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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Jennifer Chan's document: net art in the museum
my next exhibition proposal: one word - assmonitor
The Top 5 Disappointments of 2011 by R.M. Vaughan
1. Celebrities
They go to jail, they get out of jail. They make babies with strange women, then they say they didn't make babies with strange women. They get married, then they quickly get un-married (after gibbering on US morning talk shows about how sacred the vows of marriage and Jesus and cakes, or Jesus Cakes, I forget). They go crazy, they go on tour.
I am very, very bored with this dialogue. Time for one of us to opt out.
Since I'm fascinating, I guess it will have to be you, Celebrity.
I used to interview celebrities for a living, and, lemme tell yah, they are all pathological liars. That's how they got the job. They lied; about their talents, abilities, measurements, friendships, birthplaces (I'm looking at you, Obama), love for life. They don't love life, they love the opposite of life, hysteria.
2. Art
While it is true that I did not see a lot of art that I hated in 2011, it is also true that I saw very little art that I felt warranted more than 12 seconds of my time. And I am not paid for my time.
3. The Earth
We're killing the planet! We're killing the planet! Oh, you hear that every day.
But nobody stops to ask if perhaps the planet is killing us.
All the evidence is right in front of you, from weird livestock-based influenzas to earthquakes to unnaturally frost-free winters that allow vegetable matter to rot as rottenly as it likes and thus cause filthy spoors to breed, spoors that float casually, wantonly across the hills and valleys until they land on my innocent head and then give me ear infections … during Christmas no less.
Bette Midler once said that she loved Mother Nature despite what Nature had done to her looks. How cute. How forgiving. However …
Mars, I should like to point out, has never done anything to me, nor to you, good nor bad. Mars, I should like you to note, does not kill small children with bug bites or smother hikers in snow. Mars, I'm telling you, is exactly like PEI but without the ugly knitwear.
4. Gays
If I was not a polite person, I would name, right here on the internet for all to see, a prominent Gay person who is close, heartbeat close, to the levers of power in this country and yet who continues to ignore/cop-alert/block my kittenish, flirty emails.
John Baird, Minister of Not Having Sex With Richard
I was born to be a political wife.
Small talk with psychotic despots? Check (file under Father Issues Conquered). Cue cry during horrific catastrophe public funerals? Check. Promote indigenous gardening and literacy and pet neutering? Check. In my sleep I could do that. Not farting until I get home? Check. Waving from cars? I do that anyway, because I am friendly and genuinely glad to be mobile.
5. Archives
Everybody's doing one. The Archive Show.
I did one myself. I'm no trailblazer, thank you very much. That pioneer shit is too much work. But with an Archive Show, half the work is already made!
Archivalism: scrap-booking for academics.
Jon Davies' Top Ten for 2011
In no particular order, just things seen in Toronto, and with nepotism and self-promotion embraced:
1. Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten, The Museum of Found Objects: Toronto (Maharaja and –), February 5 to April 6, 2011, Art Gallery of Ontario and South Asian Visual Arts Centre.
2. Three Gallery TPW collaborations
Lindsay Seers: Extramission 6, April 2 to 24, 2011. With the Images Festival.
Decisive Moments, Uncertain Times, October 20 to November 19, 2011. With Trinity Square Video, which presented Decisive Moments, Somewhere Else, October 27 to December 9, 2011.
Ben Rivers: Slow Action, September 8 to October 1, 2011. With TIFF Future Projections.
3. Two Mercer Union Exhibitions
Tricia Middleton: The Call Is Coming from Inside the House, November 11 to December 10, 2011.
Out of Print, January 27 to February 26, 2011.
4. Marisa Hoicka & Johnny Forever: Trust My Gut – A Drag Opera Surgery, October 27 to 30, 2011. Presented by the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) at upArt Contemporary Art Fair, Gladstone Hotel. Also, everything the FAG has done since its launch.
5. Chris Curreri: Beside Myself, November 17, 2011 to January 7, 2012, Daniel Faria Gallery.
6. Melanie Gilligan: Self-capital, April 2 to May 7, 2011, Interaccess.
7. Beth Stuart: The Cliques, October 6 to 30, 2011, Erin Stump Projects.
8. Beatrice Gibson: The Future's Getting Old Like the Rest of Us, film curated by cheyanne turions for the 2011 Images Festival and screened on April 8, 2011 at Jackman Hall.
9. Susan Hiller: The Last Silent Movie, September 22 to November 26, 2011, Prefix ICA.
10. Miranda July's conversation with Patti Schmidt following the Canadian premiere of The Future, August 2, 2011. Presented by the Images Festival.
Anthony Easton's 25 Best Visual Experiences 2011
1. That Sholem Krishtalka’s Lurking Drawings work on different levels depending on if you see them online or in person.
2. Twombly Sculptures, all of them, see for example this one
--named Epitaph for Jupiter, because of the classical references, and the island in Florida; it’s sad and funny!
3. The huge new book of Robert Adams’s photos out by Yale, and also how Adams complicated and often lovingly melancholic attitude towards the suburbs has changed.
4. The you tube video: Hooters Girls Remember 9/11 because kitsch and sexual politics always under gird what is best about America:
5. The “butch” remake of Don’t Tell Mama that Alan Cumming did at an AIDS fundraiser--Wiemear fuckery at it’s ahistorical best.
6. Attack the Block choosing to use analog monsters instead of CGI trickery.
7. Jenny Keller’s Field Notes. because there is something powerful in the accuracy of pure observation translated into an attempted objectivity
Sheet sketches of hippopotamus anatomy and behavior. By Jonathan Kingdon (Harvard University Press)
8. Those 15 Minutes of Tree of Life, you know, with the creation of the universe, and the dinosaurs and the interesting mix of analog and digital--the interesting bit that rewarded the slog?
9. Puppy Baskets Cause they are cute. (hi/lo, talent and craft, mini-Koons, etc--but mostly cute)
[Anthony that is so fucking 2006, puppy cupcakes are what is happening now- LM: ]
]
10. Ai Wei Wei--his tweeting, his writing, his interviews, his big installations, and his small performances, his entire presence.
11. High School Milk Jug--video cause of the disco lights, and the costume.
12. Liz Magor at Susan Hobbs I cannot explain why this moved me so much, it’s something about the plainness, and the idea of making the repairs of found damage obvious, and the textiled memory of loss, and the reworking of the domestic, and well all of that and still...
13. The 15 Minutes where Bill Cunningham talks and doesn’t talk about his religion and his sexuality--the whole documentary (Bill Cunningham's New York) was fucking brilliant, but those intensely brittle moments of silence where the holiest thing i have seen all year.
14. The Sotheby’s Catalog for Liz Taylor--We all spent the year talking about the nature of Capital, but sometimes we just want to look at something pretty, and there is something grateful in Liz’s blunt vulgarity.
15. Tatiania Berg’s Shaped paintings --All of that good bad painting that has become bad, and the clashing colours, and the just sort of hipster aggro amateurism of all of it, and you spend the year craving finish fetish, and this smart woman makes work that looks like Palm Beach bored housewife ceramics, but better and deeper and you just sort of think--if this wasn’t sculptural, I would loathe it, it’s like that.
I'm Not Going to Eat You Later Tent 2010 Oil, spray-paint, enamel on canvas
16. James Cameron Mitchell video for Dio.r Russel Toovey, Marion Cottiard and Ian McKellon all make me swoon.
17. Big Frieda for the unadulterated joy and political implications of ass shaking (Choose a video, a public performance, or that shot of her and Ryan Gosling )
18. This photo of Merce Cunningham by Rberg--It is a great photo of a dancer, and a personal reflection of that circle, and both of those things suggest we keep it, but the recent working of his back catalog makes the argument of his photography as a separate practice, and not just grist from the Combine mill--this proves that point.
19. Bram Dijkstra’s book Naked, on the American nude: queer, straight, man, woman, illustration, fine art, pulp and academia--an entire book on all kinds of ways that America by creating texts about the nude worked a new identity--with brilliant insights on everyone from Grant Wood to Julie Bell, and everything from Public Hair to De Kooning’s misogyny. Groundbreaking.
20. The film Margin Call, for it’s costumes---as restricted and as about status as a Geisha house, and for it’s cool blue/grey aesthetic
21. Timber Sports sponsored by Stihl-- I could make a case about pure athleticism, but mostly it’s the eroticism of Walt Page’s beard:
22. Warhol Panda--saw as they were hanging at the Detroit Museum of Art, claims have been made that his endangered animal series was about AIDS or something, but it’s so cheap, so commercial, and so badly screen printed, worth more than it’s worth, and has the same cheerful vulgarity and easy money that Liz had.
23. Animal Talking in All Caps Aesop for a more cynical age:
24. Catherine Opie's photo of the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad--Opie's best work is myopic--about the best self of it’s subjects--and though the article about Nyad talks about how she can do nothing but train and swim, convincing others to feed her and clothe her and to train with her against their better judgment, the photograph just shows Nyad, with a web of jellyfish scars, her skin the colour of her background, her hair the colour of her skin, making a bicep, to prove to the photographer (not the audience, she is not facing us) that she is capable.
25. The House of Sharon--I saw it in the last 20 minutes of a Friday afternoon after spending the day with baptists at the dedication of Rowan, my friend Spenser’s kid. I cannot imagine a better way of seeing it.
Sunday - Ryuichi Sakamoto
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (courtesy of GVB)