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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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For everyone who had fun on the DMG bus last night (thanks to Von Bark for MC-ing the ride) there is more bus fun to be had next week, as Andrew J. Paterson will conduct Lucky 13 on the ride to AGYU for Fiona Tan's opening. Bus leaves AGO at 6:00, departs York U at 8:30 to return downtown. If you happen to be in Kingston this weekend look for Andy there too! He is performing monologues from MONO LOGICAL at Queens U tonight, and he will be in attendance for the launch of Gary Kibbins' incredible book, Grammar & Not-Grammar, edited by Andrew and published by YYZ Books. The launch will occur at the opening for Matt Rogalsky at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Kibbins is brilliant (so is Andrew) and so is the book. This Rogalsky character sounds pretty interesting too.
More things happening! I was very lucky to be at Tin Tin Tin in February of 2004 for an early version of Maggie MacDonald's Rat King Opera. The full-fledged production is showing this weekend and it is SOLD OUT. arg.
Too bad I couldn't be in two places at once! I think I would have enjoyed the InterAcess opening last night. If anyone was there, please report! Finnish art is cool, the new InterAccess is cool, and so is the curator of this show, Nina Czegledy. I'm looking forward to the exhibit.
YYZ has a big show on about art and activism with a bunch of screenings and workshops. I'm very curious about this one, will make a post once I get to see the show.
The Quantal Strife Opening was great! And Sally requested that I post a satellite image of the approximate location where the artists (and their many admirers) can all be found, currently brawling over String Theory. (someone bitch-slapped me when I mentioned the possibility of 26 dimensions, so I left in a huff)
Hey I'm guest-curating a show at the Doris McCarthy Gallery with artists Scott Carruthers, Crystal Mowry, and Marc Ngui...It's going to be really good and you have to come and see it!
January 19 - March 5, 2006
Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto at Scarborough)
1265 Military Trail (UTSC campus)
Opening: Thursday, January 19, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Free bus departs 401 Richmond St. W. at 6:30 pm
NOTE: there will be party favours on the bus
Catalogue Launch: Sunday, February 5, 2:00 - 5:00 pm
Free bus departs OCAD (100 McCaul St.) at 12:00 noon to AGYU, Koffler Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery UTSC and Blackwood Gallery UTM
For more information call 416.287.7007
or visit www.utsc.utoronto.ca/dmg
Later this afternoon Ann MacDonald and I are co-guest-lecturing about art writing in a class at OCAD. I've made my notes available online here, and I welcome all comments and complaints. As a special bonus, the charming and selfless RM Vaughan has agreed to let me post his prose poem, 7 Steps To a Better Artist Statement here.
Bits excerpted from Julian Stallabrass taking on Dave Hickey in his book Art Incorporated, published by Oxford University Press, 2004
Hickey's well-honed rhetoric is used to bolster the notion that 'democracy' is embodied in market mechanisms, so that the laws of supply and demand set the hierarchy of prices which really does reflect what people want from art. This view is loosely associated with the standard line of liberal thinking that says that you cannot have democracy without the market. It is another matter, though, to say that the market can act as a subsitute for democracy. If that is a very doubtful claim even when applied to free markets, when applied to the art market—which, as we have seen, is highly archaic, controlled, and restricted—its foolishness is crystal clear.
(pg.169)
Bits excerpted from Julian Stallabrass taking on relational aesthetics in his book Art Incorporated, published by Oxford University Press, 2004
A good example of the type of art that [Nicholas] Bourriaud recommends is Gavin Turk's The Che Gavara Story. This event followed a series of works made by Turk in which he had inserted his own face into well-known images of Che in black-on-red hoardings and in a waxwork mock-up of the famous photograph taken to prove that the revolutionary was dead. In 2001, in an ambitious departure from this previous line of work, Turk staged a series of meetings and discussion sessions about Che's life and legacy in a squatted room in Shoreditch. Political strategy meetings were followed by sessions in which activists would organize a demonstration that was to be the culmination of the series. The idea of this work, said Turk, was to use his status as a newsworthy artist to set up a space for discussion and action that would have a chance of breaking into the mass media. (pg.179)
[...]
The discussion I attended had many points of interest but felt aimless and unfocused, and others I spoke to who had attended the sessions felt similarly. Bizarrely, the final manifestation was dominated by nudists arguing about their right to go naked in public.
The Che Gavara Story demonstrated a number of key features of socially interactive works. Firstly, there is a trade-off between the number of participants and their diversity and the likely discourse. Active paritcipants tend to be few, elite, and self-selecting. Secondly, in these temporary utopian bubbles, no substantial politics can be arrived at, not least because even among those who do attend, real differences and conflicts of interest are momentarily denied or forgotten. A merely gestural politics is the likely result. If, following Bourriaud, one's primary interest in such manifestations is aesthetic, this hardly matters. (pg.181)
[...]
If all this seems a self-consciously futile and token activity, then the rise of this art may be less positive than Bourriaud thinks. Coupled with thinking about the hollowing out of democratic politics...what Bourriaud describes is merely another art-world assimilation of the dead or the junked, the re-presentation as aesthetics of what was once social interaction, political discourse, and even ordinary human relations. If democracy is found only in art works, it is in a good deal of trouble. (pg.182)