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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I had a really great time at Subtle Technologies. Unfortunately I couldn't attend today cause I had to work. This meant I missed Donald Specter's interpretation of Waiting for Godot which is a little bit sad, and Frederic P. Schuller's take on physics as a picture of reality, which is downright heartbreaking, but Friday and Saturday were still awesome. I was really happy with my own performance. There's not much I can say about it today ...still decompressing. I used an overhead projector which was utterly satisfying, and I had a giant head on plywood with video running in the brain and eyes. I'm working on a web version of the talk. This little gif of Oppenheimer crying rocks looks both more slick and more dorky on video. Hightlights of the conference for me included:
- Juan Gruer's talk in which he quoted Rilke in German and then translated saying (I paraphrase): creatures see clearly, but human eyes are like a trap, that turn inward, our thoughts and interpretations a boundary between us and the world.
- Rob Goodman's sophisticated meta-take on the impossibility of reconstructing the harmonics of brass vases which Vitruvius suggested were placed in Greek theatres to enhance accoustics.
- Olaf Dreyer's excellently articulated quantum theory that space is not fundamental. Also all kinds of stress from the audience about entanglement, which was both entertaining and informative.
Also (important note) I plan to conduct my performative lecture again this summer so that those who were dissuaded by the fee might be able to come and check it out. Date & location TBA.
| The much awaited day has arrived... Hawkeye Parker's epic Everquest battle poem is now online at Clog! |  |
Check out the photo gallery of great looking fluid experiments by John Bush, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT.
This one:
, this one: 
, and this one: 
are my favourites. (Thanks to Zeina for the tip!)
Toronto's art and science conference, SubtleTechnologies is next week. Come for the whole conference, but don't miss my lecture/performance on Friday, May 27th at 11:00 am.
I'm a clod. lumpen. slow. myopic. I never remember to spellcheck, but worse, I don't remember to GOOGLE! And that's a problem if you are as thick as me, cause if you don't google you can go around whining that Toronto's best art journalist RM Vaughan's National Post column isn't available online when in fact it IS online and also he wrote something nice about you in it about a million years ago and you never knew. uuuuuuh. y'all can pull the feeding tube whenever you want.
thanks (again!) to Simpleposie for dragging me into the loop.
Simpleposie has posted details on the Canada Council's next Toronto "VISUAL ARTS INFORMATION SESSION ON THE NEW VISUAL ARTS PROGRAM FOR VISUAL ARTISTS". Gotta love them all caps. The council has to use 'em cause they come from the CAPital city of Canada! Uh, anyhow. The event is May 25th.
Last night I took part in a focus group at the Art Gallery of Ontario. They are working on a re-branding strategy to go with the big Gehry-induced physical transformation in 2008. They've invited various stakeholders to give input. My group was "artists." There's another "artists" group on Wednesday. In attendance last night were 8 artists, an outside facilitator, and Arlene Madell, the director of marketing and communications. Of the artists, 7 were white females between 35-45. Pretty well everyone in the group knew each other really well. As a bunch, we were kind of mean and negative. I hope the feedback was helpful, it was definitely impassioned and honest. Here are my favourites of the more positive, action-oriented suggestions that came up:
- Give more power and freedom to young curators with vision and excitement for contemporary art. We named names. I dunno if I should do that here. It seems like it would be a breach of confidence. If I change my mind I'll make an update.
- Host regular get-togethers for curators and programmers from galleries across Ontario, including artist-run centres, private galleries and public galleries, to compare notes about specifically what projects are upcoming and explore ways to work together.
- Expand on the good work that the education and outreach department is doing, particularly Teens Behind the Scenes and any like programs.
- Open an AGO bar and hold free weekly events there.
- Get excited about showcasing contemporary Canadian art to local, regional and international audiences, and tour contemporary shows around the country.
- De-accession works from the collection which are not relevant to current goals for the institution and channel that money into contemporary programming.
- Shed the small-time Upper Canadian museological stuffiness for some genuine, committed engagement with current Canadian art.
The City of Toronto is shooting itself in the foot again with a plan to penalise property owners for allowing graffiti to remain on their walls. Maybe city council didn't notice that all those other fun destination cities in the world have a bunch of cool art on their buildings? I guess the plan is to make sure that there's no free culture around for tourists and hipsters from out of town to soak in, thereby driving them onto public squares awash with the ambient glow of corporate billboards.
NOW magazine did a good piece (via TPSC) on the issue last week. I was apalled/amused at this non-savvy quote from Dennis Reid, chief curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario:
It sickens me when I see people spray-painting on old stone buildings. What the hell are they thinking? I can't imagine the citizenry wouldn't want to clean up the mess as much as we can, but at the same time, there are those occasional pieces that are inspired and we should be pausing over.NB: there's a public forum on what makes a beautiful city next week. details here.
Doug Saunders is writing a whole series of columns on the contemporary state of facism in Europe for the Globe and Mail. Last week was Italy, where facism seems to be generally on the rise, today's was Germany where it does not. Last week in Berlin there was an interesting, middleclass anti-neo-nazi march. Saunders wrote about it in the Globe on Monday:
The very presence of fascists, however marginal their movement, brought thousands of people onto the streets, with the sole intention of standing and blocking the Nazis' progress.As it happens, guest poster Gordon Hicks is in Berlin right now and he says Saunders' description is accurate. Here are some of Gordon's notes and pictures of the day...
"It would be the most enormous embarrassment to all Germans if these people were allowed to walk around on this day without being stopped," said Michael Philipps, 44, a soft-spoken academic who stood with hundreds of families and blocked the street in front of the Lustgarten -- the very spot where Hitler held his famous May rally almost exactly 70 years before.
Guest post #2 by Gordon Hicks:
This weekend's event: Neo-nazi's from the under-employed east march in Berlin. Anti-facists, lefties, skinheads and citizens also march to prevent the neos from marching. The police keep a heavily padded riot line between the two groups. Happy to report the anti's outnumber the facists by a large number (5 times or more).
The photo [above] is taken from the north side of Jannowitzbruke (bridge). The protesters are sitting about - I imagine just to block the possible march of the neos. The police line blocks anyone from crossing the river into the center of the protest area.
A quiet unease hangs about - not festive like last weekend's bash in Kreutzberg - the atmosphere is more grim—resolved, actually.
Theses photos are from Alexanderplaz - just north of the centre of the Neo-Nazi march and a five minute walk from the apartment where I am staying. Every once in a while the police troops would get a command and quick-march off to somewhere else, or quick-march back into the plaz.
Below can see the "World Time Clock" with it's groovy 60's motif on top.
The water cannon trucks and armored personel carriers stood ready on the side streets but, happily, didn't see action. I saw dozens of both kinds of military style vehicles around the area. The bulldozer shovels on the front have a cheerful little request: "Please Stand Clear".
- Guest poster Gordon Hicks
The following is a report from Berlin by my friend and colleague Gordon Hicks.
Guest post #1 from Gordon Hicks:
I was just reading your post about police and ideas of 'inherent friction'. Sunday was May 1st and that means the May Day celebrations/riots in Kreuzberg. Since the studio where I am working is right in the middle of Kreuzberg (at Bethanien) we got to wander around the neighbourhood and take it all in.
The police/people duality seemed much more formalized than I am used to. Both sides seem to understand a lot more about it than they have in my past experience.
Most of the day is a huge street party with music and people hanging out being mellow. The photo below was taken in front of the studio building (Bethanien) in the park. Turkish beat music came from the South, rock music from the North.
There was a phalanx of reds marching up and down the neighbourhood in what I guess is a random pattern. They passed by at least three times, each time the group getting larger. Clusters of riot police would go into quick step manouvres in order to get positioned on this or that street in anticipation of the parade passing. (Parade below)
Cops. All sorts. And I mean all sorts. Good Riot-Cops, Just-Doing-Our-Job Riot Cops, and Big-Mean-Motterfucker-In-Black Riot Cops. ( I chickened out taking photos of the last class when I saw them straight arm a passerby.)
-Guest Poster Gordon Hicks
What is it?
quicktime / photos
Readers of this blog will already be familiar with Mr. Nobody (a regular contributor in the comment threads). Well there's a big Mr. Nobody solo show opening on Friday night in Toronto. Here's the blurb:
Hello friends of nobody!
Mr. Nobody is coming out of hibernation for his spring exhibition at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects. Bring Mr. Nobody some luck this Friday the 13th!
'In the Hole'
(video installation and drawings)
May 13 - June 4
site: 1086 Queen West, upstairs
Gallery preview: Friday, May 13, 12-5pm.
Reception: Friday, May 13, 7-10 pm
HOURS: WED-SAT 12-5PM
The "Great Explainer," physicist and teacher Richard Feynman, speaking in 1964 at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (published under the title, "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society," in a collection of Feynman's essays, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Perseus Publishing, 1999) p.108-9:
...[T]here is a kind of responsibility which the scientists feel toward each other which you can represent as a kind of morality. What's the right way and the wrong way to report results? Disinterestedly, so that the other man is free to understand precisely what you are saying, and as nearly as possible not covering it with your desires. That this is a useful thing, that this is a thing which helps each of us to understand each other, in fact to develop in a way that isn't personally in our own interest, but for the general development of ideas, is a very valuable thing. And so there is, if you will a kind of scientific morality. I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word. That a description of a country made by the people of another country should describe that country in a disinterested way. ... Advertising, for example, is an example of a scientifically immoral description of the products. This immorality is so extensive that one gets so used to it in ordinary life, that you do not appreciate that it is a bad thing. And I think that one of the important reasons to increase the contact of scientists with the rest of society is to explain, and to kind of wake them up to this permanent attrition of cleverness of the mind that comes from not having information, or not having information always in a form which is interesting.
"Frightening" moral philosopher, Mary Midgley, in her book Science and Poetry (Routledge, 2001) p.84:
Current scientific concepts are not adapted to focusing on subjectivity. Indeed, many of them have been carefully adapted to exclude it, much like cameras with a colour filter. [...] Galileo and Descartes saw how badly the study of objects had been distorted by people who treated these objects as subjects, people who credited things like stones with human purpose and striving. So they ruled that physical science must be objective. And this quickly came to mean, not just that scientists must be fair, but that they should treat everything they studied only as a passive, insentient object.
We know that abstraction made possible three centuries of tremendous scientific advance about physical objects. Today, however, this advance has itself led to a point where consciousness has again to be considered. Enquiries are running against the limits of this narrow focus. In many areas, the advantages of ignoring ourselves have run out.
This has happend most notoriously in quantum mechanics, where physicists have begun to use the idea of an observer quite freely as a casual factor in the events they study. Whether or not this is the best way to interpret quantum phenomena, that development is bound to make people ask what sort of an entity an observer is, since Ocam's Razor has so far failed to get rid of it. This disturbance, however, is only one symptom of a growing pressure on the supposedly subject-proof barrier, a pressure that is due to real growth in all the studies that lie close to it.
A few things are bugging me about contemporary internet interaction. I am really tired of the constant friendly prods and reminders to update software, as my computer chats away with corporations online, trolling for software products, both free and not free but all time-consuming to implement, supposedly on my behalf. Also (and granted this is partly due to human error) I'm sick of inadvertantly clicking on links that are direct to PDF files I really don't want to download. What really ramps up my aggravation is that Adobe Acrobat takes a little while to load and we have to look at this STUPID and insulting graphic the whole time. This dancing guy who is supposed to represent me, the happy user, is more like the assholes who cut me off in their SUVs while I'm riding my bike (and they're talking on their cell phones) than he is like me or anyone I associate with. I guess that just means I'm lucky I don't have to work in an office downtown, but geeze, even on Bay street I'm sure there's some other types of folk using Adobe Acrobat besides slick, trim, self-empowered white guys with their shirts tucked in producing file after file of ugly boring reports and purple bar graphs. Also, what are those cyclindrical things? Slinkys? And, um, nice letter 'A' there. I guess that little item represents both the broad field of typography, layout and design, and the whole line of Adobe products that service that field, and that your computer can constantly remind you to update and upgrade, keeping the brand recognition strong and the user's consumer indentity prepped and fresh for purchase 24-7. Arrrrg.
For a report on last Friday's critical mass in New York City, read this excellent blog post by Stillweride (thanks Rico). Recent events in NYC remind us of the inherent friction between police (historically hired by the state) and common people (historically a threatening faction that those in state control command police to keep in line). The cops have been picking on New York's critical mass ever since the protests there in August. When the cops pick on you, it's not fun. Toronto's critical mass ride has had its share of problems with police as well. For some reason the utterly utopic mandate of the event ("it's just a bike ride") gets under the skin of police-people who seem to want to eradicate (and criminalize) unpredictable behaviour of any kind. It's fair to say, in Toronto anyhow, that simply being a visible minority may more often than not put you on the cop's abornmality radar. It's all inordinately frustrating.
If you are at all interested in the civics of police control, you will very much enjoy Min Sook-Lee's amazing documentary, Hogtown. I just got to see it at the Toronto's most excellent Hot Docs festival. Min Sook-Lee is smart smart smart. She got a film crew into the Police Services Board right at the point when the new mayor of Toronto, David Miller, was elected in November of 2003. It was clear that there was tumult brewing, and indeed the chaos hit just in time for her cameras. The story is about a city council divided between those who want police accountability, and those who want to give cops free reign. In a short space of time there was a smear campaign, exposure of endemic police corruption, unrest about racial profiling, yelling matches about helicopters, blatant disregard for the democratic process, and heroic feats of courage and determination. I have huge respect for Alan Heisey (who I posted about earlier) and councillors Pam McConnell and John Filion who all stuck to their guns despite extraordinary stress levels and the infuriating, babyish behaviour of colleagues such as councillors Case Ootes, Rob Ford, and Giorgio Mammoliti. Even if you aren't involved in local politics, you will find the film to be a nail-biter and a shocking reveal of some elected officials' tenous grasp of democratic principles. The cameras catch everything, from back-room whisperings to full-fledged shouting matches in the council chambers. See it if you get the chance!
Tino took a beautiful photo of his bike and my cat and owl for bike lane diary! I love it.
Rembrandt in New York, by Joanne Tod, 1999. Image from Tod's pages on the CCCA website.
Hospital, by Damien Hirst, 2004. Image from David Cohen's review at artcricial.com.
I saw work from Damien Hirst's painting show (see previous post) projected at a recent symposium. They instantly reminded me of the Canadian painter, Joanne Tod. I've been a big fan of her work since I first saw it in art school, back in the 80s. She has making smart, self conscious ugly/beautiful paintings for a long time. From Tom and Joester's respsonses I get the impression that Hirst's paintings are uglier than Tod's. Tod frequently paints scenes of opulence, and the paint handling itself teeters between lush and downright scratchy. How to position this painting? Is it is a cynical statement about the empty gesture of the "artists hand"? Is it a jab at acquistion and commodity? Or is it simply a grab for those collector dollars? In 2002 Tod put on a show called Vanity Fair, in which she rendered portratis of a bunch of Toronto's big-fish-small-pond personalities as characters from the novel. Shinan Giovanni (then gossip columnist for the National Post) wrote in Lola magazine: "...when Tod confessed that I was to be one of the subjects in her show, I was instantly flattered and made to blush. This, you see, is the power of the portrait artist: the subjects always think they're being made love when, in fact, sometimes they're just being screwed."
The same goes for the art audience when confronted with slick, smart, po-mo painting. Are we being screwed? If we are, maybe we like it? It's odd that Damien Hirst has chosen to replay this dynamic in paint, where the epitomes of market cynicism and self-reference have been visited and revisited thoroughly over the past 20 years. In this context, I understand Kimmelman's "moral scold" (as Tom called it in yesterday's comment thread). Granted, Hirst's subject matter speaks to a contemporary level of desperate detachment. But besides offering a historyical study of postmodernism-in-paint, what could Hirst be possibly saying with this treatment other than, simply, "buy this painting"?
On the other hand, maybe it is possible that ironic reference can fold so many times as to compact itself back into sincerity. If there is a contemporary youthful art market really interested in "earnestness, or at least the appearance of it" as Kimmelman suggests, and Hirst can deliver, then what's the problem? Are you "shallow and money-obessed" if you enjoy a painterly painting of a dissected brain, or a morgue, or a bleeding soccer hooligan? Or are you just a reader of magazines, watcher of television shows, disempowered and subjugated protestor of wars, believer that church and state should remain separated, post-AI-proto-cyborgian internet user, in short...an understandably depressed and yet participating member of contemporary western culture?
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Art meets science in Damien Hirst's new show at Gagosian in New York, which I haven't seen. The image on the left is the original photo, the right is Hirst's painting (painted by a roster of assistants with some input from Hirst himself.) A press release at Science Photo Library says: "The paintings signal a new direction in [Hirst's] work - that of photorealism. Photorealism was an invention of the 1960s. Take a photograph, and copy it meticulously, until your painting and the photograph are indistinguishable. From a distance Hirst's paintings look like photographs. But close up you can see that they have all been executed using oil paint and brushes." ...and... "We do occasionally licence our images to artists who want to use them for source material. But until you see the finished artwork, we never know how close to the original photograph it will be. The look and feel of the Hirst's oil paintings is different from the original photographs, although the image itself is almost facsimile reproduction." Michael Kimmelman said in NY Times (available here) "[Hirst's paintings] arrive amid a booming youth market, as shallow and money-obsessed as Mr. Hirst, and just as enamored of fashion, but with a higher premium placed on solo handicraft and earnestness or at least on the appearance of it." David Cohen at artcritical.com says: "If you want to see Mr. Hirst’s careeer in terms of iconoclasm, you could say that by producing 31 dutiful, soporific canvases he has delivered a fatal overdose to painting more decisive than the assassination attempt of his pickled shark. But Mr. Hirst isn’t really an iconoclast. For all his razzmatazz and buffoonery, he is in deadly earnest about the power of images." | |