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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Big Culture Sunday
This weekend Von Bark and I tried to see the Robotic Chair doing its thing in a Roots store, but the darn Luminato festival website (Toronto's latest civic arts extravaganza) neglected to list the special Sunday times, and we showed up at exactly the wrong hour. Instead we went to the Royal Ontario Museum and walked around inside the underwhelming Libeskind crystal. The light is nice and so are the angles, but the ceilings are kinda low and all the walls are slanty. I dunno how they're going to mount any successful displays in there. But I still love the ROM, they didn't mess with the grand old staircase and the massive totem poles. We lost ourselves wandering in the old section of the museum, looking at the Acropolis diorama and the big Bodhisattva sculptures. After that I continued on downtown to catch a bit of the end of Luminato. Max Streicher's big horses floating over Union Station were great: apocalypse meets Alex Colville (Colville horse& train painting posted below). I forgot my camera, but there's good Flickr pictures here. R.M. Vaughan's Globe and Mail review of Luminato is here. I have to agree with his dismissal of the big black balls at BCE place, although one of them was deflating like a great big testicle, which added a humorous, though unintentional frisson. I didn't get to see Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s piece. I wish I did because many people beside R.M. were not impressed, but R.L.H. is one of my favourites and I wish I'd seen it for myself.
Update: Timothy Comeau's excellent review of Luminato is here. [via Simpleposie]
We finally watched Terry Gilliam's Tideland. It begins with a brilliant introduction by Gilliam in which he confesses that many people are not going to like the film, and exhorts us to remember that children are "resilient" and "designed to survive." I didn't like Fisher King much, but otherwise I love all things Gilliam. Tideland might be my new favourite. Like Philip Pullman in his Dark Materials series, Gilliam treats childhood suffering and magic-thinking survival strategies with rare insight and genuine respect. It's a ghoulish and supernatural film, but, next to Todd Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse, it is the most realistic film about a little girl that I have ever seen.
Timothy Comeau's new work "Outdoor Air Conditioning" (reproduced below) demonstrates, contra the recent humiliating announcement by PM-for-the- moment Steven Harper that Canada will not meet the Kyoto targets, that in the visual arts at least, we are doing our bit.
Comeau's work raises the bar for art within a conceptual framework, adding environmental impact awareness to create a neat tautological bundle. Not only is the work about the state of the environment (massively out of control and uncontrollable) but it is a model of environmental frugality: no materials, no crates, no shipping, no gallery, no printed matter, no mailings, no hard documentation, no archive. The work exists in the mind, and a mindful mind at that.
It leaves a child-size environmental footprint; Comeau's computer, mine and yours (heavy metals and other hazardous materials not easily disposed of yet dutifully replaced every two years), energy consumed (see David Suzuki's ad about the cost, in beer, of dedicated beer fridges), some miniscule part of the admittedly gargantuan infrastructure that supports the Internet. Proportionally, you have to think Comeau's digitally-relayed concept adds hardly at all to all that, unless it is in the way it fuels the passion for ever more powerful and energy consuming digital communications.
Is it not time that every artwork include in its specifications, an environment impact assessment?
- R. Labossiere
Today is June 5th and it's cold outside. I declare the local weather pattern on this day to be a readymade installation entitled:
Outdoor Air Conditioning.
a free cooling centre open to the public during this global warming heat wave
My dad won a big poetry prize yesterday.
Feeling no small degree of filial pride and a
zinger of a hangover...
