Showing posts with label Toronto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toronto. Show all posts
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| VIP observers sitting on the patio of the Officer's Beach Club on Parry Island are illuminated by the 81 kiloton Dog test, part of Operation Greenhouse, at Enewetak Atoll, April 8, 1951 (from the Ryerson Black Star collection holdings). |
Nuclear photography from Hiroshima to the meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. I find AGO's smaller side exhibits wildly unpredictable. They are sometimes one claustrophobic room with a few works and sometimes four large spaces jammed with work across many disciplines (if it fills four rooms and has a 300-page catalogue, why isn't it a headliner?). Camera Atomica should have been a main exhibit. But how do you market pain, horror and devastation? That's a tough sell! You have to be extremely talented and innovative as a marketer to convince people to come and pay to see some of their own species' worst acts. That's the only reason I can think of: no one knew how or wanted to try to sell this show, so it ended up with second (third?) billing. Camera Atomica is such a powerful, upsetting and obsessively curated show; you leave it disgusted with humanity and by proxy yourself. You leave it reflecting, despairing slightly and raggedly hoping for better. And that's a central function of art. Maybe it's too soon. Maybe we're just not ready for photography of this kind. Because it's strange how comfortable we are looking at paintings of ancient atrocities. We study them with a dispassionate eye. Massacre of the Innocents is one of my favourites at the AGO and its subject matter is brutally murdered babies, among other things (by "favourite" I mean it moves me, I mean I find it amazing, and it's weird that its gruesome subject matter bothers me far less than the photos of the children of Chernobyl. Must be because I can allow myself the fallacy that those brutal battles that happened a long time ago capture a different kind of human; we have all evolved since then. Except Camera Atomica tells me we haven't, not much). So, an open plea to AGO's marketing department: either ignore your board and take more creatives risks, or give up: sub the work out to a more avant-garde agency. If you can't sell the hard things about art, if you can only sell sexy graffiti shows and name-brand celebrities, then you're failing as an institution.
This is a photo from a prior show, but at YYZ gallery Rude's gold aluminum mirror rhombohedrons are being shown in near-darkness and the effect is breathtaking. They look like debris from another, better planet, from utopia maybe, miraculously and mysteriously intact. Such beauty so coldly rendered.
From Sarah Robayo Sheridan's text on the exhibition:
"Gold mirror is a recurrent medium in Jade Rude’s installations. It is a
material that evokes divergent affiliations: both the high-end optic
technology of space missions but also a plastic world’s answer to
consumer-grade luxury. Rude’s industrial sheeting offers a more
glamorous update to the mirrored surfaces of earthworks of yore, while
nevertheless following on the turnabout prompted by American minimalism
that made industrial fabrication the new gold standard in art. Indeed,
Rude’s favoring of conditions of installation in which “the physical
body and surrounding architecture become enmeshed” aligns perfectly with
the battle cry of minimalism in the 1960s. Yet in this particular
foray, Rude also appropriates a specific image referent as her starting
point - the mysterious solid that stars in Albrecht Dürer’s now
five-centuries-old engraving Melencolia I (1514). Based on what
most scholars agree to be a truncated rhombohedron rendered in the
etching, Rude has extrapolated a three-dimensional structure that she
deploys in modular repetition, stacking and distributing these units in
clusters across the gallery space. The resulting rhombic building blocks
are scaled to multiple sizes and are placed according to subjective
decisions of arrangement that the artist has negotiated in relationship
to the physical footprint of the gallery. The dispersal of the forms
across the site is formally linked to phenomena of accrual and
multiplication common in the natural landscape. The repeating units also
offer refractions of the surrounding environment and its visitors
framed in the mirrored facets of the solids, which act like prisms
distributing light in a theatrical staging of the forms. The resulting
installation balances between sculptural, pictorial and performative
concerns - both carefully laid rock garden and hall of mirrors."
On til March 7
The prettiest, most delightful pieces at Villa Toronto are Zeke Moores' golden dumpster and silver portable toilet (Diaz Contemporary) but what I found myself thinking about later were the aluminum-covered branches by Tony Romano, a nod to Stendhal’s theory of love: Austrian salt miners used to take a tree branch with them down into the mine. Over many months, salt crystals would accumulate on the branches, and the miners would give them to their wives and girlfriends, as objects of beauty. Love is about making something ordinary transcendent, Stendhal wrote: 'From the moment he falls in love, even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is.'
Michelangelo never intended his sketches to be put on display, but 30 of them appear here with a steroidal curatorial heft: the theme is creative disappointment. This is an enlightening and peculiar lens through which to view a master. It's also disappointing itself, since it implies that the best way to get modern audiences to relate to a long-dead genius is to show his biggest flops. He's just like us! Big dreams collecting dust! The curators must have felt this sense of smallness too, otherwise why the random addition of a
couple Rodin nods?
And yet it does work, on the level of enrichment; Michelangelo's activity as an architect of military fortifications isn't well-known outside of academia. One leaves the exhibit having learned the breadth of his artistic practice and having a larger sense of his devotion to creating art, so much of which never came to fruition. Here are all the projects he thought up and worked on, all for nothing.
It's also mildly breathtaking to behold hand drawn sketches that have lasted for over 400 years.
Compared to the magnificent, exhaustive Colville show next door (admission is the same price to both - whoever is pricing these shows needs a performance review) the Michelangelo exhibit is overpriced. And again the viewer is dragged along by an overbearing curatorial presence, this time with such insistence it's embarrassing. Do we need to link Colville to Wes Anderson to prove he's still relevant? Do we need sound art 'modern responses' to Colville to celebrate his importance? I say no.
If, as the curatorial statement asserts, the late Ms. Scondi (1921-2005) "rejected public validation of her efforts" she would presumably be mortified by the current show at Katzman Contemporary (an austere, beautiful, modern space located in a rundown residential neighbourhood several blocks off St. Clair West at Old Weston Road).
"...ultimately it wasn’t until she retired from her post at the station and retreated to her cabin in the woods [in rural northern Ontario] that she was able to embark upon the many artistic investigations that would fully occupy her remaining days and years."
Scondi's lengthy self-imposed exile is far more engaging and appealing, to me, than any of the work on display. Her homages and assemblages and creations seem secondary, the fruit of a larger work: withdrawal from society. Self-imposed exile ("prolonged quietude") is a very deliberate and very difficult performance piece, completely of another time - a time perhaps lost permanently - when fame could actually disinterest a person. It might seem clear that Scondi retreated in order to make art, but it's not that clear to me. Retreat is itself an artistic act. But in any case, I wish millions more would devote their retirements to cultivating an artistic practice of the Scondi variety.
Because she had no formal/traditional art education or connections to the art scene, she is considered an 'outsider artist' but one has "to wonder whether the concept of outsider art has lost all sense:
After all, outsider does have a nice little paradox embedded in it: for an artist to be considered an outsider, he or she must first be brought inside the professional art world by an insider. In other words, everyone the art world considers an outsider is de facto an insider. The standard outsider biography thus includes not only a traumatic (typically motherless) childhood, a history of institutionalization (orphanage, asylum, prison), a stunted education, a subsistence job, and an intense drive to make art, but also a discovery story, a tale of someone with cultural connections who brings the outsider in."
Because she had no formal/traditional art education or connections to the art scene, she is considered an 'outsider artist' but one has "to wonder whether the concept of outsider art has lost all sense:
After all, outsider does have a nice little paradox embedded in it: for an artist to be considered an outsider, he or she must first be brought inside the professional art world by an insider. In other words, everyone the art world considers an outsider is de facto an insider. The standard outsider biography thus includes not only a traumatic (typically motherless) childhood, a history of institutionalization (orphanage, asylum, prison), a stunted education, a subsistence job, and an intense drive to make art, but also a discovery story, a tale of someone with cultural connections who brings the outsider in."
Though Scondi rejected fame, here she is, having a solo show at a highbrow Toronto gallery. And being written about.
"On the shelves you will find a large collection of small objects. They represent as completely as possible a cross-section of inanimate and animate beings which we encounter in the external world as well as in the inner imaginative world: trees, plants, houses, fountains, bridges, ships, vehicles, etc.
Try to illustrate each moment of your life by selecting objects from the shelves. Arrange these small figures in the same way sculptures and paintings are arranged in a gallery. Your therapist plays the role of the museum's curator. If you wish, you can explain what you are doing or wait until the end. They can clarify how some galleries are supposed to be used; however, the rules are simple and you are the artist. Your vision is what counts."
To Sept 1 - The Power Plant
David Altmejd's 2008 work The Holes ("a gargantuan werewolf lying lifeless in a crystal garden") is at MOCCA until April 4.
Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker's chief art critic, visited Toronto last week to give a talk on MOCCA's Misled by Nature exhibition. He dismissed the curatorial linkage of Altmejd's work to the Baroque and rambled enjoyably about rejecting the notion of beauty as an attribute. Beauty is a democratic experience available to everyone: a moonrise over the Walmart parking lot is beautiful, he said, and everyone can appreciate such a sight. By contrast, not everyone can appreciate the beauty in art, which requires knowledge, study, and by association, refinement.
Kant defined the sublime, Schjeldahl said, as beauty plus an emotion. Beauty + fear = sublime. Beauty + awe = sublime.
Under this definition, Altmejd's work is spectacularly sublime.
Misled by Nature continues at MOCCA to April 6.
