The A Word

Here’s this week’s radio show, with an event you should know about in the BlackFlash Bike Rally and Scavenger Hunt and the last few days to see Memories of a Naturalist at PAVED. And I’d like to start a petition online to officially emancipate Joni Mitchell from Saskatoon, or alternately demand that she live here for at least six months a year, especially in the winter.

There’s a number of things coming up that I didn’t mention on the show, as I’ve been thinking alot about Eli Bornstein’s exhibition at the Mendel, and that dominated this show. Check out the lineup for the upcoming Street Meet Festival, and Sounds Like III. Both look to be very cool and I give you the Street Meet poster as a teaser.

This week’s radio show, people: you can listen to it here. I mention a number of exhibitions that are opening at the Mendel, and I also mention Cliff Eyland’s talk at aka gallery this Thursday evening at 7 PM.

At an Art Education panel years ago, the art / technology “conflict” was fiercely debated. “New media” was accused of lacking content, favouring obtuse academic language to “justify” bad “art”, obsessed with “process”. So, where did Susan Shantz, head of the U of S Art Dept., whose exhibition Creatures in Translation, all 3D scanning and printing, on display now at the Kenderdine, stand in this debate?

She arrived late, with a screaming, disruptive child in tow, then thankfully departed quickly so conversation could resume… Her dismissal of a groundbreaking community debate is mirrored in the lack of consideration and self-criticality in Creatures. I’ve seen lots of bad “art” but this may be the worst. Displaying emails (3D Printing Instructions) as “Art” sets the failed tone here.

The blurb is as follows: “Accessing images from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s online archives as source material, Susan Shantz used three-dimensional modeling software and a haptic tool to simulate the process of sculpting clay, recreating artifacts as they appear online. These digitally sculpted forms are then rendered two- and three-dimensionally into forms of varying sizes and states of completion. The objects Shantz chooses to work with are four early 20th century Japanese Banko ware teapots, shaped like a badger, sparrow, frog, and sea creature, choices that reflect a longstanding interest in the artist’s “ubiquitous manufactured versions of nature in culture.”

That can be refined down to techno fetishistic plagiarism, a touch of privileged academic colonialism, degrading the craft / finesse of the EDO period. Or, as I used to say when teaching (when the U of S had more media classes than, say, Evan Hardy high school): just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Postmodernism often privileges subjective reinterpretation within “history” and “art” (Elwood Jimmy and Steve Loft excel at this, encapsulating humour and rage).

That’s absent here. It’s “look what I can pay technicians to do!”. I was fully expecting to be seduced by the technology, and instead was underwhelmed. Several works look like cheap cardboard cut outs, some seem less finished than work from School Art (no offense, kids).Let me offer two examples (in media, and with collections, respectively) that are smart and well executed, to contrast and compare.

Judy Bowyer’s Worry Well employed audio to weave voices in a “floral” sculpture of small speakers, expressing worries both banal and heavy. Some were loud, some whispered, some insistent, some resigned. The technology was a tool of the content, despairing and hopeful.

A perverse (in a good way) response to the “preciousness” of collections was Turner Prize*’s Golden Jubilee, as a “celebration” of the Dunlop’s anniversary. Sampling and reconfiguring seminal works (in their opinion) from the Dunlop’s collection, Turner Prize* continued their irreverent approach to Art, and how we frame / consume it. They reveled in being “unreliable narrators”, using “an esoteric, witty, and highly subjective lens”.

But if you’re expecting that kind of conceptualization and critique here, you will be unsatisfied. Creatures is disappointing in execution, disappointing in lack of content and perhaps damning of all, is disappointing in that it continues the dismissal of any analysis or debate of the (contested) role of new media in artmaking, as argued at the aforementioned panel. Consider what Buffy Sainte-Marie did – is doing – with her retrospective at Wanuskewin. She also worked in media at an experimental stage, but her art isn’t just technical masturbation, bereft of meaning.

I could mention Walter Benjamin’s ideas of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but a premise of that early 20^th century thesis was quality, and how that affects the assumptions of “precious” art objects, specifically as commodity. But these derivative simulacra degrade the works from EDO, like bad caricature, like a plague of 3D frogs – and teapots. Fragment Rendering (Frog Crown), or 3d Rendering (Badger Teapot) are more of a “trade show display”, reminiscent of technical demos, where you often use images and objects that are banal and meaningless, as you want solely the process to dominate. Large images on the wall display the scans of the objects, and there are “prints” in display cases, but they’re less impressive objects than you’ll see in nearly any show at the Affinity gallery (a recent roundtable there asserting the primacy of the object was a welcome tonic to academic posturing…)

There is art in this show: in the Website Watercolours by Joseph Anderson, but his ability is plagiarized, like the technological expertise.

The current debate about how 3D printing will change everything from gun laws to capitalism (and crime) is exciting and a bit dangerous. 3D Scanning and Printing are groundbreaking technologies. I anticipate seeing what an artist will do with them, but Creatures isn’t that. This is pricey techno fetishistic plagiarism, an analogy, perhaps, for the eventual closure of the department itself…

“Groundbreaking”, “revolutionary”, “trailblazing” – those terms are bandied about frequently in art world technofetishism that you’re forgiven if you approach them with skepticism. I remember when digital technology was viewed with suspicion by most art departments (photographers were the hypocritical worst). Now, there’s an almost orgiastic celebration of new media: Douglas Copeland has joked that it’s as though someone was running around centuries ago, saying, “here’s paper. Give us content! Give us content!”

Some of the more nuanced use of technology, however, has been by artists of colour  – Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Thirza Cuthand, or Bear Witness. When Elwood Jimmy presented his curatorial project 21 at PAVED, I noted that many “post colonial” artists work in new media (video, digital, web) so as to produce their own narratives and validate their own history.  This is necessary when politicians equate dissent with terrorism, like Harper – or Stalin, who originated it.

These are all things I considered while spending time with the retrospective of digital works by Buffy Sainte-Marie, at Wanuskewin Heritage Park.

A brief excerpt from the gallery didactics:

“The Great Hall Gallery at the Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is proud to present Sixteen Million Colours, the first survey exhibition of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s digital work, produced from 1984 to 2011…Sainte-Marie [has] created 11 large-scale, electric, pixel images of warriors, elders, mythological creatures and self-portraits, that contemporize and bridge the past with the present”.  A bit more, with her words at the beginning: “One thing all these works have in common, they all combine layers of different realities as well as techniques – photographic, scanned objects, digital painting, painting and layers of ideas and emotions.” The pieces in this collection explore Sainte-Marie’s development as a digital artist as well as her  Aboriginal identity.”

Buffy Sainte-Marie is one of the finest songwriters of her generation (“Universal Soldier”, “Til it’s time for you to go” – shush, I’m a secret romantic). She IS a trailblazer in technology and intent (Steve Loft’s ideas of an “aesthetics of resistance” from Steeling the Gaze matter here). She’s worked in digital media since the beginning, nearly, with programs like PixelPaint. She deserved a large solo show at the Mendel, not Joni “paint myself as Van Gogh” Mitchell. Institutions are idiotic, oftentimes: instead she was blacklisted, targeted by individuals such as Lyndon Johnson.

Self Portrait is one of the more striking images in the space, with its rich deep colours and impenetrable blacks, and the power of her gaze staring out at you, larger than life yet making fierce eye contact. Wesakechak The Trickster is as gripping, as it mimics in appearance a black and white photograph (which we always associate with “reality”, and it’s fitting that Sainte-Marie jokes that this is the “only known photo of the Trickster”). That it suggests something bodily, maybe a little lewd, maybe a little crude, is only appropriate for any depiction of the Trickster. He’s a “sacred fool” who crosses many Native legends (Edward Poitras has explored this as well, as clever and cunning Coyote, and I can’t help but think Adrian Stimson’s Buffalo Boy is of the same family). There’s an aspect of history both immediate and older, of references that are both contemporary and ancient. This manifests in the multiple “beings” or “possible futures” within The Mohawk Warrior Contemplates His Future. It seems like the “anniversary”, if I can put it that way, of the Oka “crisis” was to be ignored just like any aspect of  history that doesn’t fit with the larger, Harper Gov’t ™ narrative, but perhaps that’s just in line with the ignoring of INM, too. This sentiment appears in the blistering colours of Pink Village, which Sainte-Marie has described as images of elders floating above a valley, “wisdom bearing witness to destruction”.

Some works – such as Elder Brothers – use photographs from the 1880s, a period that harkens back to Edward Curtis and the ethnographic notions of “studying” a supposedly “dying” race. The black and white figures are awash in a landscape that is pixelated and bright, almost moving and alive. When looking at this work with a fellow artist / curator, he made the analogy of pixels as beads, as an image that is larger in size and meaning being made of smaller parts.

Not all the works are successful, as I’m not a fan of the dolphin image, but maybe that’s because it seems disjointed from the other political works, and I include the self portraits within that. But it’s a strong show, in a gallery space that, in it’s architecture, for the works to suffuse the space but still stand on their own. Sixteen Million Colours is up all summer: go see it often, and take a walk outside at Wanuskewin, and think about site and history, truth and lies and “where” we are now.

This week’s radio show is here, people: and this came to me later, after I’d done the show, but here’s some information on an exhibition at the Void Gallery (and an image), and an image from Judy Chartrand’s exhibition at aka that opens this Friday.

From June 6^th – 30^th, void gallery is showing Elemental Turnings, woodturning by Rod Peterson, Bernie Bober, and Debra McLeod. Rod Peterson, chair of the Saskatchewan Craft Council Board of Directors, has organized this show for void. Residing in small Saskatchewan communities, the artists draw on their connection to and respect for nature in creating these handmade works, most from birch wood and birch burls (as they put it, “the warts that grow on trees”). All are juried members of the Saskatchewan Craft Council. A reception will be heldSaturday, June 22^nd, from 3 – 5 pm.

Here’s this week’s radio show, people. Enjoy. I mention a number of events, as this Friday is frenetic with activity, and a few things that are closing and a few things that are opening soon. I’ll be adding a few things to the site over the next week, including a few reviews, but it’s been a frenetic week.

Here’s this week’s radio show people: I talk about Ellen Moffat, Lucas Soi, and a few other things of note. You can listen to it here.

Here’s this week’s radio show, where I mention two specific things, in terms of Wanuskewin’s exhibition of Buffy Sainte-Marie (the image below is from that show) and the exhibition and adjunct programming at the SCC and the exhibition in the Affinity Gallery there, which is all about the anniversary of their Dimensions exhibition. Enjoy.

Spring is when this, ahem, young man’s fancy turns to ladies – and their paintings, of course. Perhaps it’s due to the Dreaming Painting panel, that featured several artists I’ve mentioned before whose paintings I hope you saw (Janet Werner, Mélanie Rocan) and another still currently on display in the city (Tammy Salzl, Into the Woods, at AKA). Maybe the words of Kim Gordon, late of Sonic Youth, are rattling around in my head too, as to how women make natural rebels as they’re still treated as second-class citizens. Narrative is a major touchstone for all three of the artists I mentioned already, and they’ll tell their own stories, thanks very much.

Salzl’s works at AKA are – like Rocan’s – about her place in the world (both are mothers) and how we position ourselves within it. Some of her points from Dreaming Painting (brought to you by AKA, College / Kenderdine galleries and the Mendel) speak to how she “mediates alienation through beauty and narration” in an “operatic tableaux”, that are almost like Grimm Bros. fairy tale illustrations.” “The uncanny, the grotesque, the monstrous skewed forms [are] set in a darker space”, though still a kind of “familiar storybook setting”, that “slows the viewer down”, or “disconcerts the viewer”. Yet she makes them as “aesthetically beautiful as possible”.  Salzl framed her work in Into the Woods as a response to “our current psychosis as owners, not gatekeepers, or stewards, of our planet”.

I also enjoyed Tammy’s talk for the simplicity of her statement that she “says things that are important to me through paint.”

AKA is dominated by several large works, with female figures either fearsome (The Chorus, with her multiple breasts, birthing of animals, and a retinue that would make any Maenad proud), or superficially quiet (Familial Ties, with a girl reclining on a couch – until you see the anatomically correct heart she holds like a lover’s token, as though it bores her, now. Or Etiäinen, where the flowing, voluminous dress seems to shift from pretty, girly pink to raw and juicy entrails…). Salzl’s people are fleshy: their joints, knees, knuckles all seem inflamed, reminding me of the late, and much lamented, Lucien Freud.

My insistence upon narrative and contempt for (most) abstraction is well known (though I’ve been accused of mellowing, since my “departure” from that leprous house known as the U of S Art dept, and the Day-Glo fish paintings of the “head of painting”). But I’d also assert that I spend a lot of time with work that fails, to me, as it’s often just as important to gauge why and how it fails, as it’s all part of the narrative of contemporary art in this city. You can’t understand the importance of the work of Salzl, unless you understand the prophylactic that is SK karaoke modernism – and my mind is more open than it’s acolytes, as I found with Penny Leach’s exhibition Edgy.

This is at the new space occupied by Darrell Bell Gallery, in downtown Saskatoon. It’s a schizophrenic show. There’s works that breach my certainty about the failure of abstraction and other works that should be ignored. There are small works of horses that illustrate how, in Dreaming Painting, the question of the freedom to (quoting the American painter Susan Rothenberg) paint a horse if needed, free of accusations of abandoning the “genuine” painting of abstraction, is vital.

The large abstracts are bold: the titles are mostly from rock songs, and god, don’t read the statement (Creed, Nickelback, my lord), but the strong slashes and globs and dabs that manifest the hand of the painter here are lovely. The rough whites and deep blues of Edgy, the strong and audaciously yellowy composition of she lives her life like a bird in flight and who will be her, the grey / green industrial dirty wasteland air of you’re dirty, sweet and you’re my girl (I SAID don’t read the titles, but hey, you’ll know the ones to look at…), the delicate, almost pin prick like white dabs on strong at the broken places – these are works that are better than anything you saw in the Optimism of Colour, that manufactured myth of Perehudoff at the Mendel.

Pay no mind to the still lifes: there are some scabby, painterly marks there, but they pale next to the aforementioned abstracts. Yes, I said that.

Both Edgy and Into the Woods are up for awhile: they are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and act and speak in different ways. Go see both.

Here’s this week’s radio show, with information on opportunities for studio visits / interactions with two visiting curators / writers, and some info on upcoming events and current events at SCYAP. Enjoy.