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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Rebecca Belmore, “The Named and the Unnamed”, 2002 (Photo: Howard Ursuliak).This image was provided for download here.
I am really pleased that Rebecca Belmore is going to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale next year. She is a tough and exciting performance artist from the First Nations. The first time I saw her, in 1997, she performed a strong, scary tribute to Dudley George, ("the first Indigenous person this century to be killed in a land rights dispute in Canada") at a 7A*11d event at the skanky old Symptom Hall in Toronto (now that place worn't no boo-teek hotel).
In 2002 Belmore was part of the group show Houseguests in which contemporary artists infiltrated the AGO's historic Grange property, Toronto's "oldest brick building" (fer gawd's sake). Belmore took over the master bedroom, and slept under a bearskin blanket in the 19th-century four-poster bed.
The video still above is performance footage projected onto a wall that has been studded with light bulbs. I saw this installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2003. The performance is a long ritural "in response to the horrific unfolding of evidence around the serial killing of women from Vancouver's skid row." Belmore is a hard-core performer, with onstage charisma and an unsually unsettling undertone of violence. In the next shot, she takes that rose and pulls it, thorns and all, through her teeth. Another element that I really liked was when she put on a long red dress, picked up a hammer, and started forcefully nailing the dress to a back-alley telephone pole. Belmore is strong, and she knows how to wield a hammer with conviction. Once all the loose pieces of garment were nailed into the wood, Belmore proceeded to tear herself away, rending the dress and leaving it to dangle in tatters. I was impressed by the performance (which had many more elements than I am describing here) but also by the simple distracting beauty of the light bulbs shining through the video. All this to say, Canada is gonna have some kick-ass representation at the big show next summer.
Well I'm back online and catching up with the foofoorah about changes to the Canada Council's visual arts program. There are spirited threads on both Zeke's Gallery and Simpleposie with refreshingly crabby provocations by Timothy Comeau of Goodreads and refreshingly outraged response from various art-types. The discussion is polarising, which is entertaining, but of course, as Cedric Caspesyan points out, there's a loss whenever that happens. One very important thing to keep in mind is that most Canadian artists do not currently get funding from the Canada Council. There is a myth that we can float along on grants in this country, making esoteric and unpopular art that might never be shown. Some of the people who make art get government support some of the time, and a very very few of the people who make art get grants on a regular basis (but even for them there are no guarantees). In practice we are not that different from the USA, where artists whose work doesn't commodify well spend a lot of their time hustling money from private grants, bursaries, residencies, day jobs, gallery jobs, etc. The Canada Council isn't currently proposing to increase the amount of money or anything, so we are arguing about statements of principle. And in this respect the younger rabble-rouser types (and I include myself in this category, though I am not sooo young, because I will entertain doubts about the status quo) have been lucky to grow up under a government that, until now, openly states the importance of arm's length support for creation of art. Could we even pinpoint and begin to separate the explorative or experimental elements of our artistic personalities that were formed in the context of this ideal? That said, I'm glad Timothy Comeau is ranting and Zeke is stating his preference for the new, exhibition-oriented agenda, because ideals require scrutiny. If we care, we have to be able to question and change.
Comeau is dead right when he says: "It is not fair to think that the Canada Council's programs, nor our whole artworld infrastructure, as sustainable as anything else within the current system manifested by its bureaucracies." But he is wrong when he says: "In art, in luxury, in anything, it's only worth something if somebody wants it." Acquistion is only one method (and I would also pose it is restrictive) of interacting with art, but it is the only means available in the so-called "free" market place. Right now, with the Canada Council as it stands, we participate as a society in an open statement that culture has value beyond commodity. Tell me, is that not cool and worth defending?
I will be offline for a spate (moving house). Back next week around Wednesday.
