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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Gene Threndyle's piece for the weekend long WADE show (performances and installations in wading pools in Toronto's parks, curated by Christine Pearson and Sandra Rechico) was one damn fine work of public art. He filled the pool at Trinity Bellwoods Park with inflatable killer whales, each painted with an excerpt from Dante's Inferno. The kids loved it, taking to the whales instantly without a care for the strange dark poetics beneath their bellies. The parents loved it. The art audience loved it. All afternoon we sat around in the sun and shade. Egon Von Bark played old 78s his victrola and they sounded good to us eventhough the needles were dull and scoured threads of vinyl up off the disks.
thanks to Tanya Read for this excellent photo!
There was also a reading from the Inferno. Von Bark stood in the pool and delivered some lovely elocution while the children bumped their whales around his shins. Mark Hazen and Anne-Marie Hood administered a long and challenging test to guage your level of hell (I got 7, which was disconcerting but seemed par for the course).
David Hoffos' piece for WADE at Bellevue Square Park. Photo by Justin Waddell
Another WADE installation I really liked was by David Hoffos in Bellevue Park. It's a night piece, a video projection of a little boy standing in the edge of the pool, his toy boat a little distance out into the water. It's sad and quite creepy. The ghostlike child is life-size, almost part of the crowd, but hopelessly remote, isolated and from us flesh and blood folks by the fact of being a mere video projection. These are the only two WADE pieces I've seen so far, and they've both been excellent. Maybe I'll see some more of them later today.
Any reports on other WADE performances are very welcome in the comments section below. If you want to send me jpegs at smblog@sympatico.ca, I'll post em with your comment.
what is an art blog?
Jeffrey Matt and I performed on Tuesday evening at 40 Tiny Queer Performances Under a Pink Light curated by RM Vaughan. It was a fun, fast evening with a great lineup. The deal was that you had one single minute to perform before the lights went down. The acts charged along and the whole darn thing took exactly an hour. I was pretty pleased with our performance, although the rehearsals were better (more physics, less mouse). Jeffrey played the spry jumping-lesson-teacher with knowledge of physics. I played Miss Mouse, the lumpen-yet-game student of jumping. Maybe I'll get some quicktime up one of these days. Pete Dako made a nice post about the evening, and there's a pic of us. (Thanks for the link, Pete!)
Interesting survey on art blogging here at MTAA [via Tom Moody]. Tom Moody's answers are here.
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Catherine Osborne just posted a nice piece on Eddo Stern's show at AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). She's into the work, but not so keen on the sculptures, and I agree that of his ouevre to date, they are also my least favourite pieces. However they functioned quite differently in the context of this exhibition than when I saw them at Postmasters. At AGO, Stern's art is all together in one room. This is a bit distracting, but in other ways cramming the sculptures up against the videos is good for both bodies of work. The didacticism of the videos plays off against the nerdy medieval festish humour of the sculptures, connecting one kind of harmless recreation (ie: dressing up like knights and elves and throwing tinfoil balls around in the woods) with another (playing video games in which you re-live the brotherhood-and-lightning-reflexes-and-suchlike-juicey-tropes of Vietnam and other fun wars). Both together make a tidy picture of a violent culture that just so happens to be killing and torturing a lot of people in the middle east. There are sublteties to this work that are a bit obscured in this noisey installation, but I don't think contemporary events are really calling for nuance right now.
There is a new sculpture, two Hulk-like fists of beige, pseudo-stone pounding a keyboard, shooting off red, white and blue stars on a monitor, and playing bellicose favourites such as Queen's "We are the Champions." I'm guessing it reads as subversive in the states, whereas here it falls a little flat as over-obvious humour. It's silly but kind of satisfying nonetheless. The new video is more troublesome and more interesting. It's a montage of internet Flash games in which you kill (mutilate, humiliate, and sexually violate) Osama Bin Laden; cropped so the gory pixelated details are blown up huge. This all to tunes from big Jesus movies like Last Temptation of Christ and Passion. Normally I think I'd find this all a bit heavy-handed. Right now, however, when war fetish and violence are anything but abstract, driving home the political points in a major art museum feels appropriate to me (as the Whitney Biennial, with its pretty pastels and tender touches did not). I've heard Eddo talk in public twice, and he's ambitious, earnest and smart about the implications and narratives of technology. "Vietnam Romance" is still one of my favourite artworks, and I'm very curious about the ongoing game development and community hub activities of C-Level in LA. For more writing on C-Level, see Tom Moody's review of the Waco game .
Note: Mark Allen of C-Level is no longer working on the Waco game, but he's started a gallery called machine project. The current show is Jessica Z Hutchins, also a C-Level member, artist and writer. She came to Toronto for Eddo Stern's AGO opening, and meeting her was, for me, a high point of the evening. Her new book, Pastoral, is available online here.