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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The next show at MOCCA (opening Saturday) is going to be good. Donigan Cumming is a strange cat who makes strange videos. Peggy Gale guest curated the exhibition. Gale herself has an interesting story. She's been Canada's expert on video art pretty much since the medium was invented. In the early seventies she curated a comprehensive cross-Canada show at the AGO called Videoscape. Back then, video art tended to be conceptual and performative, exploring the possibilities of real-time and the seeming physicality of video itself. Said Gale in her 1977 essay for Parachute, "[Video] is not 'over there,' projected away from us onto a wall or screen as is the case with film. Rather it is 'here;' it projects it's message from within, as would a person who is interacting directly with us. As such, video has a presence which demands attention."
Video art has come a long way since the single-shot days of the early 70s. No longer a reel of magnetic tape, conceptually tied to television and performance, video has become a diffused-yet-integral component of the contemporary multi-media environment. Gale, with her prevailing interest in narrative and the tangibility of ideas, is still pushing her writing and delivering insights into the medium. Hence a show by Donigan Cumming, who's work is multi-layered and challenging, twisting fiction and documentary together in a tight and disconcerting weave. His works feature people living with poverty, old age, and substance abuse. The viewer is confronted with too much intimacy: the saggy flesh, toothless maws, and abject living conditions of some very down and out people. We are invited to peek into a strange relationship between Cumming and his subjects. He is too close, in fact the narrative of desperation seems to belong to the artist as much as it does to his characters. Is this fiction, document or exploitation? If fiction, why the painfully acute level of realism? If document, why is the artist himself so present in the work?
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Says Gale, "When I was asked to curate this show I felt I could say something that hadn't been said yet. It was very hard to nail it." And nail it she did. The exhibition is accompanied by a vivid publication, more an artists' book than a catalogue, that visually puns with pixels and window screens, nutting around with the contemporary construction of video images while at the same time presenting poignant pictures of sad reality. Gale's essay is elucidatory. Here's a quote:
"The relationships between Cumming and his accomplices are complex. Some have become his friends, and stay in regular touch; others surface only in the photos and video works. These touch on the tradition of "concerned photography" with its probing of issues and personal trauma; the resulting images, however, are far from the beautiful photographs that appear no in photo-journalism, as eloquent, even seductive, studies of famine victims or war zones, inner city violence or environmental decay. Ironically, the gritty realities to which we are introduced in Cumming's work, may not be all that they appear, nor even be honest portraits. Facts conflict. They insist on something other than direct or "true" documentation, despite the profusion of information and nuance that they display. Yet while Cumming's work has been reviled on occasion as obscene—that is, offensive or abhorrent to prevailing concepts of morality or decency—the work is highly moral and engaged, and very far from inciting lust or depravity. Insofar as his images are "offensive" one must look not to the artist's intention but to his departure from the sanitized world of contemporary advertising and so-called lifestyle modes. Sex and violence? Not here. Offensive to the senses, disgusting, loathsome, foul? Only from a certain (blinkered) point of view."
You never saw so much hemming and hawing as me trying to decide whether or not to go see the big Bruce Mau induced design show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, MASSIVE CHANGE. The huge lettering on the outside of the building finally wooed me with their promise of spectacle. Paying the fee to get in proved to be an interesting mistake (the website is comprehensive). I previously had no idea that such totalitarian design concepts had taken hold north of the border. Floor-to-ceiling lettering throughout the exhibition made headline pronouncements such as "We will eradicate poverty....We will build intelligence into materials and liberate form from matter...We will design evolution." The first display is about urbanization. Fast-paced video of high density downtowns and satellite images of the earth is accompanied by a sauve, female voice who makes the unnerving claim that "everywhere is city: We still conceive of cities as discrete objects, separate from their surroundings. This is no longer true. There is no exterior to the global city that connects and sustains us all." The display climaxes with gigantic letters that pronounce:
EVERYWHERE=CITY DESIGN=HOPE
Yike, steady on! Some might still say that DESIGN=DECORATION. Yet for all the obnoxious bluster and posturing of this show, I enjoyed its amibitious attempts at categorization. Like Orbis Sensualium Pictus, Bruce Mau and the Institute Without Boundaries have attempted to depict the entire world. The breakdown (scribbled down from the catalogue table of contents) goes like this:
- Urbanization Economies (eg: density, housing)
- Movement Economies (eg: personal freedom, global movement)
- Energy Economies (eg: clean power)
- Information Economies (eg: Lessig on free culture)
- Image Economies (eg: micro and subatomic photography)
- Market Economies (eg: corporate accountability, ecology)
- Material Economies (eg: super hard, super light, bio mimicry)
- Military Economies (eg: conventional war, virtual war, cyberwar, peace)
- Manufacturing Economies (eg: ecology and equity)
- Living Economies (eg: genome, biomedia, drinking water)
- Wealth & Politics (eg: citizen revolution, digital divide, global poverty, women's health, gender power imbalance)
This is my last post to the main page of Sally's blog. Several weeks ago I booked a flight to a relentlessly Catholic country and I have to leave town soon, plus it will be really hard to get a good wi-fi signal in a gothic cathedral. Thanks to the generous loan of Sally's powerful laboratory microscopes I am able to leave you with this image of the College of Cardinals balancing on the head of a pin. (quite comfortably too!)
Personally, I like the Italian prospects, they seem to be the most endearing autocrats in the whole conclave. On-line bookies give the best odds to Dionigi Cardinal Tettamanzi, Archbishop of Milan. You look at his picture (photo #1) and think, what an old darling, vote him in. (He'll officially disapprove of us doing whatever we want, but I suspect we would still get away with it.)
The other Italian, a major long-shot, is Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, retired Archbishop of Milan. (photo #2, surrounded by drinks that are not martinis). He speaks 11 languages and is in regular correspondence with Umberto Eco. There is one impediment though, he is a WILY COYOTE JESUIT (photo #3), and the moment his papacy is announced he'll go and start Vatican III.
Most people are under the illusion that the big Vatican councils produce reform, but they mostly produce documents to be ignored. (one of my favourites was written on the subject of the rhythm method, by a panel of laity, married men and women, several of them declaring that method of birth control to be unreliable and idiotic. They went on to speculate that if all the Bishops had to stick a cold thermometer up their butts every day ... I paraphrase, but these sentiments were actually expressed.)
What Vatican II did produce was the spectacle of Nuns, suddenly dressed in navy blue a-line skirts, white blouses and sensible shoes, playing 12 string guitars and singing Hava Nagila. A Vatican III could result in something even more weird and wonderful, with the added benefit of pissing off Cardinal Ratzinger, Mel Gibson and Mel Gibson's dad. That's probably a good enough reason for Digital Media Tree to offer all its all its moral, financial and political backing to endorse the candidacy of Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, WILY COYOTE JESUIT (photo #3).
I just discovered that you find out the most obscure things when you google Fiddleback Chasuble Sightings. At this site, I learned that they were considered forbidden and reactionary in some circles. (Exactly who is in these circles, is unclear, also I don't know where I stand in relation to this controversy. I am not currently oppressed by this issue, but perhaps I will be in the future if I give it some more thought, and if so, a scathing indictment will follow on this blog. All I can say for the moment is that it just made me go all soft and squishy on them.) (but I could easily turn on a dime) Don't forget to check his link for the
wildly popular biretta sightings.
A further indictment of Maradiaga's prospective papacy is that he has been known to display a cavalier and blatant disregard for certain other Cardinals that he believes to be of little consequence.