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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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On Saturday I went to a sound performance, "Music for Incandescent Events," by Sarah Peebles and Rob Cruickshank. A bunch of us stood around on the rooftop pation at DeLeon White gallery at pre-dusk. As the light in the sky dimmed, a sensor in a little yellow, waterproof box picked up the change and triggered mp3s of Peebles playing a Japanese mouth organ called a sho. Not being trained at the subleties of sound, I found the tones quite simple and near-ambient. The piece progressed for about 20 minutes as the sun set, stopping when the sky became dark and the first couple of stars started to twinkle. It was a very pretty sky and an unusual experience to just stand quietly with a bunch of people and watch light change colour ... reminiscent of James Turell. Red clouds eased into blue and black. Buildings became silhouettes. The earth spun to the east and it all got colder and darker. Happens every day.
I used to have a matching pair of old lady sibling cats, but one of them recently died. The other is padding around disoriented, trying to adjust to the role of sole cat. I keep being reminded of this phrase: We Want To Be Your Only Bird, which is from an excellent, bittersweet and understated apocalpytic essay from the year 2000 (pre-west nile) by Ian Frazier, titled "Tomorrow's Bird."
"Crows: We Want To Be Your Only Bird™." I think this slogan is worth repeating, because there's a lot behind it. Of course, the crows don't literally want (or expect) to be the only species of bird left on the planet. They admire and enjoy other kinds of birds and even hope that there will still be some remaining in limited numbers out of doors as well as in zoos and museums. But in terms of daily usage, the crows hope that you will think of them first when you're looking for those quality-of-life intangibles usually associated with birds. Singing, for example: crows actually can sing, and beautifully, too; however, so far they have not been given any chance. In the future, with fewer other birds around, they feel that they will be.You can read the whole thing here at DoubleTake Magazine.
UPDATE: they took down that link so I posted the piece in the comments section. I'll cease and desist if anyone whines.
I am not an archivist. I am the sort of girl that, if you lend me a book, chances are you won't get it back because I will drop it in the bathtub while I'm reading it. That's why I have deep respect and admiration for people like Brock Silversides who actually collect, preserve, and catalogue cultural artifacts. Silversides is Head of the "Media Commons" at the University of Toronto Library, who have acquired the archives of Toronto's lefty weekly NOW Magazine. According to Silversides' essay in the catalogue, the NOW collection consists of "writing/editorial and research files, taped interviews and printed transcriptions, advertising and promotional material, artwork and graphics, office and administrative files, financial records, circulation records, legal files, awards, [and] memorabilia..." Tonight was the opening of a show of about 150 photographs from the 80s, culled from the collection (34,000 photos in all) by Silversides. My two favourites are Bob and Doug Mackenzie (aka Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) of SCTV, shot by Patrick Harbron, and weirdo punk/alt. bandaged-up zombie musician Nash the Slash as Uncle Sam playing a violin, shot by Andre Pierre. The series of protest shots is also compelling, as are all the photos of youngster local politicians with bad hair and silly 80s fashion. The free, low-production-values catalogue, pictured above and below, is a perfect take-home souvenir.
I was surprised to find myself quite moved by the event. NOW founders Michael Hollett and Alice Klein each spoke with real passion about the bubbling energy of Toronto and it's people. This city is so gawky, it's like a perennial teenager churning with potential energy, a balloon that's always inflating but never bursts. This NOW archive, which includes a full bound set of every issue, is a real core sample of activism and art from the little city that tried and tried and tried. We want it all in Toronto, and we sometimes think we can get it. The listings, letters, lefty commentary and cultural repository that is NOW are both thoroughly taken for granted and thoroughly indispensable. As I rode home from the event along Harbord Street, I was passed by a woman that I can only describe as a "downtown cyclist." She was hip and cute and familiar, with heavy-rimmed glasses, a trim leather jacket, and, of course, a fresh copy of this week's NOW tossed into the milk-crate-basket strapped to her rack.
The phrase, "familiarity breeds contempt," may encapsulate Toronto's cultural situation in a nutshell. We do get on each others' nerves in this town. But we are also ambitious and passionate and looking at these photographs from NOW Magazine I see that familiarity is also fertile. In some weird way, everything that happened on the pages of NOW, from before I even moved here, belongs to me. If you live in Toronto, go see this show, it's part of our heritage and it's sitting in the palms of our hands. (Also, the rare book library is totally cool! Look up...)
Now and the 80s is on at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 120 St George Street, til December 21st, 2004.
There is a nice piece of journalism-from-the-future here about the bad-apple hipsters who wrecked it for everybody else at the big art show in re-opened Terminal Five at JFK Airport in New York. Chat on the topic available at Schwarz. It's ridiculous. Did somebody say, "end of days?"
On Sunday I attended a panel at the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International that addressed the question "Is there an avant garde?" Both Watkins and Monk chose to address the topic as a history lesson, and as such their presentations were quite enjoyable. Watkins told tales of Greenburg in Australia, Marxists, Punk and the "heady days of early postmodernism." Monk, maybe because he was burnt out with manning the AGYU exhibit all weekend, was uncharacteristically lucid and direct (noteworthy!) saying, "Nobody, I hope, believes we can reconstitute the avant garde in Greenburgian terms." Gopnik gave a feisty off-the-cuff rant that rejected teleology while claiming that a "robust notion of the avant garde exists" in the minds of "the people" whether we accept the term itself as relevant or not. Barber talked about generational turnover as represented in artist-run centres such as Diverse Works in Houston where she is Visual Arts Director, and was inspiring in her definition of avant garde artists as "untested, taking risks, challenging convention and putting themselves out there to do things that don't have an assured result."
The most notable aspect of the event, in my opinion, was Monk's assertion that in the unlikely event that there were to be a reconstitution of the avant garde we ("we" meaning he, and the rest of us who are entrenched in our own art paradigms) quite likely could not recognise it. It may develop "in other places, by other means, by people who are not called artists." During the question and answer period both Gopnik and Watkins made similar assertions, agreeing that our cultural source for "creativity" might move to some other domain besides art. I found these statements startling, as I did not really expect a group of pundits with careers embedded in fine art and it's discourse to dismiss the field with such an apparent lack of anxiety. I guess it is my own fuddy-duddy-ness showing that I figured the loss of relevance of the term "art" was somehow a radical idea, at least within art circles. I believe it sincerely, but articulating the fact still gives me sweaty palms. Guess that just makes me a nervous nelly!