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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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here's my one-line-list review of "What the Bleep Do We Know." (thanks to Joester for the idea)
- More gratuitous graphic cheeze than Brian Greene's PBS wank-doc on string theory.
- I wish they would've told us up front that the blond pundit was channelling somebody else.
- This film had as much integrity as a chiropractor talking about how the uncertainty principle means you can change reality with your mind.
- I learned that a lot of basketballs is a "field" whereas just one basketball is a "particle."
- I would've found the extended wedding party dance interlude with cute animated characters representing human cells under the chemical influence of love extremely tedious, but I stopped watching at that point and skipped to the final credits, which was the first place any of the so called "experts" who'd been spouting off all movie were identified on screen.
I very much enjoyed Doug Saunders' column in Saturday's Globe and Mail (only available w/paid online subscription), "Longing for something authentic? Watch your step." In Rome, he visited the Italian home of Massimo, a "charming and eccentric man who lives at the centre of one of Italy's more vibrant intellectual cultures." Says Saunders:
In this world of hybrids, fakes, phonies, knockoffs and massproduced corporate clones, it is a thrill to run into somebody who is undeniably authentic. [...] People have had enough of noisy music composed of machine-made samples; instead they want a CD of pure, true native folk music or genuine keep it real ghetto authenticity. They want to avoid drugs and doctors and hospitals and deliver their children at home in good grubby medieval agony. They like books with simple, genuine narratives and none of that clever, academic wordplay. They want the good old politics of nationalisim, maple leaf flags and Crown corporations, even if it meands keeping the Queen on the money. At least its real.Says Massimo, showing off his collection of art and artifacts from around the world:
Unfortunately, there aren't many people left who are interested in tradition. The Ango-American world is flattening every alternative culture with its globalization. Being a minority, I identify with the American Indians, with the Irish, with the Muslims everywhere. This is what I have been writing about for decades.And, showing off his bust of Mussolini:
It was our greatest moment. We have to build a new future in its image, but it's not going to happen like that again. [...] I'm not against other cultures or immigration, I'm just against the mixing of races. That is a constant value: authenticity, purity. I don't mind being called a facist, and for all my life I have been proud of my facist heritage. But if we are ever to win again, we will have to call it something different. It will not happen until we are a real, genuine people.Yike! Good one Doug. I've been tilting at windmills lately, irritating my friends by worrying about fascist-looking art. All of a sudden, aspects of an artist like, for instance, Istvan Kantor bother me, where in the past I would've been simply irritated or ambivalent. I recently saw a screening of Kantor's super8 film "Fish Head," in which he guts a live fish and wears it on his shaven head, like a centurion's helmet. The fish is still swishing its tail and gulping, blood runs down Kantor's cheeks. The image is iconic, and visually satisfying. It got under my skin and I can't stop mulling it over. (Does this mean its good art? - damn!) I'm not too concerned for the torture of this particular fish (I eat fish after all, and have been fishing once or twice), but rather what invocation of power rises off the scene. Granted, the film is from a long time ago (mid-80s?), and it seems to me that in the context of pre-millenial post-modernism, the punk-rock nihilism of quoting fascism was kind of sexy/quirky (a la Attila Richard Lucas), connected to fetish and individual expression more than to past political movements of oppression. But nowadays, in the wake of USA's disregard for NATO, Guantanamo Bay, the insidious erosion of human rights such as the current persecution of Times Up in New York, and the outrageous psy-ops of homeland terror alerts, I'm finding such acts and images a lot more creepy.
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 | Qualia Street Closing Party and Von Bark Lecture Fly Gallery party at Saigon Flower 1138 Queen St West NEXT WEEK: Wednesday, April 27 8:00 pm My art installation at Fly Gallery (1172 Queen St. W) is up until the end of April. Come celebrate the closing with us on April 27th at Saigon Flower. Arrive at 8:00pm for Von Bark's lecture on Vermillion Qualia and the Mind/Body Split (or something like that), stay for drinks and fun. Yes, there will be party favours. Pop down the block and check out the window display one last time (best viewed after dark). |
| Qualia is defined as, "the subjective qualities of conscious experience (plural of the Latin singular quale). Examples are the way sugar tastes, the way vermillion looks, the way coffee smells, the way a cat's purr sounds, the way it feels to stub your toe." Excerpt from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1995. | |
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On Saturday I went to a presentation by artists Kevin Krivel and David Warne, in collaboration with Greg Hermanovic, at Trinity Square Video. The trio had constructed a pretty cool new-media installation called New Creatures that shoots video portraits, stacking instances into one image so you can scroll through a captured motion in real time. One side captured head shots and the other captured full body movement. It was fun to play with and the images were sometime beautiful and sometimes creepy. Neato! Both Warne and Krivel come from architecture backgrounds, and Hermanovic is a special effects software developer. The collapse of art, architecture, and design opens doors for all kinds of thought and production, but it also seems to generate hyperbole. Here are some choice quotes from the presentation:
About a projection in an elevator: "We were exposing the verticalness of the shaft." About funky video footage synched to a musical beat in real time: "It's a synthesis of sound and vision." About an installation in which furniture was wired to trigger video projections when manipulated: "Objects continue to be places where there is a physical engagedness."Hermanovic's company, Derivative, makes a software product, called "Touch" that is genuinely very cool, allowing you to mix and manipulate video in real time. It's useful for vjs and concerts (Derivative did displays for last summer's Rush tour). But the package comes with a whole palette of ready-to-go clips that as Hermanovic said, are "pre-authored, and the user performs them." The imagery is catchy, fashionable, and vapid.
images available in Derivative's online media kit
During this presentation I started feeling inklings of despair at distopic visions of the art/culture sector meshing inextricably with commodity and product design. I was jolted from my nega-reverie by the phrase, "This one is for you Queen Street types." It was a pre-authored clip called "Toronto Appliances," featuring Queen Street storefronts, and one in particular that had just closed down near the Drake Hotel.
Toronto Appliances, pre-authored video by Derivative.
Back in 2003 the last issue of Lola publised a story about the then-under-construction hipster hot-spot, the Drake Hotel. (For those readers who don't know Toronto, the context is a formerly somewhat run-down area of town, populated by lower income tenants and lots of artists, which started filling up with galleries, which quickly led to condos, bistros, fancy knick-knack stores and tapas bars for people from other neighbourhhoods who drive fancy cars. You all know the story, cause it happens in every town.) Anyhow. In this issue of Lola a gallerist in the area was quoted about the development of the Drake, saying, "If they provide good service and good hospitality, it will attract people to the area and hopefully that will move out some of the used appliance stores." Ouch.
After the magazine came out, these posters appeared, calling the gallerist an "eleetist meanie." (Thanks to Tanya Read, who collected and scanned this copy.) I dunno who Meeky is, but I'm sure glad he/she made some fuss. I know that I tend to be a stick-in-the-mud. I know that urban demographic shifts are inevitable. I know that the institutions of fine art ride on the financial coat-tails of empty-headed culture-tainment. All this makes me crabby, complicit, and confused. I don't drive a fancy car, nor live in a fancy condo, but I do occasionally drink fancy drinks and eat fancy food in fancy bars with my both my fancy and my not-so-fancy friends. And, of course, I have my own art display up on Queen Street West right now. Its at Fly gallery, with whom I am more impressed every day. They remain a tiny bastion of level-headed art sanity, standing firm in the midst of the crazy high-brow/low-brow maelstrom that swirls around their block.