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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Canadian Art Quote #1
Dot Tuer
From Dot Tuer's essay, "Is it Still Priviledged Art? The Polictics of Class and Collaboration in the Art Practice of Carol Conde and Karl Beveridge" in the anthology But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.
Known as the Massey Report, this Royal Commission presented recommendations to the Parliament in 1957 that formalized a role for subsidized culture as the guardian angel of national identity and led to the founding of the federal funding agency for the arts, the
Canada Council. In the process, it also drew a dividing line between high art and popular culture - the former designated as Canadian and in need of state patronage, the latter as the vulgar materialism of an American consumerism in need of state regulation. Positioning state funding of the arts as simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-populist, this policy officially sanctioned distrust of mass culture and initiated a series of contradictions between elitism and democratization of the arts that deepened over time.*
* For further analysis see Dot Tuer, "The Art of Nation Building: Constructing a Cultural Identity for Post-War Canada," Parallélogramme, 17 #4, (Spring 1992): 24-36.
Here's a piece of Canadiana. My friend NSL and I are avid fans of the Canadian TV show Da Vinci's Inquest. Da Vinci, played by Nicholas Campbell (who played the corrupt, killer cop in Cronenburg's Dead Zone), is this Columbo-style coroner only he's hot, he's off the booze and he's got a big social conscience (his main platform is safe injection sites). The show is set in Vancouver and the stories are intricate, political, and complicated like a British cop-show. Not only that, the character of Da Vinci is modelled after the real-life, left-wing mayor of Vancouver, Larry Campbell (he used to be the coroner). How often do you get good fun drama based on contemporary, honest-to-god real life? Okay, so now I must admit that Da Vinci's Inquest is an acquired taste. The acting is really really mannered. There's this old-fashioned, stilted, CBC-drama, Candian-cliché style of acting that's terrible and that I think is caused by a sad and sorry lack of conviction. Da Vinci's Inquest sounds like that at first, but this mannered style, while initially unnerving, is clearly intentional. Da Vinici is pure conviction, rollicking fiction, based-on-real-life, leftwing suspense. A crazy hybrid, and I love it . Yet besides NSL (who got me hooked) I barely know anyone else who likes it even a little bit. The show's 9pm Sunday night time slot is apparently up for grabs, and Da Vinci gets pre-empted by everything from Christmas specials to professional figure skating. So... whence came this Queen West (hip downtown Toronto) poster campaign? I get that there's a cult following, but I thought there were only two of us...and we count as old ladies if you're invoking cults.
I am going to break my own NO POETRY rule because its January... and February is coming up...so freakish desperate acts are allowed, and even welcomed. I accidentally read this poem by Dylan Thomas a few years ago and have been re-reading it frequently ever since.
A PROCESS IN THE WEATHER OF THE HEART
A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.
A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.
A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.
A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.
A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.
After visiting the Sculpture Center in Queens this weekend, I see why Matt King picked Ross Knight in his 2003 top ten. These wonky, awkward, pretty things look more flimsy than they really are. My favourite was the ski hill-esque structure with the colourful sheen and raggedy robot-style window panel (detail below). Both works have lots of understated personality, holding their own nicely in the bleak midwinter concrete courtyard. (for a more informed review go here)
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