The A Word

In Raising Frankenstein: Curatorial Education and its Discontents, one of the aforementioned “Discontents” admits that they started at skepticism and ended with being appalled at the blatant disregard for any kind of public (non academic) audience in “teaching” curating. This Diogenes continues with the assertion that curatorial studies programs seem to offer less than the “outdated” Art History degrees, both in genuine knowledge and in applicable skills. Less “isms”, more history, to paraphrase Paglia.

A critical but relevant starting point with two shows both on the U of Saskatchewan campus:  Animal, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi at the College Galleries, and Twelve Point Buck (a collaborative duo of Leila Armstrong and Chai Duncan), with their show, Flexus Maximus. The former isn’t the first curatorial project by Ghaznavi that has been in the College Gallery space, but easily the most successful: divided between the two floors, the stronger work is upstairs. Tom Dean’s dogs seem very playful and active for cast works, and I confess to a desire to scratch their heads every time I’m in the gallery. An Whitlock’s wall installation  Crow(d) presents a murder of crows, with heads thrusting outward from a wall, some cawing at you, some silent, all suggesting the same action and activity that you get from Dean’s aforementioned Bitch Pack. John McEwan’s grotesquely massive skull (with its own convenient dolly, titled Teko with Broken Base) is more engaging than the flashing lights in his accompanying work Shunt. The rusted and wasted nature of the skull suggests that the crows are laughing at the arrogance of humanity, while the Bitch Pack waits to “mark” their comments in a more pissy (literally and metaphorical) manner

Downstairs, you’ll find Dagmar Dahle’s Rare-Common-Extinct is pleasing to the eye, while a number of other works in that lower space are less so: I suspect the show could have been halved in terms of the contributors, edited down to a very strong show, as opposed to one that oscillates between works worth your time and works that seem more research than art – Lyndal Osbourne’s obsessive gathering, for example (shhh, don’t tell the academy that they’re not the same thing).

This is a good point to go to Flexus Maximus at the Kenderdine Gallery space, presented by Twelve Point Buck: a show that I’m alternating between calling research without any art, or another playfully snide take upon the Canadian obsession with landscape painting. (An artist I admire greatly told me that his most hated form of art is landscape, as its usually banal both in execution and intent). The gallery is filled not with the works of Chai Duncan or Leila Armstrong (okay, a few), but with the works of Levine Flexhaugh, an “artist” whose images of the West are so standardized and so artificial that Glen Scrimshaw may feel he’s encountered his conceptual ancestor. His works can be found in most Western collections (by which I mean the Prairies), but his paintings are all so uniform that you find it hard to believe they weren’t mimeographed or made from a stencil – they are that alike. The usual assertions about the national imaginary happen here, that this is just a codifying of the landscape into consumable items, playing upon regionalist pride over taste. But my issue is in whether this is presented as a mockery of Flexhaugh or in a sense of the futility of all of us trying to capture or speak to our sites, in that history may not judge us so kindly. After all, if we find Flexhaugh to be a joke, maybe our grandchildren will wonder about artists who fill galleries with other people’s works. This may be in the literal case here, or in the karaoke of abstraction manufactured here, like saleable, safe products, lacking innovation and “taste” as egregiously as Flexhaugh (to our “modern” eyes). I say this as someone who recently installed a toilet in a gallery as homage to Marcel Duchamps, but I did that in envy, not disdain, and perhaps that is all the difference.

Both of these shows speak to how we position ourselves in the larger “landscape”, and with our co inhabitants – the animals that Ghaznavi puts at the centre of her show, and the same buck that appears in every Flexhaugh work, looking away from us – but also to how we see our place in the larger dialectic of geography and history. Ghaznavi states that “as representations these animals open up ways for us to think imaginatively about animals: not to anthropomorphize them but to locate both points of affinity and difference.” That affinity and difference is a point to bring to Flexus Maximus as well, but in whether or not we’re any less unreal or disconnected than he is, to our contemporary eyes.