Cybele Young: You won't find it here

Cybele Young has now posted one of her stop action videos on YouTube. She tells me more are to come in the near future.



Previous related post here.

Big Blue Brain

Chris Christoffels and José Roland's giant inflated polyester brain, installed atop the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, for the exhibition "InstruMENTAL"

"A giant human brain will hover above the museum’s roof-top terrace with its panoramic view of the city. Like a symbol of thought, the installation will be visible from near and far, and will reinforce the listed building’s physical presence. At night, it will resemble a large luminescent blue cloud."

Click here for an interactive web page mapping the various brain regions involved in the perception of rhythm, melody, pitch and timbre. Slightly oversimplified science, but the supremely goofy soundtrack makes up for it.

Nobuo Kubota Accepts Governor General's Award

Please note: the following video is NOT Nobuo Kubota's GG acceptance speech (but wouldn't that have been fun!).




The above is a clip from Kubota's sound poetry performance at Proposta 2001 in Barcelona.

Kubota was born in 1932 in Vancouver, and came to Toronto as a young man to study architecture at U of T. He practiced architecture for 10 years before turning his attention to sculpture in the early 70s. Most of his sculptural works have been installations which focus implicitly or explicitly on sound and language.

Kubota played saxophone as a member of the Artists Jazz Band, but ultimately had to abandon the instrument when he developed a painful auditory sensitivity. He later joined the CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective, formed in 1975 by Michael Snow and featuring a revolving group of artist/musicians over the years). As a performer, Kubota uses a range of extended vocal techniques which explore the boundaries of the human voice. Influenced by Kabuki and Noh theatrical traditions, his facial expressions are deliberate, exaggerated, and made all the more humourous by the maintenence of a neutral, deadpan deportment in the interstitial silences of his performance.

Kubota describes himself as an practitioner of Intermedia: the movement of an idea from one form (e.g., sound) and continuing into another form (e.g., sculpture).
Here is a clip of work created in collaboration with fellow Intermedia artist and poet Mark Sutherland. The oval voiceprint of Kubota's vocals is a real-time spectrogram: no manipulation or animation is involved. (see the post re: June Callwood Park for a fascinating use of the voiceprint in landscape architecture).



2009 Governor General's Award Winners (Visual and Media Arts)

The winners of the 2009 Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts have been announced. The laureates are, from left, Tony Urquhart, Raymond Moriyama, Robert Morin, Kevin Lockau, Gordon Smith, Nobuo Kubota, Rita McKeough, Kim Ondaatje and John Greer. (Photograph: Martin Lipman)

The awards have recognize the following contributions to artistic life in Canada:



• Kim Ondaatje and Tony Urquhart, recognized jointly with an Outstanding Contribution award for their work on behalf of CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens). 


• Toronto architect Raymond Moriyama, designer of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum and Science North in Sudbury, Ont. 



• Video artist Robert Morin of Montreal



• Glass artist Kevin Lockau of Bancroft, Ont., who wins the Saidye Bronfman Award for fine crafts



• Ninety-year-old Vancouver painter Gordon Smith



• Zen-inspired Toronto sculptor and musician Nobuo Kubota


• Calgary-based installation and performance artist Rita McKeough

• Nova Scotia sculptor John Greer


As a gallerist , I am very very proud to have shown the work of Tony Urquhart as well as Kevin Lockau.

Urquhart is absolutely one of my favourite Canadian painters. His self sufficient and wise attitude toward the artistic process is both grounding and inspiring: he is fond of saying that the great thing about never having been in fashion is that you never go out of fashion. (As I've noted previously, however, I believe really good painting will be very much in fashion again soon, as we generally tire of excess, vanity and greed as guiding principles in both the art world and the financial world.) Urquhart's career has spanned more than 50 years and he has received many awards and honours for his painting and sculpture. However, his GG, which he shares with Kim Ondaatje, is an Outstanding Contribution award for their work on behalf of CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation / Le Front des artistes canadiens).

It is the award to Kevin Lockau which I believe will generate the most gossip within the art community... or certainly within the craft community. The GG for craft (aka the Saidye Bronfman Award) typically has gone to an artist for whom technical prowess is as important, and sometimes more important, than concept. Lockau is certainly capable of virtuosity when it comes to technical matters; however it simply is not what drives him. He played an important role in developing the glass studio at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, where he taught for 20 years. Over his career, he invented three hot glass casting techniques, producing an unique material which he incorporates in his sculpture with carved granite and welded or cast metal elements. His work is raw and urgent, combining animal, natural and human forms. Lockau has largely eschewed the gallery "system", and has never been persuaded that saleability is a suitable motive for artistic creation. He chooses to live and work in relative isolation, on a plot of land outside Bancroft, Ontario. This rugged region, where rural farmland gives way to wilderness, has been his muse. The making of glass leaves an unfortunately large carbon footprint, and this is a conundrum for Lockau. He has been driven to reconcile his love of glass-as-matter with the fact that the process of creating this material is far from ecologically sound. This conflict is embodied in the raw and energized nature of his sculpture.


Lockau was nomnated for the GG by Lafreniere and Pai, his Ottawa gallery. Hats off to them: I am one of this gallery's many admirers. They support a roster of artists who consistently challenge and push traditional boundaries in the "art v craft" debate.

I Believe in Kindness: June Callwood Park

(Readers outside Canada may not know the work of activist and journalist June Callwood. Please click here to read about this gracious, generous and inspiring woman.)

A new park in Toronto to honour the memory of June Callwood is scheduled for completion in 2011. Before she died in 2007, Callwood knew that such a memorial was in the works, and she requested that the park be made with young children in mind. She loved babies: "I think that they're so perfect… They're just full of God, if God is your goodness and your decency and your capacity for affection." She believed in children: "Most people will do anything to help a child and that's the way the human race is meant to be. We're meant to be a tribe. And when it works, it just makes your heart leap." She was spiritual but not religious: "I am missing a formal religion, but I am not without a theology, and my theology is that kindness is a divinity in motion."

The international design competition for the park was awarded to the architecture and landscape design firm "gh3". The the result is a proposal so beautifully, brilliantly appropriate that it moved me to tears. Partners Pat Hansen and Diana Gerrard give credit to architecture student Joel Di Giacomo (remember that name!) for the idea which became the conceptual key to the design.

"The design starts with a simple desire: to physically embody June Callwood's voice in an intensified urban forest."

To achieve this, a digital voiceprint was made from a vocal sample taken from the last interview Ms. Callwood granted before her death. Responding to a question about her religious beliefs, Ms. Callwood said, "I believe in kindness."

This voiceprint provided the "map" for the park, which will be situated on a narrow and neglected greensward adjacent to old Fort York. The voiceprint itself will be physically rendered in granite strips, and the spaces between intensely planted with trees. The park is divided into 6 evocative zones, each engaging different aspects of a child's sense of play: imagination, contemplation, movement and exploration.


The elements include a Puddle Plaza , a bright pink rubber Puzzle Garden, a shiny, curvy stainless steel Maze, a Pink Field (also of rubber), Tree Strip Gardens, and Ephemeral Pools.

The Puzzle Plaza, perfect for climbing, jumping and balancing.

The Maze, and the granite strips which record the voiceprint.

The Pink Field.

Park benches will be translucent and contain LEDs with motion detectors, lighting up when someone sits down, and glowing at night.


The Ephemeral Pools will have a geo-thermal heating system to create a low-lying fairyland mist in winter, and providing an above-freezing micro-climate.

Absolute perfection.

(related post: Play is Child's Work)

Angry Artist #2: Julia Roberts doing Christian Bale doing Jorge Zontal

Thirty years ago, the f-word was reserved for "special" situations. Now it is sprinkled around like salt on a tortilla chip. Too bad: it has lost much of its expressive value as a result of overuse. Did you see Julia Roberts getting all Christian Bale-ish on Letterman? Poised, demure and ladylike. What a waste of a good word.

Back in 1979 when "fuck" had more meaning, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson of General Idea made a video taking on the artist's relationship with mass media and the marketplace. In the process, they neatly skewer art critics, art prizes, and popular cliches of the artist as wild child. Then, Jorge Zontal delights with what is, and probably always will be, the finest artist rant ever to be recorded. Very, very funny, but also a serious and prescient commentary on the uneasy relationship between art and fame.

Angry Artist #1

I usually find myself getting peevish and cranky around the Ides of March. It is not that I feel sorry for Julius Caesar. It has to do with Daylight Saving Time and the weather in southern Ontario. Daylight Saving Time: a brutal and senseless exercise in mass sleep deprivation resulting in traffic accidents, medical errors, spousal arguments, etc., etc. The weather in southern Ontario: looks like spring, but it's a trick. Do not put your boots away and do not get your bike out of storage. Trust me. Another blizzard is just around the corner. Not even the prospect of green beer at my local pub can make me feel better today. No. That makes me feel much, much worse. Add it to my mid-March list of annoyances.

Best to channel that aggression by posting the following:

A man presented to the emergency room of a Vancouver hospital complaining of headache six hours after having been punched in the eye during a fight. A CT scan revealed the presence of a 10.5 cm long paintbrush, which had entered the brain through the left eye (bristles first, I might add).

The case was reported in a 2005 issue of Acta Neurochirurgica by four surgeons at the University of British Columbia (Drs. Mandat, Honey, Peters and Sharma).

"The authors report a case of penetrating head injury that presented with a deceptively mild complaint. To our knowledge, it is the first report of a paintbrush penetrating the brain. The patient reported being punched in the left eye and presented with a minor headache, swelling around the left orbit, a small cut on the cheek and slightly reduced left eye abduction. After radiological evaluation, a penetrating head injury was diagnosed. Under general anesthesia, through a lateral eyelid incision a 10.5 cm long paintbrush, which had penetrated from the left orbit to the right thalamus, was removed. No post-operative infection was seen at six months follow-up. This brief report serves to highlight that penetrating brain injury can occur without neurological deficit and that a minimally invasive surgical approach was successful in avoiding any complications."

Do not annoy, belittle, pester, or otherwise piss off an artist, at least not while he/she is wielding a paintbrush.

That was cathartic. I feel better already.

(This case has also been blogged within the scientific/medical community here and here.)

Ted Amsden: Untended Spaces

Amsden is an "emerging artist" with two decades of professional experience. He lives and works in an idyllic village in southern Ontario. There, he has been staff photographer for the local newspaper for years, his usual subject matter being kid's hockey games, sweet couples celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, brainy scholarship winners, leaf-raking in the autumn... all that is personal, important and uniquely newsworthy in the life of a small town.

Interesting, then, that when Amsden goes on vacation, he trolls the urban brownfields and rustbelts of Canada and the U.S., finding and shooting abandoned industrial spaces with results that are beautiful, poignant and oddly redemptive. Over the years, he has built a strong body of work, privately sharing it with friends and fellow photographers, only occasionally and without fanfare exhibiting it in local photography festivals.

Given the undeniable timeliness of his images, it seems fitting that the work is now reaching a wider audience.



"I like to go where I'm not invited.. looking for beauty in all the wrong places.. got bush wacked by Poison Ivy.. lost in corridors fit for fright night movies.. loving/disgusted by the mess of it all... the disease of unkempt surfaces.. the nasty trails of vandals.. surfaces everywhere mutating, melting, rusting, chemically on the go with those nearby.. the creep of Nature coming first to touch, then twine, finally cover.. I tiptoed, crunched, stumbled, climbed over living breathing museums that off gas, mutate, expand and shrink according to the rules of entropy."


"...and as always... the beautifully invasive, quietly swarming hands of Nature reaching into shadowy untended spaces, a constant reminder of who really owns this planet."

Ted Amsden: Untended Spaces
March 12 to 31, 2009
A.K. Collings Gallery

Huh? Wow!

This week's final post on the twin topics of collecting and taste.

Peter Schjeldahl is an art critic and educator whose writing is grounded in scholarship, yet is accessible and a sheer delight to read.

A couple of weeks ago, New Yorker magazine online published a series of questions about art posed by members of the general public, with Schjeldahl's answers. Here is one of my favourite exchanges:

Q: Modern and postmodern art is often a subject of ridicule. How can the amateur make inroads into the somewhat opaque traditions of twentieth-century art?
Logan Longbourne
Auckland, New Zealand

A: Start anywhere. Look. Wonder why any given art is the way it is and not some other way. The artist made certain choices, producing certain effects. Walk back the cat, as they say in espionage. Perhaps read art historians and critics for clues—but not solutions. Your own pleasure must be your goal and guide. A great deal of art, of any period, is ridiculous. But you won’t be a fair judge unless you consent to regard each work as sincere and intelligent until proven otherwise. (Developing taste speeds up the process, but it’s still a process.) If you hate a work on first sight, fine. That’s an authentic response. But stick around. Keep looking. You will have further responses. You might end up hating the work even more, but with an enriched understanding of both it and yourself. Very often, our judgment evolves the other way: what we think we like, at first, disappoints upon contemplation. The artist Edward Ruscha promulgated a handy rule in this regard: “Bad art is ‘Wow! Huh?’ Good art is ‘Huh? Wow!'

(photo credit: Alex Remnick, courtesy Thames and Hudson, via)

Next week, the topic will be "Obsolescence". (click to see a previous, related posting)

Overheard in the Gallery

"I may not know much about art, but I know what I like."

If I had a loonie for every time I've heard this, I'd be able to buy....maybe not a Peter Doig, but I am sure you catch my drift.

I think what many people mean when they say "I know what I like" is "I like what I know". The real rewards come from exploring the edges of what you know, and then stepping beyond those edges. Contrary to the conventional image of the "unapproachable gallerist", most are very happy to talk about their passion to anyone who expresses even the slightest interest. So, when you visit a gallery, ask questions: you'll have more fun!

E.H. Gombrich ("The Story of Art") approached the question of taste in a characteristically gracious manner:

"The old proverb that you cannot argue about matters of taste may well be true, but that should not conceal the fact that taste can be developed. This is a matter of common experience which everybody can test in a modest field. To people who are not used to drinking tea one blend may taste exactly like the other. But if they have the leisure, will and opportunity to search out such refinements as there may be, they may develop into true 'connoisseurs' who can distinguish exactly what type and mixture they prefer, and their greater knowledge is bound to add to their enjoyment of the choicest blend."

(If Gombrich had used 'scotch' as his example rather than 'tea', then I'd have succeeded in mentioning 'scotch' twice in this blog in less than a month. There now, I've done it!).

By the way, a loonie is currently worth about three quarters of a U.S. dollar, and a little more than half a Euro.

Gertrude Stein, Collector

Gertrude Stein lived a fabulous life, choosing to direct all her financial resources to the purchase of art, and to the sustenance and support of an extraordinary circle of friends. Art, literature, companionship and really good food were her priorities, through thick and thin.

Asked by one visitor how she had managed to build her famous art collection, she replied, "My dear, look at how I am dressed!".

Herb and Dorothy Vogel

Megumi Sasaki's award winning documentary, "Herb and Dorothy" was a hit this weekend at the Reel Artists Film Festival in Toronto. Click on her name to see a trailer of the documentary.

A photo of the Vogels has been the inspirational screen-saver on my laptop for some time now. Theirs is a story of obsession and commitment, and proof that "you don't have to be a Rockefeller to collect art". He was a postal clerk. She was a librarian. With their modest means, the couple managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history.

The Indianapolis Museum Of Art has been one of 50 institutions to receive works from the Vogel's collection:



Sasaki's comments on the making of her documentary:

"From the beginning, my intention was to make something other than a so-called "art film." I wanted to capture how these two ordinary people accomplished the extraordinary in the field of art collecting. The film is about the power of passion and love, and a celebration of life.

The story of Herb and Dorothy Vogel is unique not only because of their avant garde vision and discernment as collectors, but also their love and dedication. It is through their loving partnership that the viewer truly experiences this remarkable story.

The Vogels' message is also about access. Art is not limited to the elite few. You don't have to be wealthy or an art school graduate to enjoy art. If you are interested in collecting art, you don't have to follow trends or others' advice, just listen to your own voice. Trust your eyes and instinct. Simply take the time to look, look and look.

In today's world, where art is treated as another commodity and a work's investment value takes precedence over its artistic value, Herb and Dorothy offers us an important question: What is it to appreciate and collect art?

My fortunate encounter with these beautiful people has changed my view of, and appreciation for, art and life."

Dearly Departed

David Mirvish Books has passed over to the other side. The end is now official, and so I give you three final offerings on book related art.

1): Barbara Balfour at Art Metropole


Luminous photographs of themed bookshelves.
Also, for a mere $15, an accordion-fold booklet that documents the 7 prints which constitute the installation. (refer back to on the benefits and virtues of collecting artist books). The booklet does not record the bookshelf titles, but the staff at Art Metropole will cheerfully print them out for you. Do ask: the titles are an explanatory essential to getting the full gist of Balfour's work.

Barbara Balfour: "Ex Libris, 2008"
Yellow Shelf
Writing Shelf
Characters
Doubles
Place and Time (Proust)
Everything
Death Shelf

2): Novel Ideas
: Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
(opening later this week) 7 March 2009 - 31 May 2009.
Featuring works by Adam David Brown, Ian Carr-Harris, Brian Dettmer, Paul de Guzman, Alexandre Itin, Nicholas Jones, Georgia Russell, and Robert The.
This group exhibition--including key works from Oakville Galleries' permanent collection--celebrates a fascination with the bound page and its inclination towards artistic re-interpretation.
Some examples of Adam David Brown's altered books:



3) Book of the Dead of Amen-em-hat
Royal Ontario Museum: Feb 28 to March 10, 2009
The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead has been conserved and will be displayed in its full beauty for the first time in over 2,300 years. It contains a collection of hymns, spells and instructions for the after-life.
Perhaps it also contains some advice for independent bookstores.