1. Drawings. Powerplant Gallery, Toronto. June 24 to September 4, Annie Pootoogook
She uses history, and family politics, to extend and compress what was taught by her colonizers. The third generation working in Kingnait, she not only depicts the daily exterior world of her life, but the interior world as well. All of that said, the drawings here have an amazing formal skill. The colours are perfect, the line work is revelatory, and the wit has a tender edge. Best work there, the large, brightly coloured drawing of people shopping for frozen foods, in the local supermarket, in the foreground a woman in a traditional parka. The worst thing, about the works was the racist bullshit that emerges when women of colour emerge as cultural warriors, suggesting that she won rewards, not for her consummate skill, but because of her ethnicity or gender.

2. Campaign Ads, Election Cycle, North Carolina. Vern Robinson
The Baroque end of Rovian dirty tricks, filled with the best of overwrought writing, obvious musical cues, and the usual racism./misogyny/homophobia. Highlights include mariachi bands when the word Mexican is used and calling himself the black Jesse Helms. Link here: http://www.vernonrobinson.com/illegalimmigration.shtml

3. Anon. Photos of Fires, the Firehouse museum, Port Rupert, BC
A cramped building, adjacent to the firehouse, like an obsessive garage collection of junk, filled with the usual ephemera of small town museums, but 10 photos on the walls proved to be among the best serial installations I've seen. The photos were drugstore prints, in wal-mart frames, of one fire, per decade of the 20th century. The same buildings, the same flames licking out of the same upper floors, the midst of disaster. The photos are examples of necessary but unpleasant work, and the line, with so little variation, suggest the slow push and pull of small town life. They have improved the waterfront, built a large museum of first nation work, and have monuments to Canadians, Sailors, and the Japanese. But nothing matching the tension found in these works.

4. Bootlegs, Katharine Mulherin, Toronto, Ontario, Eric Doeringer
Watching these on the walls of Mulherin is like watching a puppy being house broken. The theory is easy to understand, and talk about: Warholian multiples, Benjamin in a digital age, the problems of late capital in a hot house art market, problematizing the cult of identity, and all of that said, there was something really sexy, really cool, about seeing these pocket sized versions of ArtForum masterpieces, at prices even the most broke could afford.

5. Camille Paglia writing for US Magazine
This is the reactionary punch line, of 25 years of pop culture, even better because it was online, and they were talking about the sacred power of Britney's cunt.

6. http://www.tinyvices.com/Ryan_McGinley_Sun_and_Health_17
McGinley is no longer shocking, but he never really was. This image is kind of heartbreaking for me, because it is so beautiful. The hand and the penis make the same triangle, as the hand and the cigarette, or the fly of the blue jeans. The red and blue provide a kind of proscenium arch, so we can see the penis better. The penis is the same colour as the wall, or the visual movement, of the penis, and the piss, a kind of diagonal line towards oblivion. It might seem like a cop out, to talk about such an intimate and sexually charged image as a formal masterpiece, but it doesn't seem that sexually charged to me, much less so then the other ones we can look at, for example Tillman's AA breakfast, or Mapplethorpe's man in the suit, one who never figured out line and the other who never figured out colour.

7. 64 Videos, One A Day For 64 Days Naomi Leibowitz http://naomileibowitz.com/projects/ofNothing/videos/index.html
I think that it completes many ideas of recent photography, or at least extends thems. By making videos of road trips, cooking, dancing, but off camera, or obliquely, she subtly comments on photographers like Goldin and her followers, as much as she talks about the You Tube culture of digitally videotaping anything, Would be less fantastic, if it wasn't so heartwarmingly and tender in its presentation, banality without being clinical, cold, or vicious.

8. Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola, Film.
Assumed by many (mostly male) critics to be two and a half hours of vacuous fluff, didn't listen to the first couple of minutes, where the Gang of Four, shout out the agenda: "The problem of Leisure, What to do With Pleasure". A film about what happens when you have money when no one else does, and also a slaughter of politics as usual, a brilliant film that upends how we view not only their bourgeois, but ours. The best bits are not the large set pieces, but the tiny details, when patterns of dresses and wallpapers match, or the costumes of side players, or the bones on aristocratic dining tables. This is an important and misunderstood masterpiece.

9. State of Emergency, Steve Miesel, Vogue Italia, 2006. http://community.livejournal.com/foto_decadent/1403878.html
Of the same emotional tenor (or terror?) as the Coppola film, these images, of models looking very beautiful, while their civil rights are violated, was one of the more transgressive experiments in form this year, in fact so transgressive in making violence beautiful, it reminded me of David and Marat.

10. Karbon Moos http://www.flickr.com/people/karbon/
A photographer, from rural Montana, talented in an artless way, only discovered via flickr, her pictures of daily farm labour make me worry I am being exotic, but some are so lovely and tough, in a fiery, complete way. Reminds me of my mother and grandmother, and all of my relatives who were farmers. The best work, is of her dog and her horse, the animals infused with an understanding that urbanites cant really understand.

Ha Ha Anthony! You just put #9 in there to get a rise out of me again. And I repeat what I said when you first blogged it:

re: vogue italia and Death of Marat -

No. Just not. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Wrongo. What the Fuck. Hardly.

(I may elaborate later) Otherwise, a great list. I've got to rent Marie Antoinette, thanks for reminding me.

- L.M. 12-18-2006 9:28 pm

The ones of the Nikita-ish blond on the shooting range are awesome.
The arrest ones are just funny to me, sorry--the bony fashion models so obviously don't belong in those pictures.
I remember Meisel's "young pr0n" shoots from a few years back--really great stuff. Such a hair fine line between commentary and exploitation.
- tom moody 12-18-2006 9:41 pm