of a "Mart-shop" window aesthetic, but I don't think this is about consumerism. I think it's just an original method of going back to the ancient surrealist theatre of the objects. Well done. (the beautiful website for this exhibit can be found here)

Guy Ben-Ner (Postmaster): the artist designed an IKEA-esque tree which parts can be demounted into many domestic applies, like a table and chair, or a bed. The exhibit of this meta-furniture was accompanied by a video of our protagonist (dressed in convenient shorts and costumed with a long, fake Crusoe's beard) demonstrating the practicability of his art. There, bluntly: It was an humourous but yet touching comment on urban survival and loneliness. It was seconded by an older video work that took the form of a surreal, again, Crusoesque video diary of the artist living on a tiny beach installed in his kitchen. That piece had cracking segments like lypsinching provided by the artist's penis. I had a great moment there. (I can't link the exhibit directly from the gallery website, you need to find it in their archives, but there are some images at the artist's website here)

Donald Judd (Christie's): Well wow... My first Judd retro. Actually the first retro of Judd in America in nearly 20 years. It was perfect considering what they had to offer, which means that if they have had bigger pieces, and less of the second-rate, smaller pieces that were obviously made for personal home consumption, I would have slated this exhibit in the better category below. I didn't know that high floors from a midtown skyscraper could look like exactly like an old school Soho loft, but here it did. And so the exhibit looked surprisingly respective of the environments where these objects had been created. The sculptures reflected many eras and approaches of the artist, including, cloned industrial structures, bright hot colours vibrating against metal, spatial inversions, additions, and substractions, easy mathematical suites, etc... Actually I wonder why the artist made unique copies of each of these work, that now sell at incredibly high prices. He could have mass-produced some of them, so much the art is functional chic. Is there a pertinence to their unicity? Or would it downsize the quality of the work if it had been overproduced? I kept asking myself these questions. Why not create art as a design multiple, or a piece of furniture? ("ok, we'll put the sofa there, and please put the Judd right here, next to the lamp"). Somehow I prefer to establish Judd's art as infiltrative, but I guess I am transferring unto him my own aspirations. In the meantime, I don't find the conceptual tricks in Judd's work much interesting anymore ("oh...look at all these slabs and how they each look differently depending of how they are angled in respect of your sight"). Nah...I really only like them because they still look sharp and totally upfront in the endlessly unadressed war between art and design, and art and architecture. Minimal, yeah, but sexy. (the website for this exhibit is here)

The Excellent / Fantastic Shows:

Cezanne In Provence (National Gallery, Washington): It was like travelling back in time. The small rooms, the way the walls were painted (a different color per room), the building itself, made me feel like being in the late 19th century salons. This was not yet a fully complete, retrospective of Cezanne, but it's the best they could do. Every styles of his were represented, as Cezanne had been travelling back to Aix-En-Provence all his life, until he established himself there for good. Ok, I'll be honest here: I'm fed up with impressionism. But Cezanne being that great Buddha of modern and contemporary arts, I felt sort of obliged to be marvelled by these compartimented strokes of blue, green, orange, beige and brown. I wonder now if Cezanne wasn't simply autistic. That would explain why his forms kept detaching themselves from reality (how he'd interprete them as abstract), and why he painted so many Mont-Victoires, which by the way, consisted of about a sixth of the show (around 16 paintings, but that is still a very low number for a show that focus on the region). The couple Large Bathers were the standout of the show for me, very prescient to Picasso. I mean, if your goal as an exhibit is to prove that Cezanne was way ahead of its time:...just show the bathers. Overall I seemed to have preferred anything that wasn't a landscape (the early portraits were perticularly fantastic), but they were a share of them too that were quite attractive, cozy and summerish. Among them, the Chateau Noirs series added the perticularity of being enveloped with mystery. I hardly could reproach anything to this show, I think they did the best they could. (there is a fantastic website on the exhibit right here)

Edvard Munch (Moma): Everything was there except The Scream (the one showing the artist actually screaming, which of course was stolen, but they were a couple lithograph variations and another painting sharing the title offered as replacements). The show was heavy on emotional vibes for me. Someone threw their weird look at me because I had a tear oozing out the left eye while watching a painting. Thank god it wasn't Artist In Hell ! No, it was Vampire (1893-1894), a painting that really doesn't show much except, well, two people crying, but it reminded me of a sad moment I had with my mother a few weeks after learning about my health issues (back in February). But I could have shed a tear in front of many other paintings here: The Dance Of Life (1899-2000) looked more like a melancholic farewell party, The Kiss (1897) gave a good demonstration of how people can consume each other through love, or I could name many other sad paintings, likeThe Sick Child (1896). It must be the way that each one of us can set ourselves in these representations of sorrow and despair that makes Munch so popular. He is like a dark Chagall. Whoever been inside a Chagall? Everyone has been inside a Munch. The artist once claimed that his goal was to express all the important human dramas (loneliness, lovesickness, sickness, lost of dead ones, getting old, etc). The middle section of the exhibit pretty much covers them all in one large room filled with the strongest pictures, or at least the most surreal and ghostly. His Madonna looks like a punk goddess, way ahead of her time. I didn't know the paintings from his later life too well, so it was interesting to discover his sexy homoerotic paintings of nude men, or his auroportraits that read more like soliloquies. The last two paintings, the artist on an operating table, and the artist in hell, was way too much for me, considering what I have been true recently. I left totally scared. (there is a pdf checklist here containing tiny images of every works)

Tara Donovan (Pace Wildenstein): a reflection on industrial waste and ecologia that spouses the form of a minimalist chef d-oeuvre, "Untitled (Plastic Cups)" is a gigantic landscape made of piled plastic glasses, and certainly one of the best artwork from 2006 yet, if not the best. It's ambitious yet simple, it's jawbreaking beautiful. I have written about it in an earlier post so there is no need for me to defend it any further here. (see the show here or here)

Candida Hofer (ICA, Philadelphia): I had seen many solo shows of this artist in the past, so it was certainly time for me to witness a mid-career retrospective. I am surprised that this doesn't come to New York. All of her great series (at least the ones that I know about) are represented: mostly, Kubrickian ghost libraries, or icey-cake palace rooms, or luxurious theatres and museums. She seems to wonder why people are building these places, and why do they look like they do. These are portraits of our illusions of grandeur, portraits of the man's ego or spirit (you decide) and how it manifests itself in the things we build and design. I think her point is strongly archeological. They could send some of these pictures inside a NASA time capsule anytime. Grandiose. (a press release and barely 3 tiny images can be seen here)

John Waters (Marianne Boesky): Ha ha ! Waters makes art about (or against) the artworld and the cinema world that can be as virulent as it is exhiliratingly funny. Most of this are photographic collage puns about certain cinema stars or recurrent motifs in american cinema. But the best works (I find) were the ones pocking at cliches of of the art gallery world, like his series of postcards featuring sentences that know too well what the gallery people think but won't say too loud (like.."Nothing is ever for sale here"), or the "Faux-Video Room" which got me knock myself against a black wall after I opened a curtain, hearing some dialog coming from behind (honestly the best video-art piece I've seen in a while!!). I loved also the picture of mr. Waters adding blockbusters video films in a bonfire. I think the gallery world fits him better now than his last couple films. I hope that he pursues these side activities because there is really something going on here for him, and the artworld needs the sarcasm badly. (very few images can be seen here)

Kara Walker (Metropolitan): a surprising show! Kara Walker had amassed an intriguing collection of old art from the Metropolitan collection that was mostly about african-americans, colonialism, and water, in an assemblage that served as an impressive outcry about the recent political turmoils surrounding the lazy help of the american government after the Louisiana Katrina catastrophe (the show was called "After The Deluge"), and how that shared already too much with america's "cultural heritage" of racist ostracism. Or so is this Kara's argument, but quite vigourously supported by her reseach material. She adds to this collection many drawings or cut-out paper collages of her own, many somehow prophetic as they also presented motifs of water and sea. You'd think this exhibit would be embarassing to every white american conservateurs, but those who expected gentle pro-black art were also in for a surprise. Miss Walker's art is akin to the neo-folk art of Marcel Dzama, in that it borrows from archetypes of expression to better accuse a prevalent decadence of civilization. What more can I say? She really hitted a hard nail this time. You go girl! I'm impressed. (see images from the exhibition here)

Richard Serra (Gagosian): Speaking of sea, Serra presented us a couple seas of steel at his new Gagosian show. This time he went for the multi-parts and the thick. One work looked like an oblong sanctuary as the viewer was invited to ondulate (walk) among elongated metal plates standing on their sides, at different heights. I think this was sort of a way for the artist to experiment the tradition of landscape in the third dimension, while still respecting his deconstructive minimalist origin. It's this connection with minimalism still prevalent in the work that forces me to seek zen interpretation that could be as well misplaced. You decide. Pragmatically, I kept wondering if the installation was safe because it seemed to me that these plates could fall down at any moment, especially if someoned pushed them. Imagine the domino effect! It was beautiful nonetheless. More than beautiful, it captured an essence of solemnity, almost as if the installation evoked archetypes of sacred sites: monoliths, cemetaries, or stones garden. The unity and heavyness of the material transgressed rapidly to the mental zone and the earth-like tones of the metal recalled the structures of ancient temples. Another work, presenting a series of large cubes of steel, made me wonder who and how they had install them. They look as majestuous as menhirs, like a contemporary Stonehenge. You don't need a specific god or religion anymore to feel enlightened. Mies Van Der Rohe said it first: you just need a basic structure. And Serra somehow and perhaps unknowlingly, is genuinely providing it. (some views of some of the works can be seen here)

Andrea Zittel (New Museum): one of my favorite artist ever, at least theoretically, had her first retrospective in New York, and obviously the curators filled the space the most they could to stay fair to the chronology of her main projects. It seemed a bit ackward at first to see her self-made designs presented like luxury objects in a museum, surrounded by guards, considering all of the post-hippy philosophy enveloping their creation (there is a nice slide show diary included to demonstrate the reasoning behind all of Zittel's art), but nevertheless, it was a moment of pure bliss to finally be able to see brought together all of her personal dresses, examples of her leisure stations, (which really are just small metallic cabins turned into jacuzis or listening stations), or the more austere and practicle model units for living spaces (kitchen, bedroom, etc...). But the objects in her art are not the only ends in themselves, and may sometimes seem drab or unartistic to the newcomer (though her shit pots are actually funny), so the generous visitor will remark that the real elegancy in this exhibit is Andrea's purpose: to observe how the artist designed each living facilities she needed for herself through the ambition of realizing her political ideal of perfect autonomy. Which is really where her enteprise becomes successful, when all of her means had been develop to prove how it's possible to live at the peripheries of standard technological, economical, and I suppose, social systems. Hey: there is even a whole mini-apartment block on show ! How's that for building your own city ?! My fave piece of hers' is her floating island, well-represented here by two floating prototypes (they're small, they're just the governing seats). An important exhibit from a truly unique artist. (there are three tiny images and a press release here)

Hiraki Sawa (James Cohan): Fluffy, dreamy, surreal scapes of baby rocking horses migrating in bathwater or gently balancing on pianos. This is a giant video tryptich lullabye that I had to watch 3 times in a row so much it was lovely. It was a total caress, I could sleep with this on at night. I am confident now that with the new possibilities of digital animation, video art has far from reached its final days. This finely crafted and applicated film should give a lesson to the numerous lazy conceptual single-shot crap that we've seen presented in other video art shows these days. Simply put: our expectations have been levelled, artists ! Some would think that this was destined for the theatre, but there was a definite sculptural appeal to this art, that didn't follow any linear narrative as it is usual in traditional animation. The other piece on show had the artist draw, among other things, a horse on his apartment walls that then started to move by itself and walk along the furniture. The sweetest show of this season, period. (images from the videos can be seen here)

Matthew Barney (Barbara Gladstone): Speaking of cinema and sculpture, Matthew Barney follows a very original working method in making films that are "about his sculptures", without them being documentaries at all. His films sort of expand from his sculptural and performances explorations, and that is for me the central reason why his art is so unique, more than the fact that his preferred themes involves sex and fetishism, or that he enjoys petroleum jelly or other liquid materials as a medium. His new project at Gladstone was entirely Barneyesque, quickly recognizeable, featuring large portions of seaship cabins or ship poles replicated in white plastic, petroleum jelly, sugar, and even vynil tissue. So what are these new strange metaphors is he going after ? Who cares for now: the art is ambitiously large, professionally crafted, aesthetically irreprochable (if you're not disappointed by the lack of colors), but above all, it is incomprehensible ! Only the small drawings in a nearby room begin to give the viewer clues of explanation, but unfortunately for the not-curious-enough, it is only through the viewing of the full feature 35mm film that the project will start to become clearer (and even then, only to those able to develop their own interpretations). The movie itself, to which this exhibit was an extention, or vice-versa, so much the artist entangles these two mediums, was a gargantuan affair for a piece of contemporary art, a Colossus Of Rhodes. It was presented elewhere in the city in a "real cinema" screening room, exactly where it should be, because these buildings exist to give the viewer the ultimate cinematic experience, and because Barney's art addresses the
medium of cinema directly, by subconditioning it to the world of sculpture. Indeed, this movie, called "Drawing Restraint 9", will certainly give headaches to film critics unable to grasp how the film vascillates with other mediums: for example the building of an actual sculpture on the top floor of a large japanese ship. What part of this film is not film but artefact? I am interested in learning how these boundaries will be defined by criticism in this perticular case. The film employs the acting of Barney and his real-life partner Bjork (she also composes the music) to convey a metaphor about heterosexual desire and relationships, and how fecondity nurture all creation (not very pro-gay, but at least this is how I interpreted it). It was probably a predictable move for Barney, but I don't understand why this have received so many bad reviews: I thought it was the perfect (and logical) theme to exploits after his Cremaster series, and thoroughall it was a majestuous essay unlike anything I have seen on the subject. The title may be boring (no need to make series just for the sake of it), but I still think Barney is one of the important artist of today. (the website for this exhibit is here)

Tony Smith (Matthew Marks): Just 3 architectural sculptures made to be installed outside, but realizing that they were made during the mid 60's , they made me wonder why Smith, though relatively known, didn't become a name as legendary as Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt in the field of minimalism. Why is there no Tony Smith at Dia Beacon? The 3 sculptures here seemed austere at first sight, but they were in fact interactive monoliths that enticed the visitors to walk through them, or around them. The fun was to evaluate them in comparison of what made them pieces of architecture or not. What did they take away or enhance from a strict architectural experience (mostly, they were all experimentations on the archetype motif of the porch). In the end a good portion of Tony Smith's work are just variations on the theme of the big black wall. But someone had to do it and he did it. It's as simple as that. I'm only saying that the pieces here made it seemed like a worthwhile project. (this exhibit's website is here)

William Wegman (Brooklyn Museum Of Art): Like with the John Waters exhibit, this one was filled with cracking jokes, often playing on words or ridiculizing simple aesthetic concepts. Somehow the curators or the artist decided to mix it all up: drawings, photos, paintings, and videos from any eras of the artists's long career (since the 1960's to now) following each other without order. There was sort of a post-surrealist approach to conceptual art in the artist's doodles from the late 60's and 70's. Well, in fact, all his photographs and videos follow a similar conceptual surrealism, and announced the trend of light, humoristic, fun art that emerged from the late 80's to the late 90's. I definitely think the theatrical photographs made with the costumed dogs of the artist had a strong influence on that. . There is a certain care for art theory, but filled with detachement, as if the artist's only ever artistic goal was to prove to art thetory itself that it didn't need to take itself so seriously to make some sense. If John Waters at Boesky had been the rare occasion that you could witness visitors laughing in a gallery, this was the opportune occasion to see visitors laugh in a museum. I may come back to this one. (see a small promo video for the exhibit here)

Snap Judgment (International Centre of Photography): This show was a total treasure hunt, as it made me discover many artists I had never heard about. All were africans, and the big unifying tendancy was conceptual documentary: art that borrowed from or served as an approach to documentary. Which was a luck for us western viewers, considering we know already too little about the continent, both itself and what they're up to with contemporary arts (totally aware and out there, it seems). The panoramas of Mandela's prison (with their present day inmates) were quite impressive and discomforting. They still amass people there like it's a war camp: terribly shocking stuff. They were also fine photograph portraits of minor workers, or photographs of peasants' means to transport water. But they were also some experimental projects, like a neat performance piece involving pictures of family photographs that had been glued to the floor until people walking on them had erased them. I unfortunately don't have the names of these artists next to me but I think I should come back to write more about it. A must. (see samples from the exhibit here)

Sarah Sze (Public Art Fund): Again, a top notch piece from her. It looked like corner walls spreading out of a huge building that would have been burried under the pavement. When you approached it, two small windows (on each sided) revealed that the artist actually excavated a good portion of the ground under the pavement to present us yet another complex assemblage of her speciality, made of everyday domestic objects amassed in series. The whole doesn't make much sense, but that is all the genuinity about this art, how it is building up expansive abstract collages from the mundane and everyday consumer products. The fact that this structures stood in the middle of nowhere (or not so in the middle of nowhere) at the corner of 5th avenue and central park recalled a preoccupation of the artist with issues of fear and threat of possible catastrophes, wrether natural or criminal. A great piece for New York and the best Public Art Fund project in a while. (read and see about this here)

Sze Tsung Leong (Yossi Milo): If Edward Burtynsky could do it, why not a true chinese? This project documents in large scale photographs the peripheries between urban scrawls and industrial worlds in contemporary China. What more can be said? One of the most pertinent show of the season. I don't know if the rest of the world will like it or not, but China is irrevocably transforming, and the picture is not always pretty. (the site for this exhibit is here)

David Smith (Guggenheim): Much better than I expected. Apart from Brancusi, I am usually not a big fan of mid 20th century steel and wood sculpture, but this exhibit convinced me, surpassing itself in presenting a perfect chronology of this master steel sculptor from America. But the standouts were not necessarely the delicately tangled sculptures posted along the main museum ramp. For me they were the virulent anti-world war II reliefs sculpted on giant bronze medals. A masterpiece of political angst, it could be considered the americans' Guernica. Then the large pre-minimalism aluminium sculptures at the end on the top floor were quite sexy. In fact, most of the pieces were relatively large. I thought I was going to see series of small model-type sculptures, but this artist obviously preferred the main meal category size. The techniques and crafts were often the matter of interest here, rather than the actual subjects or poetry of what was depicted. Thus the pleasure of this exhibit rapidly became sculpture itself, as somehow what transcended the most about these works was the pleasure that the artist had when making them, subordinating metal to each and every of his fancies and formal desires. (see samples of this exhibit here)

Ok, well that was about 2/3 of what I saw during these trips.

I'm stopping because I'm tired and I can see how that affects my writting. I am loosing all inspiration and vocabulary.

I probably shouldn't do it like this, but rather come back to the shows
for which I have the most sentiments to express.

This'll do for now,

I'll see If I can correct this list later and add some links
so consider it a first draw.

I'm gone to see Da Vinci Code....
I wasn't going to but a friend invited me.
Have pity.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Museum Day: Nicolas Baier "Hunting Gallery" at Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts

2006-05-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

Hello onlookers,

Sorry for letting down this blog if you've been following,
I've been absent but I did manage to see a lot of art in the
past couple months, visiting New York, Washington (just one day) and Philadelphia
(just one day). I cancelled other trips, it's not been easy.

I'll be back this week with words on what I saw from Late April to mid-May,
but for now I wanted to say a few words about Nicolas Baier's work, which I saw at the Museum Of Fine Arts today (and another exhibit earlier but this is another topic).

I can't believe I waited the last day to visit this exhibit, "Hunting Gallery" at MMFA, but while being there (after having waited 20 minutes to enter on a heavy-packed free-opening museum day), I thought that the situation was judicious: it was much fun to watch the general public stop by every piece that were dispersed throughout the museum and observe their surprise and curiosity. I think I had the greatest time on a "Museum Day" yet (an event I usually try to avoid).

They have been talk on some other blogs (Zekes' Gallery blog) about the question wrether the interventional aspect of this exhibit was a first within such a large institution. I'm hesitating about my opinion: there have been many shows where an artist or a group of artists were asked to do art that reflected upon objects or pieces from a museum collection, but usually all these objects and artworks are brought together in the context of one singular exhibit, in specially designed temporary rooms (just look at the past years activities calendars from Mass Moca, Peabody Museum, Quebec Civilization Museum, and countless others, or for a solo I'll simply mention Kara Walker going on right now at the Metropolitan). Or there have been a few rare cases of some interventions throughout an entire museum, but as far as I remember, those were either group shows or unique piece commissioned from one artist (say, Maurizio Cattelan's head sneaking through the floor of a museum's permanent collection, or the Montreal CCA Shaughnessy house series, or for group shows I'll mention a recent sound art exhibit among the collection of the Victoria And Albert Museum (London)).

Which is to say that I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about a full
solo show of one artist (the pleonasm is intentional) with works dispersed throughout all the collection rooms in a museum, on every floors (erratum: except for Louise Bourgeois which is happening right now at the Walker Art Centre...but I heard of Baier's first). Jonathan Horowitz's faces of the September 11 terrorists spread throughout the Whitney this past season doesn't count: it was one work, and once you had seen a couple of the faces, you easily got the point. Moreover, those were usually placed in leftover spaces surrounding the usual art, like parasites. In Baier's exhibit, the works take holistically the places of other works, that they replace temporarely, what made them all seem so "seemless". Even with the map handout they were a couple pieces that I had a hard time finding out so much that they blended with every other (usually non-contemporary) art surrounding them. This is (no playing around the pot, and even though some claims that the photographs were better at the recent solo at Rene Blouin) truly one of the most interesting art experiences I've had this year yet.

And it's not exactly the photographs themselves that "make" this show: as individual pieces they're not all of equal qualities. The "abstract pieces" especially (Steamé, Miroir, etc..), are playing on a trick that has been a little too prevalent in recent Baier's art (the idea that mundane traces look as neat as AbEx masterpieces), and are starting to pale in comparison with no-concept, "pure" abstract photography, like with the recent work of Wolfgang Stillman. With Baier, it becomes a case by case affair: the best one was the large piece in the large contemporary room, "City",
but yet that wasn't even exactly an abstract piece. It just looked so much like one that I was certain in fact that it was a large 70's painting (by..whoever...Pierre Soulages, or Richard Mills...) and because I didn't expect such a large piece by Baier I was really trying to find the piece until I came close to...IT (!....eyes
at 5 mm from the canvas). A while after, when you finally discover the group of people walking towards the edge in the corner of this work (and after reading the title), you are sort of forced to follow Baier's now familiar ambivalences between the abstract and figurative, the monstrative and the represented. This art is as bipolar as you'll get.

The fascinating aspect of the show though, is how it demonstrated that Baier succeeded at bypassing the cul-de-sac of dialoguing with the artists of recent generations (the vaulted theories of contemporary art to which his art is most usually confined), and permitted his photographs to evoke archetypes of a large variety of other artforms, through a similar method of abstracting mundane motifs, sort of exploring how what we perceive is being conceptualized and accepted as cultural form. Pointing exactly toward that moment of transgression between form and culture. But more to the point: the most peculiar (and unique) aspect of this exhibit was that it functioned purposefully just like an hide-and-seek child play, where the audience was obliged to open all eyes and see if they could distinguish Baier's photographs among various art masterpieces from different art historical eras.
Obviously Baier loves to trick his audience.

"Hunt, Hunter, Hunted" and "Harpy" both play on banal effects of wood branches meeting light to evoke essences of Baroque or Renaissance painting. You can easily imagine the form of a bird-demon in "Harpy" even though it will never formulate itself precisely. Before you even read the title of "Harpy", you would actually "sense" a process of imagination taking play, grasping with vague impressions of a dark romanticism, or earlier "flashlight" spiritualism, as you attempt to decipher what this obscure image is actually showing. The mundane has turned into a Rembrandt! And the question as to know wrether such aesthetic comparisons were enhanced by the position of the piece between older european paintings, or not, only helped mystify the experience, making it seem worthwhile. It was as such, an opportunity. Here you could really start pondering wrether anyone ever really "saw an harpy" in the first place, or if every images of harpies we think we're getting were only ever imprinted from uncertain motifs, from impressions. The question is interesting: if no one ever really saw an harpy, than does its image come from the shapes of branches at night?

"Hunt, Hunter, Hunted" recalled a large roccoco cameo, playing on the ambivalence between the representation of wood and the close-up of logs, oversightly spousing the form of a decorative design imitative of an era that often relayed on excessive vegetal details. In the end, it borrowed from similar baroque strategies to make the whole look like a large piece of jewelry. Just like with "Monolith", a photographic collage of used marble flagstones that was placed in the islamic art room, which evoked either ancient hyeroglyphic tablatures (the photograph is posed on the floor and leaning against the wall like a large stone) or simply motif-regulated religious design, these two works served to remind us that throughout history there have been other quests to form than the merely abstract and representational, like the decorative, the pragmatic, or the symbolic. And through his photography Baier is trying to stir it all up, provoking conceptual tours de force (leaning on the edge of craft), probably to a degree where this show could become the next handy joke for old postmodern detractors.

In that sense Baier did take a strong risk for organizing this show, and made choices that some could attack as presomptuous, as Baier's take on "art with capital A" this time is definitely about seeking universalisms, more than it's being about exploring his intimate world (as it's been the case in his earlier shows).

My favorite piece of the show (I agree that the two pieces in the "canadian art" room look at best like an humorous take on Burtynsky, though I absolutely adored all the pieces featuring log cabins), is one that I had surprisingly heard bad comments about. People assume that "An Afternoon On De Gaspe" is downsizing impressionism (the painting movement) for showing an image from a street of Montreal through a snowy (and maybe dirty) windows. Well I thought it was ravishing! I actually had a hard time finding it: I was really fooling myself that it was a painting from some guy (whom I forgot the name for now) who used to paint beautiful streets of Quebec City in similar moody atmospheres. In fact, yes, I'm obliged to say that it is because the subject seemed so mundane, yet fluffy, "arranged" and dreamy, which is to say that it didn't look like (usual) contemporary art, that it was disappearing for me as a possible Baier piece. And the fact of discovering how I had been tricked sort of made photography sound more interesting than painting for a minute.

It was refreshing to see, after floors of Baier art that gleaned toward the abstraction, the deco-conceptual, and the ironic (the log cabins again and again), to be presented with an art that could be granted (though most seem to only read cynicism into it) some emotional qualities. Maybe it was because I felt just "so there". Many it is because every people in the art community of my generations all had short love affairs happening on De Gaspe, Casgrain, and surounding streets in the Mile End of the 1990's, Montreal. I really perceive this photograph as representing the zeitgeist of that. You know? Psychogeography? The emotional synthesis of an actual urban space within a certain time slot of local history?
Go figure... Maybe I'm getting old and genuinely fall for the cute decorative stuff. I was nevertheless glad I ended with this piece.

So again with a Nicolas Baier exhibit there would be interesting things to discuss about every (most) photographs, as the man only proved once more that he is truly...well, call it "meilleur espoir"(?): in Canada I think he is the best artist to explore the medium of photography. Period. I am actually curious why there isn't yet an "important" (ahem...or "self-important") New York gallery representing him, from which website I now could simply link images while I babble (or from Artnet), like it is actually the case with the bigger artists. Why are canadian galleries hiding his art? What interest does that serve? There is barely one small photo on the Jessica Bradley site and some very old photos on the Rene Blouin website. How am I supposed to talk to people in New York and say: "Hey...you really really got to see this art!". It's a chance that Mr. Baier developed his own website, but if gallerists want "his prices" to raise, well, they might as well pretend for a while that the art is already taken BUT....they need to show it too.

From what I heard about the MMFA opening, everyone in the Montreal artworld is hot about Baier, but I still think he is badly represented. At least now there is a new magnificent catalog (though missing the opportunity of presenting the recent work from the gallerists) that hopefully will circulate in the right hands.

They are probably like 5 artists in Quebec's younger generations that can make it internationally (let's be real, the game is tough), and Nicolas Baier I think should be among them.

Toodles,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Nicolas Baier: "Hunting Gallery"
March 22 - May 28 2006
Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal Canada

What's Up With Curating Frank Gehry?

2006-05-02T23:40:00.000-07:00

Well Sorry Toronto,

I gave up on trying to Catch the Frank Gehry show at AGO,
but to tell the truth I didn't realize that it was only
the couple recent projects that were the subject of the show.

I agree with the bad mouths that say that, though a Frank Gehry
will always surprise if you meet one around the corner,
he's been making the same building conceptually since a while.

What I don't understand about Gehry's recent "flow" of exhibits,
at least the ones I heard about, is how hazardly they are being organized.

The Montreal CCA had announced a huge Gehry retrospective some years back,
and suddenly, no one ever heard a word about it anymore.

Than I saw a magnificent exhibit of every Gehry museums as models
and photographs a couple years ago at Corcoran gallery in Washington:
that must have contained double the actual number of models than what is
being announced for the present AGO exhibit (yes, it HAD the Bilbao), and in my opinion, a totally pertinent reunion considering the architect-as-sculptor approach of this artist. Yet, there was no publications for this exhibit, which seemed sort of ackward. At least I had an impression that this exhibit deserved one.

Now at the University Of Toronto there is another exhibit
that seems like the direct follow-up to the Corcoran one.
All Gehry museums, but this time in drawings and sketches (no models
or photographs when the Corcoran had very little drawings if any).
Again, there is no book or catalog, barely even an image on the
University Of To's website, but... I wonder why not simply have enhanced
the Corcoran exhibit with the drawings, and put THAT at the Ago?

I wonder if it's Frank Gehry himself that controls what he shows and where,
since so much has been done to publish and show materials about
his recent architectural output (the Corcoran museum was also publicizing
a Gehry facade makeover, just like with the Ago), but not much have come
out of serious relectures or recollections of past achievments, from times
when Gehry's art was actually still a statement more than it is a fashion brand.

What's the point of showing Gehry's work since the 1990's if we can never
get a glimpse of how that evolved from the 1970's through the 1980's?

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

(ps: I should write soon about stuff Ive seen but I say that all the time, then never find the time, then...well comes what may)

Last Step Before Flicker Fusion Threshold: Robin Dupuis "Commutative" at Oboro

2006-04-01T01:53:00.000-08:00

“One of the aspects of form that I have been very interested in is stasis - the concept of form which is not so directional in time, not so much climactic form, but rather form which allows time, to stand still.”

La Monte Young

Robin Dupuis is a guy I studied with, and who's been interested since years
in micro-tensions, wrether they occur in the visual domain, the sound domain (audio syntheticism), or am I supposing, the electric domain.

His new installation at Oboro is spatially ambitious yet it is almost deceptively too
simple, sort of a minimal encounter between Bruce Nauman and Granular Synthesis.

He uses the unique segmentation of the tiniest (in lenght, aka shortest) videoclip imaginable of a hand, and have it repeated incessantly, what provokes a slight
almost imperceptible shaking in the image. This image is then projected
in negative and opposing another version on both sides of a thin plexiglass panel (I linksteal from Oboro because I guess it is less illegal than taking pictures myself and publishing them, given two options). It is made very clear in another projection at the end of a tiny corridor (created specifically for the occasion) that these hands are meant to touch each others, yet I am not sure if in the smaller video piece the hands were filmed together or resulted from the use of reflect-montage (what I think it is judging from the artist's past interest in the phenomenon of feedback). But nonetheless,
all these images are accompanied by a series of speakers casted into the walls
(the ones in the corridor are in fact installed in a zig-zag pattern across each others emulating thus the physical process of sound waves) that seems to amplificate the sound incoming from the recorded images (they are drones made of very rapid loops), but they could as well be unrelated expression of pure white or pink noises, or more incidentally, static noises.

And this is where I get the most confused in that, this work is supposed to reflect a "physiology of aesthetic perception", yet I do not receive enough technological details to fulfill such a clear interpretation.

Because on one hand, I got this notion that the technology recreates vibrations
at a level that is the least perceptible for a human being (tiny loops creating drones or a montage sequences), which offer a visual enunciation of the timely fluctuations between the conscious and the cognitive, but on the other hand (scuse the pun of using the hand motif), I'm proposed all sorts of deeper (I find) meanings about static fields, unified fields (of quantum-mantric proportion), and the fact that energy traverse into everything and make everything stick together, and...
you know where I'm going there, don't you? There's a buddhist temple at Oboro !! That's where I'm going.

So as aesthetically crisp as Dupuis wishes to be with "Commutative" (see how the title itself can create a confusion), his proposition seems to dwell on the vague side, especially since the press release refuse to move much further a superficial description (read it here).

But before you move on to meditate, please follow me as I'm describing a MUCH BETTER
piece by Dupuis which in itself was worth the whole visit (have you looked here carefully? There is a QTVR shot of that second work...hmm...QTVR...sweet...how retro, how so 95).

"Conciliabule" (made in joined hands (decidedly...) with Myriam Bessette) really much suffers from being placed in the almost hidden second room at Oboro. A lot of visitors will miss out on a piece that I find considerably more appealing.

It is, again, quite a simple piece, made with tiny speakers descending from the ceilings (they have long wires, in case you can't see the picture) in perfect rows. This piece is actually the encounter between a piece by Montreal's Artifice (who used a similar room installation, but using lamp bulbs (that was at Montreal's Mac)) and a sculpture by Stephen Vitiello (a great sound artist who installed a few hanging speakers who were bumping at the pression of imperceptible frequencies (this I saw at Sculpture Centre in Queens, NYC)).

But the event itself deemed to be choregraphied the way Dupuis did it:
the work is simply the demonstration of a low crescendo between low frequencies yet only visually perceptible (through the increase of the vibrations on the speakers skins), until they become acoustically perceptible, and proceed like this through a humming drone until the speakers pop out a few minutes later (before it all restarts again).

What I like about this work is that, even though there are certainly nice
explanations and trivia details about the process and the exact frequencies used,
the piece still funtions visually for anyone not knowing any of them (including me).
It is a sound sculpture and..it is a sound sculpture. Period. That's IT.
Sound. Shown. Visually. Half a dopler effect.

But before I start tackling myself about my recent dislike of conceptual art,
I must remind that this work is first and foremost fully experiential, entirely immersive, and much more emotionally and physically engaging than a mere didactic demonstration (on the proprieties of sound, for example). This is perhaps the lunatic effect of drone, but being that I was recently attracted to transcendentalism myself, I am not the one that you will hear attempting
to devalue, diminush or demystify the affects of the most simplistic perceptusl phenomenons. Nor intellectualize them, not when I value emotions and experiences above the far and few temporal sights of complete comprehension.

Cheerlididdoo,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Robin Dupuis: "Commutative"
4 mach - april 1, 2006
Oboro
4001, rue Berri, local 301
Montréal
Tue-Sat 12h-5h pm

(Ooopsy....err...it's ending today I'm afraid.
You better read me REAL fast)

PS: Apparently Robin Dupuis will have a site soon, hopefully
presenting all the nice texts that were in the exhibit portfolio
but didnt have time to read. it will be at
www.robin-dupuis.com

PS2: Speaking of fast shaking images, I have stuff (of a totally different
vein) that uses a similar montage aesthetic that I want to put up here at some point. They were made for a kino 4 or 5 years ago. It's totally goofy.

This Way Please: Laura St.Pierre "This End Up" and Shelley Miller "Scopophilia" at Galerie Articule

2006-04-01T00:04:00.000-08:00

Frankly it has been (mostly) an excellent programmation at Articule
since September 2005 throughout their cluster of exhibits on the theme
of immersion.

You have one week left to see these 2 excellent works now playing
by Laura St Pierre and Shelley Miller.

Both juggle with ideas of high and low consumption,
evoking ideals of desire with material leftovers.

It's not as if we're trying these days to dig any new topic:
everything have been tried. But they are specifities in the works
of both these artists that make their efforts worth their propositions.

Shelley Miller, an artist whose been playing with ice sugar since
a good while (I remember those wonderful pastries decorations that she had spread
as graffities across this city's walls a few years back), presents cakes
made to replicate purses and other accessories from Louis Vuitton.

There are a couple cakes half-eaten on a tiny podium (I suppose visitors
are able to eat some of it but I didn't dare), one full presentation window
with 3 other ice sugar Vuitton purses in mint condition (she even faked the
bricked walls of bourgeois shops architecture), and a couple photographs
imitating the publicity ads made by this french company (well, maybe ads made 20 years ago). (Well...ok...maybe not that old)

You don't need a whole essay about dutch Vanitas to get the idea
of where this art is going, but what the press release won't tell you
is that this art is especially critical and pinpointing at an aftereffect of the artworld, when Vuitton and Prada are probably the only fashion companies to have ads among gallery ads in big international art magazines (her ads I find look even more like Prada ads), very certainly because both companies, while still using much of conventions in how they attempt to appeal to their clients, also draw a lot
of sponsoring toward the new artists and architects "du moment".

Not even mentioning that Murakami had reversed pop art on its head by
doing canvas of Vuitton logos at the companys (and probably, their
clients') demand, Vuitton is often lending their vitrine arrangements
to half-careered artists such as Ugo Undigone.

The interesting strategy that Miller used for her work
is providing an ouroboros: it is in how she displays a cycle between
an object of desire disappearing while it is being consumed
and its wanton image making certain that once it is gone,
the viewer will be wanting more. This is especially prevalent
considering the amount of abid Vuitton collectors, who
will go through a lot of effort to find every models
of the company's purses though they are designed with the same
egocentric logo since more than a century.

This works is in desperate need to be sent to New York.

In the next room, Laura St Pierre presents yet another exhibit
engulfing the recent trend (or revival) of "sprawling art".

It's excellent. Not nearly as great as the landmark "A L'Abri
Des Arbres" (2001) de BGL, but I find it honoring to compare the approach.

Because, contrarely to other popular artists like Phoebe Washburn
who use the sprawling aesthetic to convey everyday residues
into formal assemblages of abstract functions, Ms St.Pierre is
also interested (like Shelley Miller) by the blunt critique.

But unlike with Miller the press release couldn't be more blunt either:
this is exactly described as what it is, a decorative installation made with
residues of domestic commodities, that is, the usual styrofoams
stuff that you will find in boxes when you buy all sorts of home equipments
(be them technologic or not), and the leftovers of general home decoration
(wallpapers, paint, various thrash).

They are arranged to form sort of a marecage, almost as if this world had slowly started to evolve from its own. Maybe the homeland
of parasites in a microbiologic world, but things are not that simple:
this work is not meant to revulse the viewer. Once a play with lightspots
is triggered, the room change in color temperature, and at some points
when it comes totally dark (this use of lightning change made me really think of BGL), you discover that red-lava light is coming from underneat the pules of styrofoams. From the mundane of domestic you are transported into the exoticism of inner or outer worlds.

So where in the world am I coming from with "critique" when I've been travelling this far?

Well, hoping you won't find this interpretation too weak, I do
feel like this work funtions as the evanescence of post-human ecologia,
prophetizing the doom of a natural world being shaped by our
everyday consumer lopsidednesses, never fully able to apprehend the darkness
inherent in every faces of beauty.

Go see that show,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Laura St.Pierre: "This End Up"
Shelly Miller: "Scopophilia"
4 march – 9 april 2006
Suite # 105 of 4001 rue Berri
Montreal, Canada
Wed-Sun 12h-5h pm

Resume Of The Month

2006-03-25T04:23:00.000-08:00

Here is my art quote of the month, that pretty much resumes
the way I think about art these days, and why I got bored by
my recent art visits and tend to reduce them so I can stop
feeling like I am wasting my time:

"We live in a period of conceptual mannerism, one steeped in academic practice."
(Mark Stevens)

He then goes on...
"The ideas of Duchamp, Beuys, and Warhol, exciting in their time, are rarely being challenged or advanced in a significant way. They’re just being diddled with."

To me, simple quotes like this are as interesting as reading the last Baudrillard book "The Conspiracy Of Art" (which take turns and turns and then profess similar sentances).

These lines are actually from an article on the Whitney Biennial 2006, which means it is supposed to talk about the art that is coming up next, but frankly, only fools never change their minds: I just bought a Taschen book recently about conceptual art simply because while standing in the bookstore, I was flabbergasted while turning the pages to realize that I was being overwhelmingly bored by images of artworks that I once admired.

I thought, "gee, something's changing in me, what happened?". I wonder if it has anything to do with my recent health poroblems. It's like a convulsion of consciousness. Something is twisting.

Turns out that I walked away recently (and I mean, literally, as in getting toward a place and turning back) from exhibits that I would have never missed a couple years ago, such as the last Grauerholz exhibit, because I didn't feel like turning pages and pages of books, and I still reproach her to have hidden all her great photographs in a stupid archival conceptual glasswork.

May I still quote Mr. Stevens ?

"Earnest, well-meaning art is usually boring. Self-righteous art is worse...."

"Too many artists have ideas instead of intuitions. We could use more introverts."

Hmm...wow...I almost feel like he's calling me. That pretty much describes what I'm into these days.

Recently I was thinking more and more about this idea from Baudrillard that "art is everywhere but where it thinks it is"...And I realize that it is so true how it is very tempting for an artist, to just bring bits of that "everywhere" and patch it up inside a gallery. Show to the world just what it is you found so fantastic in your everyday perusals, or attempt to agglomerate a synthesis of all that information you have amassed, or offer an opinion on items that provoke you (what in any case always resolve in talking about yourself).

That path is so very tempting. I see many artists do it, and I can see exactly
how I could be doing it. It's like for each art thought I must fight with myself
and insist: "No, Cedric, No !! You don.t want to do Scrapbooking".

These days there is an exhibit at the Metropolitan about an artist who
apparently (judging by rumors) succeeded at joining both methods: conceptual scrapbooking and intuition. That's the Combines exhibit by Robert Rauschenberg at the Met. I feel like however will turn out my reaction to this one if I ever see it, it will conceal my thoughts on these issues for good.

Nevertheless, I write rarely to this blog these days because
I.m having fun discovering all sorts of things which have nothing
to do with the artworld. If I'd enter a gallery I'd probably go to
the desk and look at pens and erasers, sprinklers, the shapes of windows,
the light set up and how cables are hidden, the dust covering the floor,
you know, trying to grasp how this world came to exist before me.

To be blunt I an more into exotic travelling, reading about health,
nature promenades, and playing video games than art these days.

I'm even considering waiting to see Rauschenberg in LA,
so I could see how things are going over there next summer.

Hmmm...

Well take it easy for a while now, if something pops up that really stand out I'll
come babble about it.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: I might present something this autumn but I'm considering doing
it on my own, outside of any art circles. I'll post news here.

Exhibits Not To Miss In 2006 (America)

2006-03-06T12:44:00.000-08:00

This first half of 2006 will
mean sort of a tabula rasa for me,
as for various reasons (including the
need of time to consecrate myself
to some art projects), I will not
be able to see as much art shows as usual.

So I decided to start a list of shows
that I really do not want to miss,
so that at least I'm able to visit the
ones that I consider essentials.

Maybe that list could serve other onlookers,
so I decided to paste it here.

The list will probably change over time.

The old classic painters (or sculptors:

- Edvard Munch at Moma (New York), until May 8

- Cezanne at National Gallery (Washington) until May 7

- Dada at National Gallery (Washington) until May 14 but it comes to Moma this summer.

- Degas To Picasso (Boston MFA), until Summer.

- David Smith at Guggenheim (New York), until May 14

The contemporary arts:

- Andrea Zittel Retrospective (either at the New Museum in new York until May 27,
or the future gig at the Vancouver Art Gallery, since I will be visiting people there next Summer)

- Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at Metropolitan, until April 2 (luckily the Met is a bit boring until this Autumn).

- Without Boundaries (Islamist contemporary arts) at Moma (New York), until May 22.

- Sugimoto at Hirschorn (Washington) until May 14

- Anselm Kiefer at the Mac (Montreal), until late May.

- William Wegman at Brooklyn Museum (New York), until May 28.

- Contemporary African Photography at ICP (New York), until May 28

- Mayyyybe the Whitney Biennial, but not if everyone says it sucks.

This list is not finished, and will include some gallery
shows as they come up, but frankly, since January,
everything seems boring, except this new trend of
neo-asian or neo-middle-east painting (the only stuff
that shakes your eyes as you flip the recent international
art magazines gallery ads.)

They are only 3 shows from all what I read about recently
that I regret missing these last 2 months: Ghada Amer
(hopefully a museum will re-present those textiles
works at some point), Thomas Hirschorn (an artist whose scrap-book
aesthetic I actually despise, but who seemed to have been the
talk of town last month so I'd have seen it just for the sake of seeing it),
and Angelo Filomeno (actually ending next week, another textile
artist, representative of the "asian touch" I was referring to).

Ok...add to this an exhibit of over 40 canadian artists
in New York but that was probably all unconsiderable works
(ohhh, that's bitchy).

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Cedric Caspesyan VS Video Art

2006-02-28T11:31:00.000-08:00

I've been kind of loosing it up
these days at
Zeke's blog (where I love to comment) about the topic of
video art, and how artists practicing within that field
constantly refuse to adapt to some of the medium's primus
proprieties: the fact that the medium can be easily reproduced
and broadcasted.

I almost sound like I hate video art, which is not the case at all,
as I sort of come from that field, and did a few video installations
myself.

But in an age where one can find easily classics of cinema,
including experimental shorts, on various dvd collections, I am
amazed that years and years later it is still very hard
to find copies of some video art pieces considered
landmarks of contemporary arts.

This text mostly concern single-channel video art
pieces, of limited duration, a description still encompassing
a great majority of video art, though more and more of these
single channel "clips" are presented on museums walls as
though they are installations (including the video credits at the end).

Here I'll paste my comment
from Zeke's Blog, that was replying
to his comment about VTape
offering web brodcast of extracts
from canadian video art featured in their
collection.

Hmmm....Come to think of it..I will edit bits of it:

Video artists are soooo pretentious.

Their tapes lie in dust in video art centres. No one gives a damn, and those who give a damn (like I do at times) often encounter a lot of administrative resistance
when attempting to dig copies (or simply...that weird look from the guy or girl at the counter who wonder why you came here to look at those tapes).

The small bunch of people able to enjoy these types of films are not even given a chance to watch them. Video artists treat their potential audiences as collectors. You like video art? Hey that must mean you got 2000 bucks to spend for my 5 min piece (they are juste 6 copies, you know?).

Eventually the best artists are released in compilations (Bill Viola, Stan Brakhage and...hmmm....count them on the fingers of one hand).

Rebecca Horn had an edition of her film performances...Guess what: they are like 1000 copies or less and sold more than 4000 dollars each.

Her damn compil is the work of art itself.

Just like this new idea that video artists sell their monoband as projection art pieces. There is nothing that tells you that these pieces must be projected. They're not loops, they're not multi-screens, they have nothing to do with the use of any special architecture.

They are short films with broadcast conditions written by the artist or gallerist. I think of William Kentridge, how most of his films are really traditional short films. I was so upset at this guy, incredibly pretentious (he calls his animations "projected drawings") considering the amount of animators who surely used similar methods to him (pencil and eraser) because they were as poor as him when they started.

I mean, he's making money out of selling the drawings...why need to sell the films as pieces of art? (ed's note: I made a mistake here, below I will be re-adressing the issue) What if Peter Jackson came and say: look... they are 5 copies of King Kong and they will be sold 5 million each. That would be ridiculous, because it wouldn't follow what the medium is about. In cinema the object itself, the celluloid, the dvd, is quasi irrelevant. And Kentridge is as cinematic as Peter Jackson: it's the same thing.

Unless there is a special need for a video installation (say..a Rodney Graham loop really isn't going to work as a single channel monitor piece), I don't think video artists who do art that respect the format of traditional cinema (including experimental cinema) should pretend to be doing anything else than cinema.

It's irrespectuous of a tradition that's been there before them, attempting for a moment to profit from an interpretative confusion between the people able to read cinema from the people able to understand contemporary arts.

Kind of like delimitating what is so bad in Matthew Barney's cinema from what is interesting "within" it.

I have studied in both fields enough to know that cinema uses a certain senses of framing that visual arts would never tolerate. In visual arts you are looking at yourself watching the movie. The projection is a canvas. In the movie you are really looking at the film. Video artists attempt to create a distance that is for the most part impertinent. Since the 80's at least, a fair portion of them is simply relecturing trad. cinema, functioning within that field, sharing little with
visual arts but an irony that was already prevalent in 60's exp. cinema.
Very few video art actually spoof cinema in such ways that they need to be
seen on gallery walls. Many (single channel, limited duration pieces) are proposing ventures in experimental and documentary that would make as much sense or even better if they were projected in cinema screening rooms.

This said, proof that there is a pertinence to video art:
the Mike Kelley "Day Is Done" installation from last year
was one of the best video installation seen in ages. But that shouldn't hold back from a version that could circulate as a monoband on your tv. Peter Greenaway has already done films that exist both in cinema version and installation version. Obviously he is more admired by the cinema crowds than visual arts (we barely hear about his exhibits), but at least he's not wasting space showing his films on
gigantic museums walls for 3 months, with horrible sound conditions, and smell of fresh paint, asking passerbys to stand up for 2 hours.

He understands why screening rooms were invented, and actually
uses them.

And once the broadcast copies are sold and shown everywhere, he released them as dvds for standard folks.

But an old videotape by Pipilotti Rist? That is wayyyy too cool and
wonderful to be released for standard folks. Way much better than say..a video by Chris Cunningham (they are dvd compils of some of the best music clips directors). So all you ever get are the internet extract clips
(if you're lucky), and a curator text saying: "hey you... I know
you can't see the whole clip right here but you just trust me, cos I'm telling you, it's really really THAT great..Wooooo!!!".

Well, what party.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

ADDENDUM:

Ooops...ok, my comparison Peter Jackson and William Kentridge was not fair on one account:

Peter Jackson releases a certain amount of full 35mm prints of King Kong for broadcast companies (cinemas). A year later he releases it on dvd for the standard crowd pleasure.

William Kentridge sells a certain amount of films to museums for them to be projected on white walls (why museum walls, go figure...).

The problem thereafter is that he never ever releases them on dvd for the general public (this is an hypothesis...a case study of a visual artists working with single channel work). They are catalogs of the drawings, but a catalog (dvd) of the films, which broadcast versions have all been sold since ages, seems implausible.
You can get a whole reproduction of a Picasso but you will never get a whole reproduction of a Kentridge. "20 000 frames
against 1 ???? Hey, that's not fair !! Don't steal my art!"

Video art suddenly becomes engulfed into an aura that it has created for itself. Tapes get stacked into the vaults of contemporary art museums and lays forgotten there through the years. Most people have never heard of that old Lisa Steele tape, you know?

And then, 20 years later some curator finds them back and show extracts on the web to not offuscate monsieur's copyrights. Or if he's a star they end up being released on dvd 75 years after the death of the artist.

I mean...frankly... They are many programs showing short films on specialized tvs (in Quebec there is Silence On Court), but I cannot think of one program, after 40 years of the birth of video art, that ever broadcasted video art tapes on public television. (!)

Why not ? Why do I still need to go freeze my ass into an obscure
abandoned factory at a Champ Libre event each 2 years to see some video art ??

Why do video artists, instead of snobbing movements like Kino, simply not participate and propose an alternative, throw them tapes on the stage, compile them, play them.

I mean...what's all the fuss about
video art ? I thought Brakhage did it all.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

ADDENDUM 2:

Final one: promiss:

How in hell could I have forgottten
this:

There WAS a series last year in Quebec on video art made for ....forgot which channel, but it was not even Artv (meaning that no-one probably ever saw it).

But again I think it was all extracts, extracts, extracts...

It's a chance that with artists like Manon Labrecque
sometimes you don't make a difference between an extract and the whole thing. ;-)

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

1:11 AM

BGL VS Caroline Lathan-Stiefel

2006-02-24T19:31:00.000-08:00

Hello again,
and no that's not the sound of a bad tune by the band
The Cars, but just me showing up again to babble about my wherabouts.

I've seen a couple art shows lately
(missed many others), endlessly getting
back to a normal life.

I was disappointed by the BGL show at Art Mur,
which really looked more like an assemblage of bits
from previous works and performances.

I am sad that it was the first time in 4 years
or more that this group had a solo in Montreal,
because frankly it could give an impression that they "lost it",
when their last show at Mercer Union was one of
the top best exhibits in 2005.

I hope these guys can read me, but..It's really not
worth it to fill air in between other invitations
with a show of pre-baked stuff. And I understand
that Art Mur is a commercial gallery but I am certain
these guys are open to ideas. Did you know you can sell
bits of an installation while it's actually playing?
No need to sell bits of it 3 years later.

Nonetheless, a bad BGL show is still above
many other shows, and the best part was the turnstyle made with a taxidermised moose (that came as a surprised
once you turned around a vertically half-cutted wall that was hiding it).

The hidden-wall installation must have surprised some anew
to their art but was only a re-hash of bits seen previously.
Reinstigating a theatrical contrast between the lightning of a fireplace
switching with the ambiance of a dry office room that was left empty
but a series of chair folded against the walls, as if they had
been previously used for a discussion group (the subtlety was in all the ashes
spread around the corners of the room).

This group of artists have often surprised by the way it
linked a sheer humor with otherwise serious socio-political
outcries, when not simply daring to engage the sublime (usually in over-the-top
immersive installations).

But this time I got to say this mess of
sculptural bits, mixed with a couple photos,
canvas, and one video residual of earlier
performances, look more like scusez-moi
plain quebecois slapstick. Art for the sake of laughing.
Or twitting, to use a term from my previous blog.
Hmm...Interestingly I was recently
praising the healing qualities of humor art,
in fact just one post ago, but I guess I just didn't find the
BGL proposition to be "that" funny.

A very good show was
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel's installation
at Articule, which I don't have the name
next to me, but which consisted of a
complex inter-weaving of tiny constructions
and nets made with colored "fiber-wires"
(I forgot the name of those too, but you
can find them in any dollaramas).

Have you heard of any "sprawling aesthetic" lately?

Have you heard of Sarah Sze, Thomas Hirschorn, or even the coming
back of Jessica Stockholder ?

Well this was it, merely. Sort of a soft, crafty, childhood-sy, dollhouse-oozy version of that, on a smaller scale, but less confusing because mostly made
from a couple singled-out materials, and featuring many recogniseable forms
(beds, octopus, houses) among a generally abstract expression.

I think that is where art is going. Really a name to follow.

What else?

Nah... The best part about the last show at Optica was indeed that the walls
were painted black, but that is all I wish to say about it.

Tomorrow is Nuit Banche in this city, a full night of open events,
so I might as well visit a couple shows then.

I am considering, quite lazy-ly, a trip to New York in March,
but hoolah, maybe just a couple days, to visit the
Andrea Zittel retro.

I never wrote any damn review of 2005, maybe I should
try think about that too.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: I should be doing art of my own
if all goes well, soon.

PS2: I need a digital camera badly,
to enhance this blog with some snapshots.

PS3: I just realized something REALLY DUMB.
This blog was only accepting comments from people
with passwords. HAH. Corrected.

Well Well Well...

2006-02-09T14:01:00.000-08:00

Well I'm kinda back.

Kinda.

Gosh this blog is pathetic, it seems no
one ever reads it, makes me look like I don't even
have a friend. ;-)

Thankfully I do have a couple good friends,
they just happen to hate contemporary art
and always wonder why I "loose so much of my time"
caring. Hello, if anyone reads out there !

At any rates, my health is ok
for now. Actually I don't want
to talk about it: I am passing MRI
each 2 months for the next couple years
to make sure I'm ok. All chances are on
my side.

I don't want this blog to be
about babbling details of my personal life
either, because I think that is the wrong
way of blogging, and the reason I started
this was to talk about my artworld endeavours.

Which....Actually might change A LOT, because
I don't think that I need to see that much art anymore.
I feel these days that I acquired through the last 20 years
years a pretty decent idea of its possibilities, if
that may sound pretentious.

Today I went to visit my first gallery exhibit of the year
(and since a good while). It actually wasn't a good idea, I came back
with a big headache and pain.

The fun thing is that I entered the gallery
(Dazibao) and it was filled with photographs of people that I first
thought were doctors (surgeons).

My gosh, is it a good sign?

These people actually work for Hewlett Packard, but
I wasn't feeling great enough to start reading
anything about it. In fact, I left 4001
Berri as soon as I entered, thinking that I would come another
time for other galleries. I think I just got an
average flu, or I'm reacting to the liquids that
got into my body recently, or medication.

The artist is Mark Curran, in case anyone
is interested. "Hello Mark Curran, sorry
for that very lame review".

Personally I think that when we grow older,
they are many cases when some of us will
be loosing bits of our intellectual senses. And so while
walking back home in this half-numbed state
I was in earlier, I was thinking about the sort of art I would make
so that it could be received by people who are
not in their greatest form, intellectually or otherwise.

I was thinking about how an energetic healer
that I went to visit a few weeks back (because I want to put
esoterism on my side, as I do standard medicine
and natural health) told me that my "chakrah energy"
was way too debalanced, and that too much
was concentrated on the cerebral.

My immediate reply was that I was visiting
way too much art exhibits. I just knew it.
I think the kind of art experiences that artists propose me
these days are not the ones that can really help someone feel better.

Art can make you think, it can mirror back or extirpates
your deepest emotions. It can also, at times, make you
feel all sorts of sensation.

But can art really help someone "feel better" ?
Hmmm...Maybe when it's humoristic.

I think a doctor would reply that if you're
the one making the art, it can help "you" feel better.

That's the option I'm considering the most right now,
if I can pull back a bit of all this energy
that seemed to have drained from me recently.

Expect a slow blog here, but
hopefully at some point that would
mean that I'm just very busy.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

My health

2006-01-21T06:30:00.000-08:00

Ok, they are chances that my kidney tumor might not be cancerous.

They'll know for sure next week when I'm being operated.

I got one week to decide if I remove all one kidney
or just half of it (they are good things and risks
in both. The operation is tougher with half kidney).

I am meeting other specialists.

I am cancelling many show visits for a while,
but it's my luck that I haven't heard about anything
ending before March that I really couldn't cope
missing. There is BGL in Montreal that I will
see before my op.

The canadian art show at Jack Shainman sounded like
bigger than anything that happened here in a while,
but, can't make it I'm afraid.

The last show I visited (I cancelled
an art trip in Boston) was "Pardon Me"
at Taran Gallery.

A fascinating show, but everything was all
kept to the anonymous level when I would've
been curious to know more about the people
who got caught or voluntarely participated
in these inter-personal artworks.

For once I questioned the beauty and pertinence
of anonimity.

Disrupting the distance is one
next big step in art.

Forget about your art ambitions for a sec.
Don't use me. Talk to me like you're a human being.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan

If you don't know me by now...

2006-01-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

Hello everybody.

I've been off for the very unfortunate reason of getting diagnosised with kidney cancer.

I'm fighting it off with a couple operations (got stones in my liver).

I think I will survive it (it's not metastatic).
So please consider me alive.

I promissed the good lord (yes, I've become religious all of a sudden, you know how it is) to start making art again when I'll get through all this.

I'm very curious to see where that would lead me.

Have a good one,

Love,

Cedric (who just celebrated his 35th birthday)

Cai Guo-Qiang In Shawinigan in 2006

2005-12-05T17:13:00.001-08:00

Just when I was saying a month ago that the installation "Inopportune" at Mass Moca by Cai Guo-Qiang was one of the best artwork seen this past year, it seems everyone around here will have a second opportunity (scuse the pun) to visit it as it's been settled to show as the next summer blockbuster for the Shawinigan museum (Cité De l'Énergie), within the context of some sort of micro-retrospective of the artist's works.

I'm very happy for it. Very. But I'd like to remind the organizers that what makes me and others travel to Mass Moca, a museum that is situated inasmuch a remote sector as the Cité De L' Énergie, with which it shares an "industrial-romantic" cachet, is also because they presents 2 other large group shows at once.

Can seeing merely 3 or 4 pieces by Guo-Qiang be a reason enough for travellers
to travel this far? Time will tell, because "Inopportune" really IS a fantastic piece (or rather, a set of pieces), but I can confirm that it would have been totally worth this if only it had been a major retrospective, which I'm still anxiously awaiting someone organizes in this side of the planet.

Who will bring that roller coaster ?

Of course, a retro of Guo-Qiang would imply a lot of space and a lot of generosity.
And maybe even, a lot of "energy" (another bad pun). But since one of Guo-Qiang's preferred theme is energy, I think it would be fabulous if at least the Musee Des Beaux-Arts du Canada would command one or two new specific installations for this event, convincing the artist that the place presents the perfect occasion to link it back to his practice.

Something exclusive could probably entice some of our neighbors to cross the border,
what the Shawinigan Cité De l'Énergie, judging from last summer attendances, desparately needs.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Cai Guo-Qiang In Shawinigan in 2006

2005-12-05T17:13:00.000-08:00

Toronto's Art World Needs A Spanking

2005-12-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

Well, my past week in Toronto
was a disappointment on many accounts.

It's nothing to do with the art that I've seen,
some of which was really great, but more
to do with the lousy way it's being represented.

Here:

I count 4, or I think it's 5,
galleries that were closed while
I visited, some of which I really
wanted to see. I returned to two
of them 2 days later, and they
were still closed!!!

And I'm not talking of galleries who open
only 1 to 3 days per week (those were open),
but really of galleries which were slated
to be open at the times I visited (mostly
Wednesday and Thursday). Galleries who even
announced themselves in Artforum (the two that announced
themselves in the November Artforum were closed,
and I returned twice to Greener Pastures (the last
time was 2 pm on a Friday)...."Luckily", I was able to "visit"
these two shows by gazing in the windows with
my two hands on the side of my eyes for 15 minutes...
it'd be great if I could get press text or titles on their
websites but to no avail).

And then I come up to another problem
that I encountered with Toronto galleries:
many don't hand out press releases. The attendees
tell you "Oh..it's on our website", but they don't
understand that sometimes visitor travels and won't
access the web til a week later. It's great sometimes
to read about the work while you are actually
looking at it, or in your hotel room the following evening.

Only one gallerist, as an exchange, offered to
simply present the work themselves (trust me
it was necessary as the works were highly conceptual),
but my impression with Toronto, at least during this visit,
was that everyone was so poor that printing paper meant
a huge struggle.

I never meet these problems anywhere else, or
so rarely, but in Toronto I had the impression
that wanting bits of information about the show
you were visiting meant you were gonna have to
fight it out. Not counting fighting for
actually seeing the art, when I had to schedule
a date with a gallerist to make sure when I returned
the gallery would be opened (!!..they always close for
private events, it wasn't the first time with them).

All this said, I've also met charming
and very devoted attendees in some other galleries,
so I could never mean to draw a portrait of the Toronto-an
art community. In fact, I'd say that more than with anywhere else,
you never know what your experience is going to be when entering
a gallery in Toronto.

In New York you can happen to meet stiff employees but
they are generally (or nonetheless) serviable (if you are
polite yourself).

In Toronto, you can meet very concentrated employees
who will cut you very short at the first question you might have
(they replace someone, the "gallery people" aren't present, they're busy
with something (and often the only one in the gallery), etc...), or you can meet smiling people who actually ask you what you think about the art and engage with dialogue. Maybe that just has to do with Toronto people being like the food in that city: you will find every kind you can imagine.

But at any rates, my last frustration with my recent Toronto
visit was a very personal one: the fact that I couldn't
lend the times that some exhibitions were asking. They
were a couple exhibits that sounded fantastic but
included elaboratory works that I couldn't scrutinate as I
wished (or it would have meant sacrificing many other visits).

Examples:

The Database Imaginary exhibit at Blackwood
will ask you a full day if you really want to
experiment with every media work that is displayed there.
I stayed at least 2 hours but that was just the time
needed to grasp what each work were about.

The Andy Fabo retrospective had a video
work (among others) made from an extensive series of paintings
(each becoming a video vignette) that I couldn't have watched in whole, not counting the fact that the Impulse archives room asks for at least an hour of visit if you are going to enjoy it as much as I have.

I am so frustrated to have seen only 30 to 40 minutes
of the 2 hours or so Daniel Olson series of videos
at YYZ, not counting another 20 minutes looking at the
two other artists's works (and the list of things I had to visit
in that building). I'm thinking of going back. Or could it come
to Montreal ? It's not a secret that I love Olson's art much, though
it's not for everyone's taste, trust me. ;-)

I'm used to exhibits at The Metropolitan where each work comes with a full
text of anecdotal information, but somehow I didn't expect Catherine La Grande at Ago
would be like this, so after 2 hours and a half I skipped a couple readings toward
the end. Nothing dramatic, but... I had 15 minutes left to visit Michael Awad and others.

I think that's all, but I could include that I would love to see the Vera Frenkel
exercises (at Interaccess) in its entirity some day, a work that only confirmed
the pre-eminence of this artist. Of course, I'd be pressing the FFWD button at times..(ahem).

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

Toronto, by the way, still shows a LOT of painting,
which makes me wonder if it's urging to become
the Boston of Canada, what I wouldn't recommend
(lost of paintings...and bits of technological art).

Trying to vary the types of mediums
I give attention to, they are still
a few painting exhibits that are a must
to visit in TO these days:

- Angela Leach at Doris McCarthy

- Graham Gillmore at Monte Clark Gallery

- Andy Fabo at Mocca

- Ed Pien at Birch Libralato

- Gary Evans's second floor of tiny urban abstractions at Paul Petro.

- Wallworks at Ago

etc...

I still think the major stop in TO these days
is "Bodyworld 2" from Gunther Von Hagens,
simply because it's fascinating to
observe how it's so true that reality surpasses
everything you have seen in horror film
(remember wax museums films?).

As art (yes, yes, as "art"), it's also the equivalent if not
superior to Damien Hirst, which it seems to take from
at times, but without the intellectual apparat.

I think if I'd lend my body to Hagens, I'd say
"could you please make a work of art, and get rid of
all the scientifical bits" ? I can see a John McCracken
cube made out of an entire body.

Macabre's never been so voluntary, and that is all
the fun about it.

And if you forget anything about pain and fear,
some of it is actually quite pretty.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: I will or not return to some of these exhibits later on.
I'm already behind with other stuff.

PS2: By the way they were like 25 trucks for each car while on my way to Toronto (someone else was driving). That's not normal. I think the train got so expensive that every companies opted for trucking. Great for ecology. Where's a decent government?

Back From Abra

2005-11-27T22:37:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-13T15:00:00.000-08:00

"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

2005-11-13T04:20:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-13T01:42:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

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.

2005-11-05T19:22:00.000-08:00

(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

2005-11-03T02:56:00.000-08:00

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

Off to Mass Moca

2005-10-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Mass Moca but soon,
my thoughts on the meeting with Marc Mayer
(Of Montreal's Moca) at Zeke's Gallery from last week.

I'm almost done with The Mois De La Photo.
(2 shows left to see). I'll be back on that too.

And my September New York Review?...gosh....
Where is it ? It's halfway written.
Just too many stuff going on.

I was at the Festival Du Nouveau Cinema
quasi non-stop last week. More on that at
Artquebuse (the french version of this site).

Ohh..By the way....Last week end to see Dino-Fossil
in the Old Port. Nothing to do with art, but I'll
probably be amongst those last minute visitors.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

I am tempted....

2005-10-06T17:18:00.000-07:00

to leave you my impressions about the Month Of the Photograph of Montreal.

But I prefer to wait to finish my race.

I will not be making gifts: I will categorize each exhibit by order of preference because this exercise obliges me to decide which is better from what is less.

The presentation of this year is completely unequal, what could seem foreseeable, but not when one remembers former editions much more acute, containing a lesser number of artists, brought together in a couple groups at some larger places (at least with regard to the principal set of themes).

What will delight several viewers, is that this year there are really many many "photographs". Finished the time when any medium could be used to support
any interpretation of certain concepts of photography.

I missed some important conferences that I wish I could be reading somewhere (if only the Month published the results of its conferences... It seems to me that it is the first goal of this program to propose a debate).

The presentation by Michael Snow at Uqam Gallery wasn't too enthousiastic. The man had allowed himself to read a long curriculum vitae describing his career, which seemed to me a little redundant, or worse, which had helped me observe the redundancy in the recent works of this otherwise important artist introduced at this gallery.

It should be said that a certain air panic had taken me having to sway through an incredible number of students present there. I would be curious to be able to read the myriads of school papers which will surely be written by the end of the season about this small exhibit of Snow. Hmmm... Good blood, I did not say my last word on this subject.

In short, Snow discussed about the motif of the "window" which forms the corpus of the works presented until Saturday at Uqam, motif which was the subject of some major works of his unfortunately missing in the present event.

Photographs of windows, objects taking the shapes of windows, and photographs borrowing the form or the perspective of the window: in short, structural exercises playing on the framing quality and the permissiveness of the medium of the image.

Jesus, Cedric, aren't you just repeating in your own words the press release of Martha Langford?

In fact, I am trying to warn you, so that if you decide to go than you know what you are up to: simple and austere art, for the amateurs of conceptual demonstrations. It is not exactly the opening towards the imaginary that was promissed by Langford. It would even act as a serious blocking in this favour.

The imaginary, with Snow, is within his way of demonstrating, of fabricating photographic "objects", which sometimes almost denounces the medium.

Finally, Snow is a great "patenteux" of the conceptual era.

My choices for the Month Of the Photograph of Montreal for those of you who do not intend to see everything, are as follows:

- Michael Snow at Uqam, all the same, for the event itself (that finishes Saturday)

- Tracey Moffat at the Museum Of the Fine Arts of Montreal

- Diane Borsato at Occurence

- Karen Brett at La Centrale (that finishes Sunday)

- Alain Bublex and company at Maison Of the Frontenac Culture (that finishes Sunday)

- Adad Hannah at B-312 (that finishes Saturday)

- Iain Baxter at Vox

- Les Revenants at MAI Centre.

One spoke to me in good terms about Uncertain Places exhibit at Saydie Bronfman
centre, but I remain perplexed until my visit.

You missed Evergon, but a section of his works is at the gallery Three Points until Saturday.

You missed another beautiful exhibit on the 2nd floor of Art Mûr. Too bad.

You missed Robert ParkeHarrison at Toho-Bohu but you can always get the book.

I did not yet decide on the subject of my favorites for this events, but I believe that the choices listed above have more chance to be appreciated (except Michael Snow) by a greater number of people. It is a big taboo in a country where art is subventionned to make the difference between an "interesting" art and a "fascinating" art. Through reading the official statements written by Martha Langford for the event, she does not seem to make the difference. But for this blog, I take the audacity to establish this distinction.

There are also works which are fascinating for the bad reasons...

I will be back.

Cedric Caspesyan

centiment@hotmail.com

Addendum (the morning after):

Ok, ok, last minute surprise heart pop during the Month Of the Photograph in Montreal:

Add this to the yesterday list:

- Lynn Marsh: "Crater" at the Cinémathèque.

I did not expect it would raise me that much, since I had not enjoyed very much what I had seen from this artist before.

You have 3 days left to visit this work. It will only take you a tiny 5 minutes to see the whole thing, but, to come back to something I said earlier, I think that
we can speak about fascination with this work.

Fascination is like esthetics: a perspectivist question, therefore of taste.

And yet, there are processes which seem all ready to fascinate, and it is exactly the impression which arises from experiencing Crater by Lynn Marsh.

More about it later,

PS2: the artist Roadsworth will discuss at the gallery Zeke next Sunday evening. Alas, I will probably not be abe to make it. The artist seems to not have gotten along with the galerist to present his (first?) solo exhibit. Please ask him if he intends to exhibit documents of his street art at some point. Examples of his stencils, explanations about his choices of motifs, etc... His Bicycle path recently presented by Quartier Éphémère had re-assured me about the relevance of his work (not forgetting the artist's talent).

When The Images Say Miles Of Words: Zev Tiefenbach "Binary By Submission" At Zeke' S Gallery

2005-10-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

Today, I went to the Zeke's Gallery (gallery of Chris Hand,
in Montreal).

By strange circumstances, I had never yet visited a single
exhibition in this gallery.

I am not the only one. This off-circuit gallery within the standard
running paths of visual arts in Montreal, although popular with the
anglophone "underground" crowds of this city, is very poorly
covered by the major magazines of art from Quebec.

It is specialized in artist's first exposures (beginning artists), such as the photographer Zev Tiefenbach who presents there these days the samples of what probably constitutes his very first photographic series.

Before commenting on Zev, I must add that, in spite of the originality
of the galerist who makes a point of preserving
the spirit of the "salon" of the early European galleries,
I was left with the impression that the artistic direction of this gallery
is constrained by the fact that the gallery is also a place where concerts and readings are constantly staged. More traditional mediums and works of smaller sizes
are perhaps better adapted to this sort of 'round-the-hall mise-en-scène.

However, the works of Tiefenbach thwarts this rules of the familiar, thanks to an eccentric system consisting in titrating the works with telephone numbers that one can dial on the spot (thanks to the cellular phone generously lent by the galerist) in order to hear various texts and sounds which accompany the photographs.

I had already seen photographs accompanied by sound (diffused by loudspeakers: one thinks in particular of Nan Goldin), or sound works using the media of telephone numbers (The_User, Tagny Duff, Steve Heimbecker, etc.) but it was the first time that I ever met a work of this kind, and in spite of the confusion through the effort of reattributing all the bits of strident sonorities that I heard, and the general length of this process (it takes you a few minutes of time for each photograph), I remained charmed by the approach of this artist, who also proposes additional typed texts affixed on the laminés which contain his photographs.

The sound excerpts and the photographs together borrow from a flexible narrative form
which in my opinion leaves the spectator not out of choices on his way of approaching the works. Chris Hand preferred to disperse the 2 or 3 series of photographs in the room, rather than to gather them in groups, apparently in an aim to underline the freedom of interpretation of the spectator, who instead of trying to construct a narrative plot by joining together all of the photographs (a plot which probably does not exist), is invited to create free associations, and thus pursue a work launched by the artist.

One guesses easily after a certain period that the artist focussed on 3 precise subjects:

1 - an urban road-movie, which presents details collected on the road, mostly motifs of driveway architectures or route indications, but also including scenes collected in the countryside, as in a come-and-go ride between the surburbian zones in (under-)development, and the peripheral sectors of villages surrounding those urban zones (kind of focussing on the "waste ground" within a binary relation between city and countryside, if one tries to understand the strange choice of title for the exhibit). In short, a poetry of displacement, of nomadity, whereas these photographs often present cars or other elements able to "move" (ducks), when not simply presenting situations of blocking (car stuck in the snow (middle photograph, image incoming from the site of Zeke).

2 - "traces" of human lives: domestic objects left by their users after use, or about to be used (when a human figure is present). His captures of "intimate" zones (old mattress, refrigerator, chair in a restaurant (on the left)) are particularly inviteful for narration, and point out to the work of Sophie Calle, who is recognized for her psychological explorations of objects extracted
from the banal.

3 - a freer series including "texts", mixing all kinds of "urbano-picturesque" images of garages, stores, empty parking lots, or restaurant chairs (at left). A kind of physical voyage in the No man's Land of the urban peripheries, but which is lived interiorly, through the veil of an anti-pudic neo-romanticism. The photographs seem to have found themselves so much they represent non-places ("(514) 907-0775 Ext 808" (2005)), or rather, places which seem to have been built as bad grass ("How To Embalm Love" (2005)).Shop signs and windows, garage door: the artist seem to create a bond between signage and insignification. The texts seek to humanize these images and to insufflate life upon them ("I Forgot Which Muscles Were Its" (2005)). (the
photographs all come from this press release from Zeke' S Gallery.)

By adding samples of poetry or noises to his photographs, the artist create a panopy of "sound postcards" which subvert those that we can find in dollar stores. They temporalise photographs which usually are called to be engraved in the eternal. They force us to recall the time of the photographic act, and ask from the spectator to put him(her)self in the skin of the author: what occurred at that time, there, exactly? Which emotion influenced the photographic gesture? There in this direction,
Tiefenbach established a sort of system connected with that of the photographic novel, while preferring to split up moments of emotional intensity rather than to sink into the indulgence of racontage, which would have been dangerous with a work often reaching close to the anecdotal.

With complete freedom, Zev Tiefenbach proposes a new way of pointing out the bonds between photography andcinema. I can't remember if it is Bazin which used the term "monstrative" to underline the narrative potential of every image, but the work of Zev is an excellent proposal on this subject. An attempt at moving a little further, to draw around the image the imaginary
elements which it inspires.

In these regards, I consider the exhibit currently presented at Zeke Gallery as the best of the expo of the Montreal month of photography "which does not form part of it", and I wish ardently that Martha Langford discovers this proposal on the imaginative capacity of the image which will have certainly passed by her as we speak (Martha Langford is chief curator of this Mois De La Photo de Montreal, whose topic this year is the evocative power of the image).

Returning to Zeke:

Chris Hand is also the editor of one of the most splendid blogs that I know, Zeke's Gallery, which treats of all kinds of subjects as well local as international, with a clear portion dedicated to the "criticism of criticisms on art" (you read well, it consist of evaluating critical exhibit reviews).

This blog is parasitized by many comments of my share.
I am a big fan of the challenges and proposals which this man can
launch, most ambitious until now consistsing in a meeting with the new director of the Museum Of Contemporary art of Montreal, Marc Mayer, on the subject of the condition of Quebec contemporary art.

These meetings will take place on October 18 and November 2:
the first in the gallery, the following one at the museum.

We will be speaking about it.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Zev Tiefenbach: "Binary By Submission"
From August 25 at October 4, 2005
Zeke' S Gallery
3955 SAINT LAURENT
Montreal, Quebec
H2W 1Y4

Blogist: http://zekesgallery.blogspot.com/

PS: you missed it?
Bah, the next expo at this gallery
will surely be worth a glance:
abstract art by Chris Straw (if my epellation is
exact), which ressembles a strange meeting between
François Lacasse, Paul McCarthy, and
retro-gogo psychedelic design.