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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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John Scott at Nicholas Metivier Gallery 451 King Street West, Toronto until Saturday July 26
Prayer Wheel 2008 Suzuki Katana motorcycle, aluminium, steel
Normally L.M. takes care of the Sunday Devotional, but this week I'm chiming in. Me and M. Jean saw genuflecting Santa in a Goodwill store. It cost $3.29. We did not buy it.
UPDATE: This just in from Rob
Myself and Toronto's 250,000 sexy Italians will be cheering for Spain. Nestor Krüger's umlaut will be cheering for Germany.
Timothy Comeau, on his Goodreads site, wrote a detailed response to these earlier threads on Mammalian Diving Reflex.
Discuss.
(No, I'm closing the comments here, and people can go onto his site.)
Jeannie Thib at Harbourfront, York Quay Centre, 235 Queens Quay West , Toronto until Sept. 21, 2008
Repeat 2003 cut aluminum (detail)
Repeat (museum intervention at the ROM) 2003 cut aluminum (detail)
New Artists' Gardens at Harbourfront - Lyla Rye
Plato’s Drive-In 2008 Lexan, wood, plants
Joe McKay - Hostile Art Center 2008
Rhizome 2009 Commissions were announced and, the now motherless, Joe McKay is included in the line up.
(found)
Fastwürms - IRIS PORN
Throbbing Gristle:
Lolita:
Aztec Crease:
Disco Inferno:
Jam Pants:
Miami Vice:
Baby Tight Eyez:
Torontoist posted a pretty funny story by one Derek Chadbourne about putting up a guaranteed bike lane.
We marveled at the power of the pylon and how it averted traffic around them. Even a giant dump truck frantically changed lanes as to not feel the wrath of our little cones.Funny picture too, by Tino. Also, if you want a crash course in urban cycling debate, read the comments. Every bike politics cliché is represented, including my personal favourite...'I'm a cyclist and a car driver, so I can see both sides of the issue...'
Sadko Hadzihasanovic - Some Other Country at Paul Petro,
980 Queen Street W. Toronto, Ont. Until July 19, 2008
(some previous favourites)
Self-Portrait as Antonio B. 1996 mixed media on wallpaper, 90 x 55 in.
Smokin' 1999 wallpaper on canvas, 10 x 10 in.
Boys from Sarajevo 1999 wallpaper on canvas, 90 x 55 in.
(found, wake up)
Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five
Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby 1944
Beware 1946 from the movie "Beware"
Jumpin' At The Jubilee with the Nicholas Brothers?
The top two clips are from movies that were historically referred to as Race Films. Years ago the CBC broadcast them on Saturday afternoons.
(found)
Following up on a quote from Tom Moody which I'll repeat:
"Artists, too, have to compete with real world content far more captivating than anything they could come up with, which the Internet effectively gathers all in one place (sneezing Pandas, etc). Two possible responses are (1) to continually rise above it through aesthetic and conceptual framing and posturing or (2) to disappear into it and trust the viewer to ultimately sort out what's going on. The Web is a consumer's medium, not a producer's, so the artist is inexorably led to consumption as a "practice." The degree of criticality can only be inferred, not implied."Here are some more posts on net aesthetics.
(found and for your sweet dreams)
Bill Burns ... sardonic, suave and smart as whip. He has a nice show on right now at Michael Klein's gallery on Ossington called Some Dogs and Boats and Airplanes.
The show ends on Saturday, so drop by this week if you want to see it. There are a couple of really funny letter-writing projects. I don't want to give spoilers, so take my word for it, but here's a hint, there's some fun for those of us who love to hate Fantino and some more fun for people who are sick to death of yogurt yogurt everywhere yogurt as if yogurt was the answer to all of life's ills. Also a funny watercolour treat for Toronto artists who have been snubbed by Toronto curators. And, of course, a lot of very cute doggies.
Andrew Wright - Survey
Curated by Chantal Rousseau for Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124, Toronto.
Opening: Thursday, June 19 - 7 to 10pm.
Mike Grace, Able Seaman, Cook 2008 Lightjet print, 28.6 x 44.2 cm
Oh shitfuckdamn, we missed LuminaTO didn't we? Leah Sandals does the math.
(via simpleposie)
(was I supposed to go to it?)
(found)
Gabrielle Moser has written an interesting post on some issues with community art projects that were brought to mind with Darren O'Donnell & Mammallian Diving Reflex's The Duel in The 'Dale: Parkdale Public School v. Queen West. She indicates that the humour behind using these kids in adult roles might have something sinister behind it.
I'd say that his humour in working/using kids isn't sinister. I know because mine is. I laugh when they fall over. Other than that I don't want to be around them most of the time. That may be why his work exerts a hold on me. I love the controlled anarchy that comes with the illusion of power swapping that he's created.
(Did I just make an argument for that position? I feel tricked.)
Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet - Young man meets Death
c. 1485-90 dry-point
Jacques de Gheyn III - Triton Blowing on a Conch Shell 1615 etching
Afrika Bambaataa & John Lydon - World Destruction
I think tomorrow is the last day to see Sojourner Truth's installation at Katharine Mulherin. I dunno how to distinguish between the gallery's two spaces, but it's the one that's further east. I really really liked the show. The artist's statement described a dream in which animals were sucking up the colours from pieces of plastic and other detritus, and pooping them out as paints. The installation is a kind of joyful immersive mandella with flowers and medals and other bits and bobs all made out of cardboard and paper and sticks and stones painted with glitter with antlers and other animal part artifacts thrown in. Sounds like a kids craft project, and it sort of was, but pulled off with a Fastwurms-esque confidence and great attention to detail and materials. If you are in the neighbourhood, check it out before it closes. I'd love to post a picture but the images at the gallery website are awful and really don't do it justice. Maybe we'll track down the artist and get some good pics up at a later date.
There aren't enough pretty pink sparkly thingsto truly convey my
(love) for 
and the deadly radiance of issue #21
(found and fucked with, in reference to the post below)
Since it kills Sally to link to the pissy rhizome threads, here's a link to Artfagcity who gives a comparative overview of the recent Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel discussion at the New Museum.
Recent comment threads about net art at Rhizome prompted me to dig up some history...
Automobiles 1.0
Excerpted from a book review by Gijs Mom of Kathleen Franz's Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile published in The American historical review vol.111, no.5, (2006) p.154
[Kathleen] Franz's narrative can be read as a gradual marginalization of the user, first of women and then of male tinkerers. Analyzing 100 patents and 200 letters to Henry Ford, she places the tinkering mania in a context of an American, democratic belief in (largely masculine) "ingenuity." This framework is then used to perform a case study of the efforts by Earl Tupper (of later Tupperware fame) to market a "collapsible top for rumble seats," mounted at the back of the car body to accommodate an extra passenger. But Tupper was too late: by the 1930s automobile manufacturers managed to push the users out of their realm of "scientific" expertise, mostly by changing the multipart body into a unitary, "tinker-resistant," and streamlined design.Excerpted from Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004). First published by CBC Enterprises in 1990.
... the registration statistics of several states contained hundreds of cars with unidentifiable brand names, clearly the result of home-made tinkering. In this phase, the differences between producers and users were small, indeed. My own research largely confirms that the tinkering movement was certainly not negligible, but at the same time new middle-class users who joined the army of adopters were less inclined to see the car as an object of active adaptation to their personal tastes. From this perspective, the marginalization of the users was not the result of a conspiracy but was co-constructed by a (growing) number of the users as well.
Take, for instance, the motor car. In its young phase, it could quite appropriately be called a "mechanical bride," the term used by Marshall McLuhan to describe the relationship between car and owner. Care was regularly lavished by young men upon their vehicles, polishing and tuning them, repairing them and improving their performances. There was a sense of camaraderie among the owners and they would admire each other's mechanical brides. Little is left of this era in today's real world of technology. In the automobile's middle age, it is hard, if not impossible, to tune or repair one's own vehicle. (p.94)
The real joy of owning wheels, the sense of independence that allowed drivers to go wherever and whenever they wanted to go, became muted because, in reality, there were usually thousands and thousands of others who wanted or had to go at the same time to the same place.
The early phase of technology often occurs in a take-it-or-leave-it atmosphere. Users are involved and have a feeling of control that gives them the impression that they are entirely free to accept or reject a particular technology and its products. But when a technology, together with the supporting infrastructures, becomes institutionalized, users often become captive supporters of both the technology and the infrastructures. ... In the case of the automobile, the railways are gone — the choice of taking the car or leaving it at home no longer exists. (p.95)
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Psyche and the Split-Brain by Jenny L. Yates is the kookiest book that I have found so far in my research for school. It also, coincidentally, contains my favourite art interpretations ever. Yates wrote the book as her thesis for a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the CJ Jung institute in Zurich (1992). She worked with two subjects, a man and a woman, each of whom had had their corpus colossum severed as a treatment for epilepsy. The corpus colossum connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Yates showed images of artworks to the right and left sides of each person's brain, separately, and asked them to describe what they saw.
I don't know much about Jungian psychology, but Yate's symbolic analyses of the results are a challenge to my credulity. She also makes some oddly rigid assumptions about the meaning of images. The man's right hemisphere responded to an image of a lion and a lamb with the phrase "morbid feelings." Yates suggested that "...this male's right hemisphere has an opposite perception to the mood of the painting. Clearly the image of the lion and the lamb is one of peace and calm." (p.32). Art interpretation is really not that empirical. Now that Mr. Right Hemisphere has suggested it, I can see many ways in which lions and lambs hanging out together might be quite morbid indeed. The book is a bit of a warning that trying to pin down the meaning of an artwork too explicitly is, well, kooky.
But my goodness! The responses these people gave to the artworks they saw are fabulous. I get the feeling that the man may be teasing a bit. Here's a sampling...
Female Right Hemisphere: "Four"
Female Left Hemisphere: "Green. Two circles in the middle, not exactly alike, separate."
Male Right Hemisphere: "Very small lady."
Male Left Hemisphere: "Color green. A ring, almost."
Female Right Hemisphere: "Trunk of a tree."
Female Left Hemishpere: "A flower."
Male Right Hemisphere: "Lady left the steam room in a hurry."
Male Left Hemisphere: "Chinese or oriental fan or shell with creatures more man than beast or fairies coming out."
Female Right Hemisphere: "I want to know more about that than any others. I am trying to figure out why. Why Jenny?"
Female Left Hemisphere: "Big yellow flower."
Male Right Hemisphere: "A vase, not an urn."
Left Hemisphere: "A cat, orange, background - a stage drop."
Second Round, Female Right Hemisphere: "Flower"
Second Round, Female Left Hemisphere: "Telescope, looking into the background."
Second Round, Male Right Hemisphere: "An Iris, but I don't think that it is."
Second Round, Male Left Hemisphere: "A kitten, orange, sitting on a substance, cotton."
This is the famous brain map of sensory input by Dr. Wilder Penfield called the "homunculus." Wikipedia warns us that it's not necessarily totally accurate, and may be out of date. But in general it illustrates that our body parts are mapped on the cortex of the brain. But the brain doesn't just map our body, it also maps the area around us. Sandra Blakeslee is a science writer who co-authored Phantoms in the Brain with VS Ramachandran and recently wrote all about brain mapping with her son Matt, in a book called The Body Has a Mind of It's Own. On the Brain Science Podcast she described how she got the idea for the book while browsing the posters at a big neuroscience conference.
There was a paper by an Italian neuroscientist that talked about perispersonal space, which I had never heard of. So I went over and starting asking him, and we were talking about strokes and this method he had of studying strokes. And then I said to him, "What's peripersonal space?" And he — it's so cute — he stepped back and took a pen and he said, "You see this pen? It is now outside of your peripersonal space." And then he went dvvvf, dvvvf, dvvvf and started moving it closer and closer to me. And then he got it into the area around me. If you put your arms out over your head, and to your side and down by your hips, that's your peripsersonal space. And he was telling me that that space is actually mapped in your parietal lobe. I couldn't believe it. I knew that the brain maps the body, I knew about the Penfield maps and the classic touch maps and motor maps, but the idea that the space was mapped... And when you use tools the maps increase in size. ... It was just enchanting. And then a bunch more findings were coming along at that time about tool use, and mapping, and about mirror neurons which are about mapping your social world. And then this whole thing about inner reception, which is how you map the internal feelings in your body... this was so exciting...Later in the interview she explains how this mapping of the perispersonal space can account for why we are aware that there is somebody behind us, etc. She also describes how out of body experiences can be induced with elecrtrode stimulation in the right angular gyrus, and how seeing auras can result from synaesthesia. And she says this rather sweet thing...
Some people when they are very young start seeing coloured auras around others. They're not making it up, they really do see that. And in fact people that have those kinds of really strange synaesthesia think it's perfectly normal. They reach their late teens before they realise that not everybody sees the world that way. Out of body experiences, near death experiences, healing touch — we're proposling neurophysiological explanations for a lot of these phenomena that are routinely described as the paranormal. And no wonder! I mean, if you have an out of body experience it's real, you're not making it up. And then modern science comes along and says "Oh, no no no, that can't be." So people are drawn to the parapsychology world for the lack of an explanation from the more allopathic scientific world.
Sunday Devotionals - Soeur Sourire
Suggested by my studio assistant (Ed Pien's mostly) and artist, Joel Thomson, who thinks this is funny, frankly I don't, it all looks pretty normal to me.
Dominique, outsold Elvis for four weeks on the Billboard Charts in 1963.
From the movie with Debbie Reynolds
Updated disco version with Soer Sourire looking very hip and Vatican II
A friend* recently brought me this cast iron Nun beer opener from Montreal.
Obviously made in prison by Maurice "Mom" Boucher, former head of the Quebec Hells Angels.
Speaking of Montreal, to answer an inane and popular rhetorical question, it is not the New Vancouver, Montreal is the best place in the universe.
[*Worst Art Critic in Canada]
(found)
Neurobotics in action.
Here are some quotes from a presentation by Yoky Matsuoka on neurobotics (thanks to joseter).
...we are so good with our hands, a lot of people say that our hands are the reason why we have this society. We can use tools, we can build buildings, we can even have this level of consciousness, some people believe, because we can gather amazing sensory information from our hands, and manipulate objects in a way that other primates don't do.
We want to build a mechanical device that's controlled by the original brain signals that would mimic our own limb, and nobody else could tell that its actually a robotic device.
This image is from Matsuoka's presentation. It's a monkey with electrodes in it's head. The brain area is interestingly masked off by a black blob. Dunno if that's to keep the audience from getting sad for the monkey, or if the tech is proprietary and they want to keep it secret, or what. Anyhow, the money's arms are tied down and he's controlling that robotic arm by thinking. But the grasping part of the action is being controlled by a human off to the side with a remote controller, because, as Matusoka says, "that level of detail we can't get yet." They currently working on some superdextrous robotic hands, trying to match up the machinery with the neurology.
Grasping is a big deal in neuroscience. It's one of the first things we do, and we happen to be pretty good at it. Mirror neurons were discovered when scientists were looking at a monkey's brain function during grasping. Grasping is a big deal because of prosthetic design, robot design and the lingering fascination with AI.
The frontal lobe is big in humans and this probably accounts for why we get up to so much complicated business like global capitalism and network technologies and art that animals don't bother with. The frontal lobe takes care of planning and evaluating and setting goals. But it is also responsible for motor control. Recently on Dr. Ginger Campbell's Brain Science Podcast, Dr. Art Glenburg explained a bit about the study of embodied cognition, which explores the hypothesis that "high level cognition is really based on lower level processes," such as "neural systems that control action, neural systems that control perception, and neural systems that control emotion." This work in cognitive psychology predates the discovery of mirror neurons in neuroscience. Mirror neurons add emphasis to the concept that the "brain evolved for action."
On Saturday I attended the afternoon session of Subtle Technologies. I always love that conference, even though its art/science amalgamation is sometimes awkward and goofy. The organisers, Jim Ruxton and Sachiko Hirosue, are really good at riding out the discomfort that arises from weird juxatopositions between the presenters. It's not a melding of minds, but a meeting of disciplines.
From The Hubble Space Telescope Gallery and Public Information, the caption on Jayanne English's website reads: "The radiation detected from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) not only includes light that our eyes would see, but also radiation from the infra-red and and ultra-violet which we do not see."
One of my favourite talks was by Jayanne English, who works on "outreach images" for astronomy. She was part of the Hubble team that composed and colourised data from the Hubble telescope into the sumptuous space images that we see in magazines. English talked a lot about the politics of translating data into colour choices that would be visually interesting to a general audience. She said she had to do quite a bit of "inreach" initially, training the astronomers to understand image theory. One big problem is that the light at the "hot" end of the spectrum is represented in science as blue, while the "cool" end is red. Scientists sometimes think their data is being misrepresented if she inverts this convention so it'll make sense to the rest of us who think red is hot and blue is cool. But making the images scientifically informative is an important part of the mandate. She said that she is not interested in representing data as the eye would see it, as that is not useful to the science, nor particularly interesting to look at, as most of the information is outside the visible spectrum anyhow.
Lately English has been working with data from radio telescopes, which, she says gives her more leeway. There's more info and images here on her website.
National Radio Astronomy Observatory Image Contest - First Prize 2006. Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Jayanne English (U. Manitoba), Jeroen Stil and Russ Taylor (U. Calgary) and MSX. The caption on Jayanne English's website reads: "A Majestic Gas Shell Revealed by the VLA. -- This image, created by myself and Jeroen Stil with the support of Russ Taylor (U Calgary), shows cold hydrogen gas shell, GS 62.1+0.2-18, residing in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. One of the telescopes it uses is the VLA, the radio telescope array used in the movie Contact. Our eyes do not detect radiation so this gas is 'invisible' but very important to the formation of stars, planets and even life itself."
Yves Saint Laurent dead at 71.
(via schwarz)
Sally is probably rolling her eyes as she reads this, but people like me and Anthony Easton care about this shit.
I used to sew clothes with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth, because that made me just like Yves Saint Laurent., and it also meant I burned holes in things before they were ever worn.
SUNDAY DEVOTIONALS - Russian Basso Profondo
Maxim Mikhaylov in Sergei Eisenstein's 1944 film Ivan the Terrible
Orthodox Male Choir
Cristian Deheleanu Orthodox Priest from Romania
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