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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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I just deleted the post that was here. It was much too long and self-indulgent. The best bit was this: ...I've been worrying a lot about the preponderance of supernatural tv shows & movies. If it ain't reality tv, it's vampires, psychics, demons and zombies. I like some of this stuff a lot (especially the zombies) but why all the fantasy? Is it the culture-tainment industry's way of accepting and answering to the rise of the religious right to power in North America? Is it simply an escape? Are we playing at magic in an attempt to imbue a culture based on commodity and surface with some kind of mythic depth?
And this other bit: ...I've also just started reading Gwynne Dyer's revised edition of WAR, and the very first page of the first chapter gave me something concrete:
Soldiers often prefer to cloak the harsh realities of their trade in idealism or sentimentality, as much to protect themselves from the truth as to hide it from the rest of us, but at the professional level they have never lost sight of the fact that the key to military success is cost-effective killing. The relentless search for efficiency in killing that ultimately led to the development of nuclear weapons was just as methodical when the only means of introducing lethal bits of metal into an enemy's body was by muscle power.Just like urban planning, health care and education, war planning is something that society does by choice, and Canada is no exception.
NOW magazine this week has a piece by Dyer about Afghanistan:
The combat in Afghanistan is more severe and sustained than anything seen in Iraq, for the Taliban fight in organized units with good light infantry weapons. In the past month, Britain and Canada have had about half as many soldiers killed in Afghanistan as the U.S. lost in Iraq in the same time, out of a combat force perhaps one-10th as big.How is this a good choice? After reading a bit of Dyer I understand better how our soldiers might genuinely feel un-supported by those of us who would prefer that they come home, because, like little children deciding not to clap their hands to keep Tinkerbell alive, we are failing to believe in the myths that sustain them, such as the oft-repeated (and insulting to our intelligence) rallying cry that they are protecting us from terrorists. Worrying that the military is perhaps not doing its job at cost-efficient killing in Afghanistan demonstrates a cultural lack of fantasy. We consumer-citizens are supposed to be eating up the narratives we are fed, not calling for accountability.
 | I am going to be delivering bedtime fortune stories at the Heliconian Club this Saturday night-Sunday morning as part of a Nuit Blanche event curated by Emily Pohl-Weary. The reading lineup for the Bedtime Tales: Fables and Fantasies program is listed below. Other cool events (especially this and this and this) are taking place all over town. |
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Bedtime Tales: Fables and Fantasies A Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Event On Saturday, Sept. 30, literary fantasia Bedtime Tales: Fables and Fantasies will feature more than twenty local literary stars and provocateurs, assembled in Yorkville's gothic Heliconian Club, located at 35 Hazelton Avenue (one block east of Avenue Rd). The authors will delight, entertain, and heat up the wee hours of the morning in between stops on the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche route. Pause for a cup of hot cocoa and cookies, grab a cushion, stretch out beneath the vaulted ceilings, and enjoy tales of the night ranging from the surreal to the sensual to the scary. Here's the lineup: Lillian Allen 7:01 PM Hadley Dyer 7:30 PM Olive Senior 8:00 PM Jean Yoon 8:30 PM Kerri Sakamoto 9:00 PM Pam Mordecai 9:30 PM Ibi Kaslik 10:00 PM Tamara Faith Berger 10:30 PM Russell Smith 11:00 PM BREAK 11:30 PM Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm 12:00 AM Mariko Tamaki 12:30 AM Kelley Armstrong 1:00 AM Paul Hong 1:30 AM BREAK 2:00 AM Sabrina Jalees 2:30 AM Kristyn Dunnion 3:00 AM Caitlin Sweet 3:30 AM BREAK 4:00 AM R.M. Vaughan 4:30 AM Andrew J. Paterson 5:00 AM BREAK 5:30 AM Gemma Files 6:00 AM Emily Pohl-Weary 6:30 AM Download the program book with readers' bio notes at: http://www.emilypohlweary.com/bedtimetalesprog.pdf | |
Yesterday I went to see The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (curated by Rhonda Corvese). Artist Iris Häussler invented another artist: a little old man, German, an outsider artist living in a tiny house in downtown Toronto and filling it with dark and scary sculptures. The artwork is the house, and the tour given by people who tell you they are from the municipal archives, investigating the "cultural value" of the work. The story goes that the archives have opened up the house to the public, both to allow the art to be seen in its original setting, and to justify the budget, since cataloguing is taking much longer than anticipated. It's a great fiction, and our tour guide gave an incredible performance, never breaking out of character even a tiny little bit. I absolutely loved it.
The artist and curator only revealed the fiction part way through the exhibition, so quite a few people who saw it early thought it was real. I am not sure how I would have felt if I had seen it before I knew. The show was very emotional and intimate, and I would likely have felt manipulated. However I think it is brilliant. And it poses a question: is it wrong to lie for fiction? Even knowing I was in a constructed installation, I still felt like I was tramping through somebody's life. Which is obviously the intention. The character of this old man was very vivid, working out his personal history, including the holocaust, by making big dark sculptural projects that are reminiscent of Anselm Keiffer and directly influenced by Brancusi. There is also weird creepy obsessive stuff going on with the female form, as befits any male outsider artist worth his salt, and a mysterious relationship with a woman who seems to have lived with him for several years. I feel like Joseph Wagenbach is real.
I would love to hear in the comments from others who went, especially anyone who was not aware of the fiction. Here's part of Häussler's statement:
In parallel - as the project is ultimately revealed as an art installation - it initiates a discussion of questions of authorship and ownership, of public perception and curated intention, such as "What defines a contemporary oeuvre?" "What does it mean to be a product of your times?" "What personal history remains in a body of work?" "What products of work are considered as art and for what reasons?" and "In what sense could it be said Joseph Wagenbach exists, or does not exist".