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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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At the CNE this week I sat inside this Snowbird and this light armoured vehicle. My main impression in both instances: "Man, this thing is small." The L.A.V. —which carries 10 including the gunner and driver—seemed a particularly tight squeeze. My petite friend and I were hunched over and bumping knees as the slightly-less-than-patient man in camo answered our questions and showed us where the light bulbs were. I'm not claustrophobic, but I was very glad the door and hatch were both open.  Also this band was playing...  It sure feels like war time around here, what with the news reporting near-daily Canadian casualities and all. I remember when I was a kid the idea of Canada going to war again was unimaginable and terrifying. Now I find it dismal, sad and mind-numbing. 2009 seems like a long way off. |
L.M.'s recent post prompted me to re-read ArtFag's latest rant about recent curatorial mis-steps in big group shows that set out to define Toronto art (specifically, the Power Plant's We Can Do This Now and MOCCA's Love/Hate: New Crowned Glory in Toronto). ArtFag can be counted on for a rip-rousing, searing critique, and I applaud their unequivocal demands for better curations.
To collect a group of work under the pretense that there is no common thread is not only an abdication of responsibility, it is, to be crass about it, an abdication of your job descriptions.I wholeheartedly agree. I also applaud ArtFag for moving beyond mere griping into some actual diagnoses and suggestions.
This is a small art scene, in a small city, after all; almost everyone knows each other, and certainly there is opportunity aplenty for all to be exposed to each other's practices. The challenge in erecting a Toronto show would be to track those threads of interconnection, to sort them so that one can have a clear picture of the living mechanism that is this city's art.But here I start to differ. Particularly at the phrase "almost everyone knows each other." Really? Or do we just stick too closely to our well-worn paths? And what, exactly is a Toronto artist? Is it someone who was born and bred in the GTA? Someone just in from Calgary looking to set up shop in the Golden Horseshoe? Someone who's been reviewed by Gary Michael Dault? Someone who runs a video program for youth in Regent Park? Someone who went to OCAD? Someone who shows on Queen St? Someone who everybody already knows? ArtFag paints a picture of a 'stagnant' art scene and blames the commercial gallerists for not promoting younger artists. But what about the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Toronto Free Gallery, X-space, Le Gallery? And is it really youth who provide the kind of 'fresh blood' ArtFag calls for, or is it modes of practice and definitions of 'Toronto artist' that are currently off the art scene radar?
I think what we are really suffering from is a slightly sickening compulsion for self-definition. Why, in a city full of immigrants and travellers, of ambitious artists who's practices are in dialogue with others here and around the world, do we struggle to define our art according to our geography? Is is just because of rivalry with Vancouver? And, if you remove this cloying notion of Toronto's failure to love itself enough, isn't there plenty of thoughtful, rigorous curation happening in this town? What about Pat Macaulay's work at York Quay Galleries, or Diaz, or Cheryl Sourkes, or Ann MacDonald at Doris McCarthy Gallery? I can't help thinking that it's time to turn our attention away from the fairly trivial category of Toronto, and pay attention to the networks of art ideas for which such boundaries are meaningless. The important threads of connection for art are between works, not between friends. Toronto is a social town, and perhaps it is the persistence of this social perspective, this clinging to the clique as an organising principle, that gives us the sense that we are being held back.
ArtFag ends with a footnote:
....an increased interest in our city's young might provide the necessary sharp shock to the more slack and middling of our mid-career artists...But it is precisely our mid-career artists that make us think the hardest and offer us the most, artists who have been around the block enough times to eschew fashion and gimmickry in favour of challenging themselves, of building on an increasingly resonant and evolving body of work. Artists who continue to exhibit in Toronto as well as in all kinds of far-flung places, and whose work rewards our attention, not from the lazy social perspective of pigeonholing 'people we already know', but from the broad and enriching perspective of art discourse.
But these quibbles are small compared to the my immense gratitude to ArtFag for taking the trouble to write this magnificent Toronto Manifesto, for challenging the local gatekeepers to do better, and especially for putting themselves on the line to make a proclamations about what is wrong and how to fix it. These are steps we need to take. Along with, in my case anyway, trying to learn as much as I can about how to curate awesome art shows.