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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Tom Sherman has a great rant about video in the current issue of Canadian Art. "Fuck film," he says, "The dead ideas of film are being heaped onto video. Cinematic history is like a ball and chain." This evangelical stance is pretty entertaining. I can't tell for sure how tongue-in-cheek he means to be, but I'm guessing this posture is somewhat self-conscious. Sherman is sophisticated, and he knows video. He has been insightfully pushing the medium for nearly its entire 40 year history. He also says:
Art is a perceptual and intellectual activity conducted by people who question and often despise the status quo. In the 21st century reality is defined by layer upon layer of media, often by media stacked high upon one another, unattached to any absolute truth (no matter how momentary and fleeting any sense of truth may be). Video is not only the best medium for critiquing television and cinema, its media next of kin, it is also a perceptual, philosophical instrument for questioning reality in broader terms, for finding problems with the way we connect with the world, and doing something about it.
Goodreads has posted a C Magazine article by Emily Vey Duke titled "Suffering, Empathy, Art and the Greater Good." I love Vey Duke's writing for it's open-heartedness and genuine striving. I like that she is casting around for ways to better connect art with a non-art-educated public. I disagree, however, that there is something inherently wrong with teaching Duchampian nominalism. Also, I believe a healthy suspicion of art tropes about beauty and truth is not only a beneficial trait, but imperative to a genuine and communicative expression of either beauty or truth. In my student days it was an over-reliance on emotion, direct expression, machismo, and navel-gazing therapeutic personal brain barfs that seemed to be dragging art into a murky and inaccessible quagmire. Now I see Vey Duke calling for us to value the "explicitly emotional in art as highly as we value the ambiguously clever" and my instincts are to cry out No! Gawd, spare us the myopic whinging and purging of a bunch of young artists' personal angst.
At the same time I recognise what seems to be a systemic lack of rigour and ambition (and I would not exclude my own practice, especially considering a recent rash of afternoon napping). I chalk this up to the legacy of post-modern slacker-type despair ... in which making anything at all was seen as somehow heroic in the face of the perceived (I've always believed incorrectly) abject meaninglessness of all symbols. Furthermore, a crappy-looking aesthetic was required as a sort of apology, an acknowledgement that the artist was aware of the sheer audacity of saying anything at all. After the cold brash onslaught of deconstruction, an intimate personal approach was necessary..."please don't take my little art offering too seriously, it's just my two-cents worth of pain and insight."
Fortunately artists like Vey Duke and others have taken up symbols afresh as considered and effective tools for art communication. Hearts are back on sleeves and this is probably a very good thing. I am just wary of current trends of creeping anti-intellectualism. Expertise has become a bad word in the art world, and this is a problem. If you believe in your work, then there is nothing wrong with working really hard to achieve excellence in your field.
For the most part, I agree with Vey Duke. My plea to artists (and I plead with myself here as well) would be: don't be ashamed to work hard for your art. Don't sell yourself short by presenting self-effacing shoddy work if you have in you an idea that is excellent. Don't hold your own intelligence in check, and be brutally honest with yourself and apply your own criteria to determine what is good enough.
This is a montage of our recent "exhibition in progress" at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. I apologise to curator Corinna Ghaznavi and fellow artists Gordon Hicks and Rebecca Diederichs for the poor quality of these snapshots... believe me the art looked great. The day was open and fun with lots of good discussion. Those folks in Sudbury know a lot about science and art! I showed video on two screens, and lots of working sketches on bulletin boards. I collected drawings of neutrinos from people who had time to stop and hang out. Gordon had a spinning loop projected that he tweaked and teased into all kinds of shapes throughout the day. Rebecca made a collage on the spot with images she generated on the computer, prodding at the question of what happens when neutrinos pass through matter. There were also lots of balloons popping. The Schroedinger's (Balloon) Cat project was an excellent ice breaker. Each balloon had a cat sticker inside, half of them live cats, half of them dead cats. Here's how our sign read:
The Black Box
| The Balloon
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In the interest of privacy I won't name the folks in the pictures above. But thanks so much, you were all great!