artTwit

Art Bitch

2005-10-05T01:45:00.000-04:00

Ok well....a bit of change here....

It turns out they are a couple groups of people who used the nomenclatures

"art-wit, artwit, art(t)wit (that would be me), art twitt, etc..."

Some friend of mine also told me he didn't like the name that much,
and that I should write some texts in french sometimes.

So while I am in NO WAY going to kill this blog,
I am thinking of using it for some special cases of art bitching
(hey...I did look out for "art bitch", but that name too
already exists).

I am not sure yet what I want to do,
but I found out a title that seems un-used,
and which word-play sweetly functions both in
french AND english.

So thus I created these two mirorring blogs:

Artquebuse

and

Artquebus

But I might as well kill them both and return to artTwit
(which I always wanted to call art(t)wit anyway, but blogspot
didn't like the parenthesis)

Cheers,

and see you wherever I decide to move on,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Defining The New Art Scene (September 2005)

2005-09-30T10:34:00.000-04:00

This month I'm selecting a discussion forum
from the New York "alternative" toy store
Kid Robot,
where fanatics discuss about recent toy designers,
general street art, and modelling techniques.

You may not call limited toy designs
"art", but judging from the recent
interest of gallerists with street arts,
or the general melting down of boundaries between
art and design, some of these artists
will be in museums tomorrow.

Consider this the 21st Century version
of terracotta figures: most of these toys
are not meant to play with, but to
install on your shelves and watch.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: coming up next, as soon as I find the time, a countdown
review of my last trip to New York, and further ahead
a countdown review of Mois De La Photo (Montreal).
They are a few summer exhibits that I might come back
to, or not, depending how things go.

Floating Island

2005-09-21T16:19:00.000-04:00

(image from www.robertsmithson.com)

Nothing too original,
but you got a few days left (until September 25th 2005) to catch a view of Robert Smithson's posthumously (and newly) built Floating Island, a tiny emulation of Central Park that circulates on the Hudson River around Manhattan for this period.

I didn't embark "on it", so I don't know how or if "general people" are allowed to climb on it at some point, but it's probably one of the best piece by Smithson ever, whom is honored by a travelling retrospective these days for which I got mixed feelings, partly because I deeply regret it have not been set in exterior conditions, away from the confinements of museums.

I was hearing a presentator while visiting Whitney talking about an institutional wish to preserve Smithson's delicate artworks, which I thought was ridiculous, since many of his works in contemporary museums are actually replicates. Hence, a Smithson work would make sense when you're able to replicate it: it's not about an "original". Just like building the Floating Island: the piece makes total sense even though we know it was mostly built by his wife Nancy Holt.

The obsession of the artworld about signature and authenticity totally move
Smithson's art beyond his intention. Or if I'm simply imposing an interpretation
on Smithson's legacy that is not really his, than here's a fine opportunity to oppose it.

For if a portion of Smithson's art speaks about the nonsense of materiality (always in state of ephemerality), than this vision should be encompassed by a curatorial project who claims to support it. Instead, here we are presented with "documentary photographic sets" that seems (selon the press release) to be presented as the "objets d'art" themselves, the precious "simulacras" presented to a public unable to visit the works for real. Archiving strangely doesn't suit well with Smithson's "message".

For example, I am confused about the best way to receive a Smithson's preparatory drawing. Visually, the drawing for Floating Island seems self-erasable compared to the spectaculory physical realization of the project. Yet the drawing is the signature, the project a replicate. When does a Smithson's art piece begin to materialize? How does authorship contravene with a signalization of entropy ?
Why not have simply painted a wall saying "Go Visit Spiral Jetty In Utah Or Fuck Off!!", instead of throwing us with an array of design drawings for something that was foremost meant to be outcasted from institutions?? Sounds like I'm way off my hat but...the compromise to save Smithson's artistic legacy is perticularly paradoxical and could lead the viewer to misunderstandings about aspects of his work.
I could be wrong and, in fact, maybe Smithson's was wrong and reached a lot of limits about what art can express and how it is able to express it.

Finally, is it so important to preserve a pile of dust
with mirrors that functions as a metaphor for entropy?

Or rather: is that pile of dust, THE ONE pile of dust, or does any pile
of dust speaks the same?

Cedric Caspesyan

Defining The New Art Scene (August 2005)

2005-08-31T14:59:00.000-04:00

Been sick and more than away from the visual arts
this past month. I think I'm desillusioned by the whole thing,
but I can't tell yet if i is the people systematizing the way we are invited to
watch art or the artists that seemingly embrace that systematization
that got me so down lately.

I'm fed up with museums and their guards, for one thing.

There is a prospect in the circumventions of museography
(the "topography" of museums, to borrow a popular expression)
that engulfs artistic expression in a certain set of politics that are
hardly if ever adressed by artists.

Why do artists want so much to be exhibited in museums?
What is the signification of this need ? How does the museum
experience shapes an artwork? Is it really the "best of all
possible worlds" solution for an art piece to be exhibited in a museum,
or if not what could it be ?

The Artforum issue of this month contains an excellent
article about artists (some very well known) who attempt
to produce and exhibit art away from the confinements of
museums, or rather, making art that contradicts conceptually the usual
need of the white cube or museum space (stage) to exist (aka la Fontaine de Duchamps),
on the very opposite depending on outbound, exterior contexts to be fully
experienced or grasped, and this, without having necesseraly to
fall into the ageold category of land art, or respect any of the
obligations of the site-specific.

Basically, an art of "the buddhist temples", if I can make
an analogy with the early asian temples that were built
from the inner of caverns, oppositing a tradition of building
"artificial" spaces filled with treasures and figurines.

Actually, the Artforum article presents many of
these artists as redefining the tradition of "land art",
but to me, some of these artists have not much
to do with nature, but much more to do about
reconfiguring the experiences of life.

Can we be neolithic again ?

I cannot link a specific "linkography" page
about artists going into this direction, yet.

But I can link an hero of this new tendancy:

http://www.zittel.org/

and one community project she has unleashed.

which is sort of an arty-intellectual version of this (that you all must know about):

In Quebec where I'm settled they are groups like
Farine Orpheline
and Atsa which follow similar
paths, organizing various outbound projects without having
to indulge any sentiment of constraints
about site-specifity (I remember a recuperation parc
designed by Atsa that was hardly site-specific).

And I know they are countless events out there who claim site-specifity
in order to get grants to unfold their events, but whose actual only goal
is simply to present art anywhere it's not a gallery or museum.
(you recognize yourself)

Maybe someone should compile a list of links, not so much
of events, but of artists or art movements that specifically
work on creating art that stand at the outbound of institutions
(and need that ourbound to exist).

The Artforum magazine is here.
(You can dig it in a public library and just read it.)

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Defining The New Art Scene (July 2005)

2005-07-28T05:29:00.000-04:00

Hello.

This is my July post.

What hav'I been doing ?

I'm doing art. I'm doing research.
I'm putting up a couple stuff up
this autumn.

I've been replying to many other blogs,
attempting to opposite the direction that
bloggers are taking at replying to blogs
on their own sites.

I've been seeing art, of course.
Nothing you shouldn't imparably miss
but the Pompeii show in Ottawa.

Maybe that Russian show in Quebec City.

I'm all so non-contemporary these days.

My art scene for the month of July (a website indicating
the emergence of an art scene) is one that I find truly
inspiring. You've probably heard of this trend:
Afrofuturism.

This to me constitutes a re-appropriation of modernism by the african imperative that thoroughly influenced it. At least an attempt to clarify this link, to pursue
the imaginary visions of an avant-garde that constantly employed motifs emulating a certain "africanitude".

Does anyone remember the tag "jungle music" associated with drum and bass music from circa 1993? (I was a big fan of 4 Hero back then)

I think the art sleeves for some of these music releases were probably
the earliest form of afrofuturist art I had encountered.

But you could also say that a Picasso was afrofuturist.
Or the dialogue that it opened with african culture.

There is one art show I will be missing this summer that is probably
one of the most important happening these days: Africa Remix.

I am jumping a little fast because I wouldn't want readers to confuse african contemporary arts with the afrofuturist movement, but there are certainly signs of it in there.

Please !! Someone !!! Make that exhibit cross the Atlantic !!!!!!!!

In the meantime, Pompidou is also showing videos from Isaac Julien
that Montreal artgoers probably saw at their Contemporary Art Museum.
That was also pinpointing at afrofuturism.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Defining The New Art Scene: site of the month (June 2005)

2005-06-28T10:55:00.001-04:00

My winner for a site of the month that lends a cue on the whereabouts
of a new contemporary art scene is the rather famous
kaikaikiki factory
website, which represents a group of young japanese artists led by
ultraknown Takashi Murakami, and which arts are generally influenced
by both otaku (sci-fi anime) and kawaii (cute anime) culture.

This post-Koonsian japanese pop art relecture is fascinating
for 3 reasons:

1) It is a "creative" (as opposed to "appropriative")
contemporary art scene which evolves from a culture
of animation provided both by the mainstream and the subcultural,
thus blurring this distinction (emulating the fact that the same anime
artists often work both in mainstream and edge materials), and bringing totally
different perspectives about a futuristic or a surrealistic art.

2) It is an art that blends the childhood and adulthood themes, subjects and iconography without falling into ironic play or mere re-appropriation.
Cure sculptures are not made to make you laugh or cringe, but made for you
to find them splendid.

3) Most importantly, this art blurs the distinction between a "high art market end" and the production of mass-accessible materials, such as toys, cushions, or wallets. One motto of Murakami is "if people want it, just make it". Sort of mixing Warhol, Koons, and the socialist modernism of early russians.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: there is already an emergence of non-kaikai
post-otaku artists, what I think is vital
to such a scene, but KaiKai for the moment are
still representing best this new art.

New York Art Trip, June 2005

2005-06-23T09:45:00.000-04:00

Well hello friends, I'm back from my seasonal New York trip
(actually, that was 2 weeks ago, but I was busy elsewhere).

I've counted over 70 shows seen in a week, and it could have been more
if I didn't opt to spend a whole afternoon sitting in front of a Granular Synthesis video, or wander for hours at the Barry McGee show at Deitch, babbling with a few locals.

I will come back later and review a few of the shows that perticularly attracted my interest, if you allow me the whole summer to sort things out.

For now let just say that the city was packed with a lot of painting,
to a point when the smell of the medium started to irritate me.

Photo was also huge, as they were a few major photograhs retrospectives
happening.

Here are samples of what I saw, by category of preference:

THE BAD / BORING SHOWS:

Passport To Painting (Rodney Graham, Shannon Oksanen, Derek Root) (Gallery 303): My biggest disappointment was to go see a show featuring Rodney Graham (one of my fave artist) only to found out he's now doing tiny, boring abstract painting that he terms "modernists". To be exact, he erases source texts and I suppose magazine images with painting, but the result is still not much more than some kind of dead joke. Shannon Osaken (they are all from Vancouver)is doing small portraits of her friends on minimalist backgrounds, as though she hopes to be the next Elizabeth Peyton, and finally the best of the lot, Derek Root, is reactualizing the canadian landscape by focussing on lands touched by factories, but I couldn't tell if the cute postcardish look was purposeful or not.

HobbypopMuseum (Deitch): a messy mix of paint canvases, conceptual pieces (traces of gold on the floor) and sound in an exhibit that regardless of figurative elements absolutely didn't make sense. Apparently this "in-situ" work is suppose to reflect the space, but I simply can't see how figures of campers or leisure-hotel bathers have to do with a reknowned Soho gallery. Confusing.

Richard Phillips (Friedrich Petzel): It is not a cool text by Seth Price about the glory of californian bohemianism (and other attempts to stick with utopia) that will convince me to enjoy these lame kitsch-pop portraits of idealized women. With an absolutely pompous title ("Law, Sex, And Christian Society"), it is almost as if the painter expected you to be shocked, but the result is so superficial from first sight that I'm not even attracted to seek anything further about it. "Sex, Drugs And Rock N' Roll" would have been a better title, or anything sounding 20 years late on Terry Richardson.

"Landscape" (Whitney): this show presents nearly anything but. This is a case of a curatorial theme totally depriving from what some works are trying to do.
For this show, any work that can use the term "field" in their description means it can be read as a landscape. A Rothko becomes a landscape, because it plays with "notions of space". Popular schoolbook rhetorics that I find ridicule.

Mark Mann (Laurence Miller): four pictures of what seems to be redisplays of old tourist photographs, made the ironic title "Four Easy Pieces" turn the show against itself. I've seen similar work by many photographs before so I had a hard time caring. Or maybe I just felt there were still 20 missing pictures from that roll. The accompanying self-explainable show "Surface" only had a couple stand-outs, that is, elaborate handwritten scapes by Lalla Essaydi, and architectural relectures by Stephane Couturier (and a few intriguing patchworks from the Nasa (!)).

Portrait Of An Age: Photography In Germany And Austria, 1900-1938 (Neue Galerie): this is where I am getting totally unfair, because this exhibit is in fact
elegantly curated, and regardless of geographical limits, can serve as an excellent introduction to the early history of portrait photography. Therefore I recommend it as a didactic lesson. My only problem is that I got easily bored watching faces of unknown people one after the next, people of which no descriptions helped me understanding who they were, apart from a few rare celebrities. My guess is that a similar show that would be curated outside of geographical limits would include a fair deal of photographic masterpieces, that were missed by this show. As a "portrait of Germany and Austria", you aren't getting a lot of historical insight.

THE OK / CORRECT SHOWS:

"Sculpture" (James Cohan): A rather eclectic group of 6 works that readjusts the notion of sculpture. I actually wished this show would have been all Roxy Paine, as they are two major recent works of him pursuing his uncondemnable
theme of entropy. His steel dead tree, that I first took for a Rondigone, is as splendid as his mushroom garden is mesmerizing. A tiny wall-house by Acconci and a candle-filled video altar by Paik are also on view.

Bryan Crockett / Jennifer Steinkamp (Lehmann Taupin): a chaos of crafty biomorphic sculptures and drawings surrounding a couple larger sculptures showing people biologically trapped in trees (or mutant trees morphing into people). The ensemble is at times, messy, and I wonder if this artist shouldn't focus on tightening his imagery to whatever he wishes to convey the most. Steinkamp, on her side, is still working on computer renditions of vegetal movement, but her focus on flat monoband wall pieces (her previous work at least seemed to function as an installation) make the whole seem too decorative and market-oriented.

Sue De Beer (Whitney Altria): Not exactly as good as her Whitney Biennial 2004 work, but this otherwise ambitious project (you need to enter a giant dollhouse, and there is a garden of sculpture at the entrance) proceeds from the same form at providing the spectator the most comfort possible, in order to enhance the visioning of yet another fragmented double-video short film, delimitating yet another passage between childhood and adolescence. This time, 3 chapters recall different stages of a young adolescent girl struggling with desire, but though De Beer's points are made obvious with the addition of sugar-teen narrative texts (that I was surprised to learn were all from Dennis Copper as there was a definitely girlish quality to them), the overuse of symbols and micro-narratives renders the whole a bit confusing, like reading the accompanying booklet in which the artists and curators are exchanging impressions promulgated by their recent readings.

Chuck Close (Pace Wildenstein): more of the same for Mr. Close, where he mocks his neo-realist tag by additioning colored geometrical fragments in order to fullfill the illusion of portraitude. The tableaux are alas less impressive than the woodblock versions we had seen at the Metropolitan recently. The technique is
marvellous but the exhibit seems a little to methodic after 10 minutes. Or after 10 years.......

Monet's London: Artists' Reflections On The Thames (Brooklyn Museum): Well, this is an exhibition covering, you guessed it, artists renditions (representations) of the Thames river in London over the ages, including a full segment on Monet (less than 20 paintings). But though the curatorial idea made sense judging from the amount of works there was to cover, I couldn't help but wonder what was it all about the goddamn Thames that all these artists found so fantastic. I haven't seen the Thames myself since a while but I can only remember a vast area of grey water. At any rates, if you love romantic views of London in the fog, you will love this show, but grey water isn't my cup of tea.

Sophie Von Hellerman (Greene Naftali): she is doing better on her own than with Hobbypop, if you ask me. But these cute, whirly-ish semi-figurative paintings, like a fluffy, neo-retro, child comic book version of Kippenberger, didn't surprise me as much as the way she decided to install a bunch of them in the gallery-s backroom, which was a genuine wink at a strategy too used by gallerists these days: to hide some of the recent works of an artist in the vaults during an exhibit.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Sonnabend): all retro and nothing too groundbreaking about these recent hommages to the architectural splendour of the miniature. These shots aim at abstracting the sculptural beauty of 20th century's mechanics and other scientifical appareils in an essay format that seems to borrow from the surrealists..

Roger Fenton (Metropolitan Museum): a fair retrospective of one pioneer of photography, but which regardless of historical merit, got me a little too bored too
fast. A couple astoundingly pre-modern "modern" photographs (moscow domes or an ackward "Queen Target"), and a couple lushful landscape are all that I retained, amid series of brittish churches and institutional buildings or pseudo-exotic arrangements. The wall texts are full of interesting anecdotes so it is not an unpleasing stroll if you are tempted by a visit. They make Fenton sounds like the Indiana Jones of photography.

Jasper Johns (Matthew Marks): the mathematic theory of the catenary leads to assume that within two different points, a flexible line will hold together into a curve, and so this serves as the major metaphor that Johns is conveying here, cradling his art within time and history, amassing autobiographical fragments with details of influential works into tableaux and drawings that always keep a certain sparsity, while affirming form with the recurrent motif of a suspended string attached to the canvas (often adorned with some sort of wood ruler on their sides). The result is a bit over-ambitiously cutting a sharp ambivalence between modernism and post-modernism, but the puzzles and secret meanings of these works are not often inviting. It is as though the painter had painted these works for himself.

Here comes The Bogey-Man (Chelsea Art Museum): a terrific chance to see the original Los Caprichos series of prints by Francisco De Goya (luv that brown paper look), adorned by a series of pseudo-grotesque ackward works by various artists (Marcacio, Pondick, Morimura, etc..) apparently homaging Goya, but who all pale by comparison. Since I already had seen the Caprichos, I left rather rapidly.

Richard Prince (Barbara Gladstone): a semi-retrospective helped gather together different mediums, styles and approaches that Richard Prince experimented over the years. From comic strip paintings to car hood "sculpture-paintings" to "check" paintings (huge phrase sentances stenciled over patches of money checks) to photographic documents of his recent project "Second House", recently acquired by the Guggenheim, the installation felt almost like its different sections presented works by different artists. While some paintings definitely revealed Prince's skill, I wasn't amazed or astounded by anything. Some of the works cut as short as the mundane jokes and sentances they depict. Prince, the person, what he says in interviews, may be more interesting than his art.

Hillary Harkness (Mary Boone): I think I prefer when Harkness concentrates on 3 or 4 very complex paintings. This show continues her obsession with worlds filled with lesbian amazons, but this time these small canvas seem less achieved, more hastened than her bigger works. The drawings included some preparatory models for these works I had in mind. You rarely see studies as intricate as these. I wonder how this artist describes her work ?

Pierre Soulages (Robert Miller): More of the same with Pierre Soulages, with a little deep blue at times interfering here and there within the usual, quasi-sacred, self-imposing majestuosity of his black paintings, which at moments look so heavy that I wonder if we shouldn't call them sculpture. It would be a greater show If
I didn't expect it that much, but still, I respect an artist who developed such an intense sense of technique.

THE FINE / VERY GOOD SHOWS:

Sophie Calle (Paula Cooper): Have you heard about her late book Exquisite Pain ? Well it's all present here, as an installation. 92 photographs and objects recounting a travel in Asia in the 1980's, stamped with "XX days before unhappiness", as the work countdowns the chronology before Calle was abruptely abandoned by her boyfriend at the time. The second part part of the show presents 21 double-panels juxtaposing the diary of the events surrounding Sophie's life after this rupture (adorned with the repetitive photograph of an hotel room), with different texts of the memories of family and friends recounting harsh moments in
their life (each with a different accompanying photograph). All this to say that this work is VERY "Sophie Calle", but nonetheless too rare an occasion for us to
see a major work of her on this side of the sea to not feel somewhat rejoiced by it. In this work, both the personal and the conceptual reaches some extremes, what could annoy more than one visitor. But than.. it is so rare than an artist asks you such a question as: "what is the most painful event that occured in your entire life" ? Not any expensive gallery price can take that away. Call it "redeeming".

Panamarenko (Ronald Feldman): a collection of retro, "Jules-Vernian" surreal machine models (some of them ready to function) and scientific drawings from an outcast Belgium artist that exhibits so rarely on this side of Atlantic. Most of these items are about flight (wings for man, mechanical mosquito, model for a flying island, etc...) and aims to defy "conventions of scientific utopia" (!). There is a retroactive Walt Disneyesque look to some of this gadgetry (Walt Disney took themselves from early representations of mechanical fantasies), but it is never bereft of charm.

Sturtevant (Perry Rubenstein): For those who are missing the retrospective in Boston, this single installation covering all of this artist's replicates of Duchamp's works constitute to my understanding her best theoretical achievment (though part of her work is also about technical achievment, as she reproduces other people's art with her own hands). This artist took upon issues of cloning way before the term was in vogue. For that alone she deserves your curiosity. The point where she fails is that she insists on keeping an aura around her work. She is depreciative of the idea that anyone can replicate art. I would say to people to create their own Fontaine instead of buying mine. Give the aura back to concept, not object. I think Sturveyant aims at bringing it back to object.

Sport (Socrates Sculpture Park): a funny park exhibit presenting "sportive" art or art preoccupied by sportive themes. Socrates Sculpture Park succeeds where Metrotech Park fails (Public Art Fund) at instauring a fresh-aired, convivial way of experimenting art. Most of the art here is light and humoristic (there's even a box ring in case you got a dispute to solve), but nonetheless unfolds into a sweet criticism of a variety of underlying themes, such as the question of territory.
There's never enough public outdoor art, period. The SSP crew are doing a terrific job.

William Wegman (Hudson Guild): photos of his dogs presented in circus context. Predictable yet I'm falling for them. Circus dogs is a reality that these photos only made stranger. They make Wegman look like an artist again instead of an illustrator for kid books. Actually they made me want to buy this next book with these circus dogs photos... When is it coming out ?

Coco Chanel (Metropolitan): some 25 cubicles chronicling Chanel couture over the years, with expensive dresses and ensembles wore by classy white mannequins, added with an extra few vitrines of accessories and jewels. They are no drawings or anything that could give any insight about the tailor's methods, but the dresses all resplenish one next to the other, as fashion is slowly turned into monumental. Chic and swell. I insist.

Fiona Tan / Contagious Media (New Museum): Fiona Tan goes Willian Wearing in her panopticon video portrait of people living within prisonal institutions.
Sort of a depressing work, contradicting with the various smiles seen on the screens. By chance, a couple other media exhibits nearby come as a relief for
dwelling on the humoristic. Most of those are web art, so you can try a visit in your home right now, as it is. (I said.... Go, now.)

Banks Violette (Whitney): this is the best work I've seen yet from Mr. Violette. And if you are not too upset about a church ruin built in salt (the church of Sodoma ?), than you are engulfed by an installation both emblematic of the "neo gothic" aesthetic and of Violette's punkish take on modernism. Simple, slick, perfect sculptural environment that will take you only a minute to contour but that you will keep in memory for much longer.

Malcolm Morley (Sperone Westwater): some critic argued that this was probably the only great painting gallery show these days in New York, within the profusion that is on offer. While there are some others that I preferred, Morley is probably the one that reached the better craft technique, in these equations of car accidents, earthquake debris, and fantastic sport imagery. This artist works with a grid method that helps him alter the events that he is transcribing, formulating an art that takes advantage on the ambiguities of form, to linger subtly with the abstract. Skillful.

Friedlandler (Moma): this exhibition of over 500 photographs arranged in salon style from the 60's photograph master is a bit exhaustive to visit, but then you can play (like I did) the exercise of passing fast and see what photo's attract your eyes the most. Not every photos are of equal qualities, to be honest, but the curators seemed to have took fun at agencing them in concise groupings of style, themes, or graphic matches. The self-portraits are there, the sublime national parks photographs too, and example of the many luxurious books that the artist published during his life. "Land Markings". Err.

Bruce Colbert (Nomadic Museum): I am saluting here years of living with people who dance with wild animals, the technical achievement of photographing them in the most visually stunning positions, the exquisite printing on handmade paper, and the originality of building your own museum. While many of the photographs are poignant, the (feature long) film feels a little bit too self-imposing, quasi narcissistic, and tend to oscillate with orientalist kitsch. Sort of a lyrical, choreographed, black and white version of Baraka. It attracts so many people that I suppose criticism is relentless. You decide.

Julie Mehretu (Projectile): I had never seen so many Mehretus all at once. This exhibit of "unimportant" works, being the first in a new gallery called "Projectile",
could be perceived as mocking a certain collector named Lehmann who recently sued the propriétaire for not getting the "important" Mehretu paintings. Nevertheless, Mehretu is in top form with her delirious agencies of what seems like cosmographic planes added one on top of others. Multi-dimensional skies from another horizon is how you could describe them if you forget for an instant that this is pure abstract play at mixing different style and layers of "pen strokes". The result marvels the spectator into chaos.

Matthew Buckingham and Joachim Koster (The Kitchen): a fiction film that looks like the video-diary that a girl made about a trip to a city in Denmark, documenting all sorts clues about the history of local politics (including the insurgence of a local anarchist group). The feature-lenght film is separated into five segments, which you can cross from one another to reach phono-globes that emits the soundtrack. What is interesting is the way the film is fragmented in a way that liberates the narrative, and lets you grasp a sense of the whole film in 20 minutes by perusing all the screens at once. Do we insist on learning details or are we satisfied with a general sense of the whole ? There is this formal strategy that you are forced to question. And estimate.

Daniel Buren (Guggenheim): a rare occasion to visit an architectural work by an artist who rebelled against museum institutions since so many years. A rebellion that has not so much to do with politics than with pure form (I'll let you decide which took from which, eventually). And so the only retrospective part of this exhibit consisted in a full wall upon which were assembled many of the artist's early stripes canvases (themselves rebellious against the traditional canvas for presenting stripes over the bland surfaces), and a couple videos that documented his ephemeral street interventions, architectural projects, and exhibiton in-situ projects over the years. Many spectators seemed in fact shocked that the centre spiral of the whole museum was left empty to respect Buren's intervention. But because this is an artist impossible to retrospects (he will empty your museum instead of allowing it), I consider this the rare chance to evaluate a very original career, that expanded minimalism and conceptual art into the living sphere.

Neo Rauch (David Zwirner): these tableaux takes from a retro-socialist aesthetic but mix all sorts of scenes together into a surreal mess (as if the communists hired surrealist painters to convey political propaganda). It is not always clear what they are about, but they always seem so full of precise mythologic and historic references. They seem to want to extract and exorcise all the sadness of political times past. Honorable.

Gregory Crewdson (Luhring Augustine): these photographic tableaux take a whole cinema crew to set up. They're sort of a meeting between David Lynch and Jeff Wall. People in spooky deserted neighbourhood, or caught in contexts of intimacy, as if hiding some secret tragedies. Intriguing.

Tony Oursler (Metropolitan): Well this new installation is definitely one of the landmark pieces in Oursler's carreer. A sculptural, spatial, take on
Gustave Courbet's "The Artist's Studio", which includes, among many objects, a video-canvas on which are projected a good numbers of interventions and commentaries by the artist's family members and friends. If you missed this artist's theatrics, they're certainly back in full. The other piece, a giant video ball of explosion that murmurs, is also worth a glimpse.

THE EXCELLENT / FANTASTIC SHOWS:

Diane Arbus (Metropolitan): I don't think there is any photograph from the 60's that influenced more the collectiv unconscious than Arbus. Like it or hate it, her focus on the uncommon and bizarre helped gather many famous images that weren't to be soon forgotten. I heard a visitor say "there is no one on any of these pictures that I feel like I want to be next with, or relate to". Actually, they are a few that I would like to know what they have become. The exhibit, thus, complies with three sections filled with instructive notes and paraphernalia, that functions like a real laboratory about Arbus's life, as though the camera had been turned on her. These sections are exhaustive to visit and will make you ponder about buying the book. But this exhibit is certainly the most important solo photograph exhibit I've seen in the past 5 years, if not 10.

Julian Schnabel (C + M): Well, a few major pieces are brought together in yet another cool and handy survey from the people at C + M. I can only hope that when you visit they are a couple other people in the rooms, because when you are totally alone like I was, the guard keep walking with you and this is really disruptive to quality viewing. At any rates, these giant paintings are masterpieces of a genre that
you could refer to as "mixte media", as they often incorporate residues from all sorts of source, including kitchen dishes or mexican potery, or use ackward material as source paint, such as oil, wax, or animal hide. Using archetypal themes of landscape, religion or portraits, these works seem to aim at transcending art history. Fabulous !

Hilla Rebay (Guggenheim): fantastic work from a lady that got too easily underestimated for copying both Kandinsky or her husband, Rudolph Bauer. Nevertheless, these early abstract tableaux are like pieces of jewels, especially her collage pieces (both abstract or portraying women). It seems Hilla Rebay sacrificed her career in order to gain attention to the artists (and friends) she admired. By convincing the collector Guggenheim, she became head of the first museum dedicated to abstraction in America, then called Museum Of Non-Objective Art. A fair replicate of the legendary first show of that museum, "Art Of Tomorrow", is also on view, what to me constitute a great celebration for art lovers, especially since this is happening inside a worldwide known spiralling museum that was also a folle idea of miss Rebay. Not to miss.

Andy Warhol (Shrahazi): I had the chance to visit a magnificent show of self-portraits by Andy Warhol at Van De Weghe, after it was officially closed.
But I wasn't prepared for this fabulous, museum level, exhibit of Warhol portraits across the ages. They are positioned in a mosaic fashion around 5 large rooms,
and they cover everyone from Joseph Beuys to Michael Jackson, often (evidently) in duplicate versions. The range of colours is so flamboyant from one portrait to the other that you easily excuse the appropriatedness of this art, at the same time as you can savour how stars and non-stars are put to an equal level by the simple gloss of painting. In the end, regardless of the theories about an industrial art closer to the appeal of mass media, Warhol's art, it seems, was all about color.

Max Ernst (Metropolitan): A bit too much white (the walls and the hard light) wasn't the best suit for the otherwise gloomish somptuousity of these
exotic paintings from one of the master of surrealism (the preferred surrealist for many). The show consisted of a great introduction to the various techniques, often evolving into as many themes and styles, used by the artists. To illustrate this, nothing less than a corpus of landmark paintings from every of the artist's periods, from the early onanist surrealism, to the symbological use of birds, to the pervasive obsession with dark forests presenting glimpses of ruins from archetypal architectures. Genesis' Eden and visions of the Apocalypse never looked so intertwined.

Little Boy (Japan Society): A compact but complex exhibit about japanese otaku and kawaii culture, daringly linking the interest of Japan for sci-fi and mutant cuteness with Second World War (more precisely the devastative effect of Hiroshima). After stacks of toys, mascot costumes, and original drawings from landmark artists of otaku or kawaii, including a panoply of Hello Kitty toys and a cool selection of adolescent figurines by Oshimah Yuru, the exhibit presents the new trend of japanese contemporary arts influenced by these pop phenomenons. Murakami, curator of the event, is there alongside many artists from his own "factory" (Nara, Aoshima, Takano, etc...) and a couple others. This show is really marking for blurring a distinction between children and adult material. At moments it lingers with the Hentai.

Sarah Sze (Marianne Boesky): In a time where every gallery is opting for the saleabilty of painting, one gallery dares to present an installation artist, and ends up showing some of the best art you can see in New York these days. Sze presents complex systems where anodin objects are gathered together in emulations of organic environments, sometimes involving a few biologic elements like water or flowers, such as in here, the reaching point of the gigantic triangular setup, the main of the three installation proposed here. What is to make of the piles of box infiltrated by all sorts of constructions behind a wall, up to an unreachable section in the gallery's storage room ? It looks like her art is attempting to parasite the place. The various forms, textures, and shapes invented by men spread into nature like a cancer spread into a human's body. This work is as fertile as it is intrusive.

Basquiat (Brooklyn Museum Of Art): there's no doubt this painter is one of the most intriguing ever coming out from New York. Sort of like a mixture Cy Twombly, Keith Haring, and indeed, Picasso, for the reactualization of africanitude. It is actually quite a virulent exhibit, from an artist who did so much in such a short period of time, and more than Twombly I'd say that Basquiat convinces us that doodles can be transformed into a master's art. The urgent oozyness of the words spread across his canvases only match his use of very bright, explosive colours. This is sort of an ugly art that turns out to actually look very beautiful (meant in the most ancient aesthetic jargon possible).

Remote Viewing (Whitney): This was predictable. Return of painting there ? Return of abstract painting over there ! This show supports the emergence of a few strong abstract painters in the last 10 years as they continue, through very personalized forms and approaches, to revitalize an evergoing tradition. Most of the works here are dense, methodic, at times quasi-scientific, and use motifs that could be referred to as "organic". Julie Mehretu steals the show from Franz Ackermann and Matthew Ritchie (among the best here, but showing work not any better what they usually do), for presenting, above a couple gigantic and graphically complex painting, a jawbreaking in-situ wall drawing. This exhibit only prove that with abstract too, skills and craft can matter, and this is exactly what these artists are going to show you. Some of them I think might become your new important painters for the next 50 years. Did I say Mehretu rocks ?

Casasola (Museo Del Barrio): impressive photographic documentation of mexican life at the time of the Zapatist revolution, this show also surveys the emergence of the political movement up to its downfall, with the assassination of Emiliano Zapata. There's no way around it: it is as if you were there! A categorically intense show about an intense period of mexican history that will surely be the subject of future blockbuster movies, without ever catching a glimpse of the virulent authenticity that is presented here. A must if you still believe in photography's power to recount history.

Andrea Zittel (Andrea Rosen): yet another excellent show at Andrea Rosen (one of my fave of the Chelsea galleries), Zittel is presenting more examples of her post-hippy, neo-craft rebellion, art that stands at the conjecture with the utilitarian, and that is presented as extensions of her own ethically-informed living project in the middle of the desert, where she creates herself most of what she uses in everyday life. Dresses, furnitures, landscapes made of wool, and watercolours of prototypes form this incomparable art from one of the most fascinating artist alive.

What Sound Does Color Make (Eyebeam): a collection of flickering and noisy video pieces, including a rare occasion to stand for over an hour (as I did) submerged within a Granular Synthesis piece. Most of the works had the slick aspect of avant-techno, presenting shapes created by light play over ambient or techno soundtracks (if not the pure glitch of video noise). Added with the obvious reverence to early pieces by the Vasulkas or Paik, it was all very expectable coming from the technology-oriented Eyebeam, but nevertheless refreshing in the context of Chelsea.

Anthony Gormley (Sean Kelly): a rare occasion to see new work by this important brittish sculptor, still focussing on the human body after so many years, but
lingering also on the abstract. The spectacular piece here is a gigantic slinky inserted into the gallery space, or rather, what seems like a slinky since the
spiralling illusion is actually created by a series of separated circles, which I guess renders a cosmogonic appeal to the experience. Most of the other sculpture
use similar schemes of the construction of the universe (nothing less) to represent the body in shapes of metal, at one point even alluding to the cubic christ of
Dali (again, nothing less).

Make It Now (Queens Sculpture Center): a very sexy survey of recent New York sculpture that beats all the other surveys of recent, young, new york art you
might have heard about. Whereas others only prove that with recent painting you needed to dig to find the good stuff, this show prove that the sculpture scene is
quite revigorating. Most of these artists transform scrap into the most imaginative configurations, creating systems of erosion, carton cities, or leopard neons. One sculpture seems to re-address Manzoni by proposing towers made with medicine bottles containing what looks like piss (but certainly just colored water). The monument to hip hop glitters by Luis Gispert is a top. I should come back on it.

Barry McGee (Deitch): a crazy installation glorifying the scapes of graffitists, including a spectacular pile of broken minivans and cars still attempting to function. Also, secret hidden squats, video tower showing images of graffitis, and a few animatronic mannequins acting as gallery's graffitists, all this within a room
surrounded by a relentless mosaic of sharp and brightly-colored geometrical shapes that provides the set of a rendez-vous between hip hop culture and either psychedelism or techno culture. I'm not sure yet what I think of the youth american generation idea of fun, but it was nonetheless irremediably eyecatching.

Aida Ruilova (Greenberg Van Doren): minimalism meets trash-goth in these absurd video loops made of edits of everyday passive expressions such as "ummm", "oh", or "ok"...The protagonists all seem trapped in bland closets, while the seconds-short video pop one after the other. It gets weirder with the "Countdown" piece when constant "Viscontian" zooms reveal numbers marked in the scenes they originally take from, often inhabited by characters in the most bizarre z-movie situations, such as a girl nude with a fat man's grey underwear standing on rocks inder a bridge. This is the death of video art as you will enjoy it ! Please !!

Thomas Demand (Museum Of Modern Art): as the king of fabricated photography, his skill is incomparable. So much that most of the time, we can't even see
that these images of various scapes, from the domestic to the industrial to the natural, are all miniature models made from paper and carton, unless we come really close to them and scrutinize for half a dozen minutes. There weren't that many works in the show (around 20 huge sizes), but given the intricacy of their details they probably each take a lot of time to bricolage. The activity of representing the banal never looked so harsh. Brilliant !

Walton Ford (Paul Kasmin): With the radical genre of neo-old-masterism, I rarely get as convinced as with this painter, who imitates the style of ancient illustrations of natural history books (including the method of handwritting over illustrations) to present pictures of animals in position of prey, being attacked by other animals. Together, they form an allegory about life being in eternal warfare with itself. The contrast between the cuteness of some of these pictures and the inherent violence of their subject matters is otherwordly poignant. A show that prove that application and a simple focus can lead to some great art.

There is about a third of the shows I've seen in New York
that aren't listed above, and these omitted shows cover
any of the four preference areas that I just categorized.

I may come back to some of them ulteriorly,
but for the moment I think my very top favorite ones
are included. I tend to change my mind on these aspects.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

(Ps...as it is I haven't revised and corrected
the ugly english mistakes in this text yet)

Defining The New Art Scene site of the month (May 2005)

2005-05-28T14:06:00.000-04:00

Hello,

I'll be back in June when I'll review some of the best exhibits
seen these last few months. Hopefully I'll got more free time by then.

I'm just here to present my choice for site of the month,
in my ongoing series of seeking cues defining new art
scenes, in a time when the art word seems so desparate
of having reached theoretical ends.

Thew site is called Last Place, and it is one out of a series of sites out there that redefine
the museum into the virtual world.

Basically, this site presents art exhibits that look like your average
exhibit excepts they only exist as 3d virtual words (including the art).

They are other experienes in virtual museums that I wish to list
at some point, but this one wins my prize for communicating a sense
of a developed community.

Keep in touch,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: Next month's choice will be hard to pinpoint
as it is not exactly web-related.

You Take Away The Sun: Manif d'Art 3 "Cynismes?" in Québec

2005-05-17T06:41:00.000-04:00

"Tu Comprend Rien"
Guy Giard

I'm in between cities these days.

I want to come back to the Québec Manif 3, which is doing a terrific job these days providing
a thoroughly pertinent event, centering on the theme
of cynicism.

There are two talks by Michel Onfray on June 2 and 4
that I wish to attend, but I'm afraid that I'll be in New York
by then.

Not all the art shown at Manif is great, but
there is consistency for about half of the stuff,
much of it relying on performance or everyday living process.

The first and foremost reason to visit is the tiny
retrospective of Ben Vautier which finishes this week
(May 20). A variety of early pieces are shown next to
a documentary of his landmark Fluxus performances.
A new graffiti and a couple new works are included
(a bed set with directions for you to make love).

This is at Maison Gabrielle-Roy, but then just look
at the map on the Manif website as all spots are within
15 minutes walk from each others.

The chilean artist Norton Maza is presenting a work worth any great Biennial
with his house made of street scraps. Called "Territory", this celebration of Bidonville aesthetic can be found at Galerie De L'Université Laval (on Charest street).

Marie-Claude Pratte is installing her "masterpiece" at the Musée National Du Québec (the only spot in Manif that will need you to call a cab). It's her version of the history of contemporary art, installed as numerous sequences of small paintings, each historical segment divided in the 6 little spooky cells of the ancient prison. It's an instant classic.

Than, don't forget to vote on this crazy project organized by Chambre Blanche, which eliminates one out of 8 local artists each week, adapting Reality TV to the reality of artists' life. They are only 4 artists left. 3 were voted off and 1 abandoned by herself. Apparently it's a lot harder then they thought. What started as a fun project ended up in a multitude of quarrels.

From there you can move to the main exhibit at Mail Centre-Ville (Façades De La Gare), where all artists, both emerging and "official", are presented in one spot.
A good portion of the art is performance-based on involves an everyday living process.

Some of my fave Quebec artists are there, but they disappointed me:

Matthieu Beauséjour: too much of the same (re-installing old stuff, and adding a video).

Michel De Broin: Squirty fun video made with water bottles. A celebration of public sex? Not as good as his work in sculpture.

BGL: this time playing road mascots, they are way off the usual complexity of their installations.

Dominique Blain: she spoils her participation by offering an old sculpture.

Here is my fave list from Manif 3:

Gwenael Bélanger: It's interesting to re-read her falling objects under the perspective of cynicism. Don't miss the video!

Patrick Bérubé: a trampoline set near its roof (you can sit on it but beware for your head if you start swinging).

Patrice Duhamel: this artist used to annoy me but his video is re-investigating the potentiality of abstraction. Great, great, great!

Aline Martineau: she's making a whole city from consumer brown paper bags. Well done.

Art Orienté Objet: the most cynical of the lot, they made a fur with dead animals found on the roads of Quebec. I was amazed realizing how many there was on my way back. They hit a strong nail.

Guy Giard: the most irreverrencious, a series of 5 video loops where the artists literally seems to laugh at the spectator's face, but it's actually quite humoristic, and totally befitting the theme.

Guylaine Coderre and Charles Guilbert: they are singing Wittgenstein aphorisms
over short animations that by moment take the aspect of William Kentridge.

Christian Messier: disgusting. Living inside a wall for 15 days is one thing, but pissing and shitting in bocals while you're there is kinda extreme. At least he is the black sheep of the exhibit, so probably best reflect the theme of the exhibit.
Santiago Sierra would adore him.

Ziad Naccahe: he is infiltrating the space with decorative flowers (a true cataloguage in style). He is probably a future Franz Ackermann. Much more pertinent than you seems at first sight.

There is a load of other stuff: bird singing through the mall, animal drawings made with pubic hair, sperm stains on fashion ads, still lives made with everyday garbage,
circular sidewalk as an hommage to prostitutes, people falling in the streets,
even Chris Lloyd of Dear Pm is there.

It's worth a ride.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

(I'll try link images to some of the art later..I'm in a rush...)

Weather Permitting(s): Julie Andrée T "Weather Report / Potentiels Évoqués" at Skol Gallery

2005-05-06T07:55:00.000-04:00

"Change of weather is the discourse of fools".
Thomas Fuller

Like any gallerist exhibiting the same old artists year after year, I am pretty loyal when I decide that I love one artist.

Usually when I name my five favorite recent artists from Québec, I never forget to mention Julie Andrée T., an artist whose work involves performance and installations, and who came a long way since her beginnings when she reminded me of young Rebecca Horn for drawing stuff on walls with a head mask.

Though she's been on the cover of recent publications with pictures of performances I have not yet seen, I was still anxious to know if T's new show at Skol Gallery was going to entice me as much as her previous works did.

No feelings to hide: I was pleasantly suprised. In fact, in a collection of deceptive shows that I had seen recently in my hometown, I can argue that this exhibit is one of the best in Montreal since the beginning of the year.

Admittedly, her new work made me think of yet another fave artist of mine, non-other than art star Jane Cardiff, but only because she borrowed one of her format of building micro, solo, theatres. The comparison ends there, rather abruptly.

For where Cardiff is interested in narrative and how they shift from your perception to mine, Julie Andrée T. is more attracted by the concrete and physical: Are you experiencing the space the same way I do? These 5 sculptural "devices", as they are called, set in the Skol space as one installation (it would help her carreer if she would title the pieces and propose them separately, the only minor flaw in the exhibit) force the spectator to engage themselves in micro-performances involving serious shift of their bodies, both voluntary and unvoluntary. The pretext ? The weather, a theme that is not original to T. but really much more of reply to a common dialogue amongst artists of her generation. In fact there has been a few collective shows borrowing this theme in recent years, and its obvious connection to inner sensual moods.

But, given that Julie Andrée had been investigating correlations between the inner senses and the physical exterior since her beginnings, it was
all natural that one day or the other she would encounter the theme of
weather, and besides, her interpretation on the subject is much more thrilling than some of these "other shows" I had in mind a few seconds ago.

What indeed would be the best way to represent the psychological state of weather than to focus on sculptural works that are entirely made for the head ? Most of the sculptures here offer orifices where you need to insert or appose your head in order to experience them. These works do not come to you easily. They involve one-to-one full participation.

The first booth directly invokes your
stream of consciousness, by letting you envision the video path of a train advancing on a railway, as they are tiny speakers on the side adding a dramatic escapist effect to what constitute a modest, homemade version of a virtual reality tester.

But where it becomes much less virtual, and the principal poetry at work, is that a huge ventilator at the back is blowing over your face, so that, as you focus
your thoughts on the stream of the train, you get a physical sense from skin response that you are actually there. Fabulous ! A joyride ! The relation body to mind, now turned into a relation landscape to mind, couldn't better be adressed. And with such simple means ? Come on, out there, this could be in a museum.

Next device is similar (a rectangle box of wood perpendicular to the wall) except that there is no chair to seat on, and no videos to watch, as the tiny space to appose your head on is thoroughly dark.

As you can hear on two little speakers a french commentator describing the process of a snow avalanche, something perky is happening to your face. Just like in a Jana Sterbak installation, there is increasing heat incoming from a hidden grid in the back. If your face is put really firm against the box, it actually becomes untolerable.

So just like how with Jana Sterbak's robe there was an antagonism at play between an expression of desire and the expression of an inherent danger, Julie Andrée T is proposing a confrontation between reason, our ability to receive intellectual information, and the ever-underestimated realm of the sensual, how our skin replies to its environment. Always, as it seems, the body opposing the mind ? Come twice: the perticular interest here is how the work is able to transpose a formal idea into physical sense. You can all imagine that an avalanche would constitute a terrific event to encounter, an event likely to be consequential to your death. Well, the work here makes your body suffer a micro-avalanche of sort, with the increasement of the heat, as if something blazing over you and enrobbing you, reconstituting a fair impression of what experimenting an avalanche would be like, at a micro level. At this point it is interesting to note how the exhibit insists on making us realize that the head, what is going on inside and on its surface, is important to our conception of physical realities (such as temperature). What I mean is that Julie's pieces are presented as autistic condensés of sensual states. The fact that you are cut from the throat when you experience them is the major metaphor at play.

The third work is reminiscent of her landmark installation
"Problématiques Provisoires" that played for a couple years since 2002 (and was in my top 10 list that year, and not just a local list). It's relying on the scheme of an apartment, and forces the spectator to do tricks with his body in order to experiment the work. They are 3 little rubber stairs that invites you to climb and pass you head in 3 different hole in a huge wood box attached to the ceiling. This task is not so easy to do, as we loose rapidly sense of equilibrium once our head is inside the said box. A good reason for this is that loud music is played into one of 4 (or was it 8?) little speakers dispersed across the room, but more over that this sound shifts intermittently from one speaker to the other, and thus spins in tango from one corner to the next.

The room is all light red. It both evokes a personal salon, as much as a 3D monochrome. The trick with this work happens when other people insert their heads
through other holes. They all get a perspective of the room similar from the one that you have, but this illusion of sharing a same experience is cut through
vehemently by the fact the sound is constantly shifting from one speaker to the next, delimiting the uniquess of every standpoint through cacophony. The piece demonstrates that music, wrether it's in your apartment or coming from you neighbor's wall, really alter the ambiance (the emotion) of a room.

Under the music (a collection of metal or pop songs chosen by the artist), one can hear an audio version of the
Refus
Global manifesto, I supposed narrated by Borduas himself. Actually I wasn't sure what this was and had to ask this information at the desk. It left me a little bit confused. With the loud music and the red I was thinking that the artist had the term "temper" in mind, which emotional link with the term temperature had been slightly over-used for my taste. But I can't really jauge on her intention. If we take the "weather" imperatus (both internal and external) out of the picture, it becomes an interesting play about form, perspective, and an history of art that have reached its limits. It could as well be an hommage to
Françoise Sullivan. I don't think it's all that important since the format itself is dynamic enough to incite curiosity. By inserting my head into the floor of this micro-apartment, I felt like a Maurizio Cattelan peaking into an Ilya Kabakov installation. I don't think this work needs to reduce itself to Quebec history. She should do a bunch of them and call them monochromes. It could be big.

The fourth booth (ok...now I really hate that they aren't titled) is a double-windowed compartment, on which reversed letters are written on each window, in a way that in order to read them right, you need to gaze across the reversed letters and read on the opposite window across the micro compartment.

Now...on the theory(ies) of "Screen", that middle point of perspectivism that we could refer to as "sight", Julie André T is doing as great or even better than exhibiting neighbor Pascal Grandmaison, high on hype at René Blouin a few steps on stairs, and who's got a museum exhibition coming up. While Grandmaison pursues his interest with minimalists, and transcribing their language into a deconstruction of photography, Julie Andrée engages the spectators (again, her sculptures are actually performance scenes for spectators) into experiencing a similar reality first hand. Crossing the gap of a vacuum, a sculptural expression of a threshold, the reader is attracted by the sentances leaning unto the glass before their interlocutor, another spectator gazing in their opposite direction.

I am not so sure again that commitment to a theme of weather is reached easily, but given the very domestic aspect of this work, she covers very well her usual interest on space's shareability. Actually, the piece sound more like a work that was made to respond to the general theme proposed by Skol for the year's program. It's as if Julie is trying to negociate a response to skol and the pursue of her own new interests in sensual scapes. Or maybe she aimed at that furtive instant when the cognitive is lost in chaos right before our eyes meet a sentance that can formulate sense (as they are floating in the middle of nowhere, reaching you by chance from the opposite window).

The last "device" is frankly the best, and the only reason why it wouldn't be a high spot in a museum is that it involves too much danger: to be able to experience the work you need to climb a wood scale that felt a little shakey for my taste. I was wishing that a ramp be installed so that I could hold myself as I inserted my head in one of the two holes.

Now...I can imagine the intensity of trying this work with a partner, as from the top
your two heads are meeting face to face in what could be best described as.. a boxed cloud (!), meaning that dry ice smoke is pouring constantly inside this little rectangle of wood, attached high next to the ceiling.

Once your eyes have been accustomed to this new radical environment, the best expression of weather since Olafur Eliasson or Micol Assaël (couldn't find a link to the piece I had in mind), now unapologetically adressed as a "head-only thing", you are realizing that the walls are covered with typical bathroom ceramics, while some sort of Turkish music is playing throughout two tiny speakers installed in opposite angle.

From the first romantic idea of a cloud we move quickly to a concept of steam and
turkish bath, if you can ever imagine a more
sensual affair. Being cut through as you are from reality happening beneath, I was remembering another artist who had played with a similar notion of low-technological-means vistual reality at the exact same gallery, a few years ago.

Except that at that time (spring 1999), the artist, Diane Létourneau was mostly concerned with landscape, and re-adapting a tradition of representation with current technological models. Julie-Andrée is expanding this idea from representation, as her work focusses on unvoluntary, yet guiding, bodily response.

At any rates, it goes simply that I thought it was already a genius idea to just bring me this up into the air, "head in the cloud" as they say, but now that it turned into "head right up the turkish bath" I was in extasis.

But to counter that extasis, Julie Andrée, who really got more than one trick
in her bag, added another element to her piece, which are audio extracts
(let me note that I really appreciate when loops are short when I'm put into such conditions) of people relating about floods and other weather disasters that made them loose their houses. From the first impression of being in a funhouse, the notion of being "right in the middle of it" started to shift, intellectually. Again, and always, the tension between reason and passion is perpretrated. What are you allowing to receive as pleasurable from this experience, from what you are ready to reflect upon ?

If there is one point that Julie André T crossed finely with her exhibit,
is how weather can be both the source of immediate fun and irremediable pain.
But I think that what she is truly asking is, given all the theory about landscape
being appropriated by thought, than are we always so subdued and victim to weather or are we able to control our reception of it, with the help of facculties from the mind.

Oh, the hell... Just don't miss it,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Julie Andrée T: "Weather Report / Potentiels Évoqués"
15 April to 14 May 2005
Skol Gallery
372 Sainte-Catherine West
Space 314

Painting Is Not Death: Damien Hirst's Big Intention.

2005-05-02T06:25:00.000-04:00

I had cancelled a trip in April to visit the new Damien Hirst show in New York "The Elusive Truth" at Gagosian Gallery (Chelsea), mostly because it received a lot of bad press (try this one by Jerry Saltz or that one by David Cohen, but also because I was first not "impressed" by the "press" release.

Well it seems that it's been extended to the 14th of May, so there is still a few days to go for those who think they might enjoy it.

For my take I agree with what is said commonly that Hirst's "spiritual" (I mean "material") filiation to Koons is starting to look ridicule, especially when he is now addressing a format that was one of the worst phase of Koons' art: the supra-realists tableaux.

Damien Hirst's art always constituted sort of a morbidization of Koons, if you will.
To retake on what David Cohen was mentioning on Art Critical:

- Medicine glass cabinets replacing vacuums in windows.

- Shark in formol replacing basket ball in water.

- Gigantic replicate of an handicapped doll replacing a gigantic replicate of a balloon Puppy.

Now what? Blood and surgery replacing ice cream and sex.

And we claim that he is one of the most important artist ever and that Jeff Koons sucks ????

Come on.

Not that Hirst isn't a good artist for a portion of his art,
not that he won't be remembered for his animal pieces which indeed
are amongst the most important art that came out in the 1990's, wrether
we like them or not (their impact suffice). But this time I can see where his art is failing.

It is failing because it arrives right at a time when the art community is starting to get somewhat pissed off about the market, and especially pissed about the art that attempts to outsmart it by embracing it. I am certain a few artists are already
surprised by the poor reception that they "see-me-fuck-with-the-market" art actually got.

Damien's premiss wasn't bad at all.

Everyone is raving about painting nowadays, especially the return
of masterism.

As a primarely conceptual artist, he opted to respond to this
by selecting sordid images from journals and magazines that for him
best represented our era, and got them painted in a realist style
in attempt to induce a little bit of aura that these not so banal
images lacked in their journalist contexts.

The twist is to transform timely events into intemporal.
To return to an impersonal art pompier and transcribe history into
large unequivocal canvases, bland in artistry but full
of what they represent: zeitgeist of an era.

It really wasn't a bad idea. His images weren't even his
but a reformulation of things found in popular medias.
The size of a good portion of these painting is apparently
splendid.

Why did it fail so much?

Many reasons:

- It came too late as a last vestige of pop. Even Warhol translated political
events into painting.

- The market eats them. They become facile products of luxury to decor
your salon (you could make them yourself), at a time when a lot of criticism is
directed at these distant, artificial constitutions (including the arts that try to humor it without opposing it). The market renders these paintings as superficial as any billboard publicity. Or worst, even moreso. Du toc pour l'oeil. "Vous avez de beaux bijoux, madame". Indeed, Hirst becomes a brand until he makes less wear-ready art again.

- The return popularity of painting has exactly to do with a re-evaluation
of the artist's hand skill in an era when conceptualism almost perfidated
it. So Damien got Saatchi's interest all wrong. If you are working with a group,
at least mention them under your title. For all the employees's hard work they manage to seem lazy (from the little I've seen), because we know they are reproduction commands. The art here is a process of selection and transposition.

- Shock value images were sensational in the 1990's but feel redundant
in post 9/11 art. The painting format is too soft, and if that was part of the intention to "softinize" the sensational, than perhaps it works a little too much to a point where the art becomes self-erasable, further than the original journal images they aim to resplenish. Actually they may entice you to return to the source of these original images, provide a provisory interest (sort of like seeing photographs of a freak show instead of the real thing), but as tableaux they only make you hesitative about wanting them on your wall. The source may titillate but the exercise of transposition seems vain, bereft of any compassion.

- The tendency of this art to balance between the sad, grave
and delibarately sordid and grotesque is its weakness. What are you trying
to say, and why ? Are you helping ? Ethics are blurried when we don't
know if Hirst really cares that this world is going rash or if he laughing at it expecting big money sales.

- There is a lot of great art around and it's just not as sad and sordid as Hirst.
Or when it is its purpose is made clearer.

Well, I really think Hirst will need to win everyone's heart again.

I see his new paintings like I see a work of Koons and I am
able to tell (and forgive) that it is from a weak period.

I definitely think Hirst is much better a sculptor than painter (even if he would
see his new paintings as sculptures). Once you see a dot painting in person, the effect is great, but then he made way too many of them.

Maybe what we need is to wait for a new show of sculpture,
if he accepts that he said all what he had to say about this present tentative.

The Butterfly (insects) paintings of recent were one hybrid
that was way more interesting than the kitsch described today.

What is going on, man ?

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

News And Tidbits

2005-04-29T17:16:00.000-04:00

The Décarie Project have launched at Liane And Danny Taran Gallery. Basically a group of "social interventions" in the lyrical sense of the word: art involving the lives of "ordinary people".

I am not here to announce a gallery show, that is not my aim.
I simply insist on pointing on a few a-day-only events that I
think are of relative importance:

On Sunday the 8th of May, Althea Thauberger
is presenting a choral concert that she organized
with people living in the neighborhood of the gallery.
It's at 16h30 at 5170 Chemin Côte St Catherine (metro
of the same name, but expect a 10 minute walk).

On Sunday the fifth of June, at noon, there will be a group
crawl performance organized by non-other than William Pope L.,
the "friendliest black artist of America", whom I
consider to be a landmark (no pun intended)performance artist,
also involved with sculpture, film, installation, painting, and web art.

Here is the Hour interview about Montreal project.

There is another good interview here.

There is another intriguing performance by D'bi.Young, who propose you
to follow the path of everyday labour of one worker of the Saydie Bronfman Center,
and move with her to her second nighshift job. That is the 4, 5 and 7 May at 19h.
You need to call for reservation (find the info on the website).

Farine Orpheline will also inhabit the neighborhood in early June with
a certain autocar that you will be able to observe at the gallery exhibition,
along with the results of participatory works already organized this last
season by other participants of this project.

-----------------------------------

Manif 3 has started in Quebec.
Yes there is a lotof art to see, but if you can make only one day, try the main exhibit and the Ben Vautier wall painting.

Tommorrow night (30 Avril, 19h) are a couple interventions/performances by Folie Culture, Christian Messier, and what I guess is Matthieu Beauséjour: International Virologie Numismatique.

Look at website for ther events.

-----------------------------------

A lot of stuff is going on at Ottawa Art Gallery.

Part of OFF Grid, another exhibit on social interventions, are students projects tomorrow (the 30th), a screening of "socially resistant" video art on the 19th May ("Avert Your Eyes / Stare Back"), and a special project by performance artist victoria Stanton between the 20 and the 24th of May.

Then there is a cool survey of art from Alberta, part of a festival on the matter:
the "Alberta Scene" (if you are like me you are goingto find the opening page very cheesy, but the exhibition
section is huge, including another survey at the National Gallery).

-----------------------------------

Elektra kicks off
on the 10th of May, bringing together the major electronic arts events of
Montreal under the gap of a single month, sharing (or actually fighting to get the best artists with) Mutek.

I mean...what is Autechre doing at Elektra?

Nevertheless, don't miss the few installations at Musée D'art Contemporain
and Place Des Arts, notably Rafael-Lozano Hemmer between the 11 and 15th of May at MAC.

Resniper at Usine C Wednesday the 11th sounds like a thrill.

Than "L'Archange" involves an installation by Alain Pelletier. I wonder ifwe can visit it during the day. (12 to 14th May at Station C).

The director of Transmediale gives a talk on the 12th (17h, Usine C)
If you never heard of Transmediale than it is likely you will
not be interested by the sort of activity going on at Elektra. ;-)

--------------------------------------

Victoriaville's Festival of Musique Actuelle is kickin on the 19th of May.

As usual tickets are a little bit expensive, but the concerts are generally
of high quality, including both sound and performance.

Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori is not to be missed for all the great reviews their abum received. Maybe try the Plsatic People Of The Universe right before it. (Friday the 20th of May).

Boredoms are back, so is Tenko. I wonder if I will be.

----------------------

Last but not least (I'm short on Toronto for the moment)
is the launching of the Festival Du Théâtre Des Amériques on the 25th of May, one of the best Montreal Festival.

"100 Rencontres" organized by Benoît Lachambre is of interest for this site
for involving both visual artists and performers into a living installation piece
that you can visit at SAT between the 25th and 29th of May (at night, and there is an entry price).

"Cinema Cielo" (Danio Manfredini), "The Room" (Amal El Kenawy), "Biokhraphia" (Lina Saneh, Rabih Mroué), "E" (Alain fraçon), and "Je Ne Sais Pas Si Vous Êtes Comme Moi" (a collective walk performance) are my suggestions.

Ok...maybe add to this the new play by Theatre Ubu.
Check the site for programmation.

At least one or two of these will mark you as some of the best art moments
of the year, as is always the case with each FTA.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Art(T)wit Site Of The Month: Avant Gaming.

2005-04-24T04:17:00.000-04:00

My art site of the month is a site devoted to the archiving
of links concerning experimentation with art and the gaming industry.
I bet on my readers' enthousiasm while they peruse the wonderful Avant Gaming
website.

I realize my aim with these monthly selections is to point
toward sites that offer hints, clues, proofs, that they are new
paths, avenues and directions happening within the arts at a
time when we feel they are not much interesting possibilities left.
Therefore I am not so interested in linking art projects themselves
(unless they are particularly eloquent), than pointing at the emergence
of perticular "scenes", and the people able to circumscribe and categorize
these "new agendas" for art (be them mediatic or theoretical).

But....for those who don't have the time to browse the site above
in its full glory for the time being, let me spot you two fave links of
mine that represents well the sort of materiel that is categorized and written
about on Avant-Gaming.

I feel like presenting them the same way Jennifer McMackon would on her
Simpleposie.

Have you ever played Pac-Man with a Mondrian painting ?

Pac-Mondrian

Have you ever played Asteroids with a sexy poem?

Arteroids

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Where I'm Art

2005-04-23T18:13:00.000-04:00

(that image is from James Farmer at Seblogging Cognitive Architects)

I am very confused and shifting, these days.

I let myself shocked by details that would
probably not cross the mind of many.

I take as argument the fact that even the public friendly William Kentridge exhibit
in Montreal shocked me when it received a lot of great press everywhere else.

I won't go here about what went wrong in my mind.

I am questioning wrether it's time or not for me to do art,
and wrether that wouldn't be my best option to respond to what
is going on around me, instead of sitting here blogging
about art shows that not much people care about.

I remember last month when I finished writting a whole
show review on Sarah Lucas, linking some images, right before
the gallery took all the images off, probably at the request of the artist.

I thought: Oops...ok, well...this one is going to be all
text with maybe one or two links to artnet.

But then, and perhaps under the influence of whom I was writting
about (Lucas had always been an extremist thinker), I
started to question: "Why do I care?".

I mean, Does Sarah cares ? Is it like she has a blog,
and talks about what she wants to do next, shares her opinions
on the world and other people's art, and show images
of her art??

No way. Her art is out there, take it or leave it
No discussion.

Not that I'm reproaching her anything, because what I
just described in fact would be the situation with 93 per cent of
visual artists I know.

I even thought Damien Hirst had a website until recently
when I realized that it was a devoted fan site.

It used to be complex enterprise to start a website, but the era
of blogging is shifting all this.

It is becoming almost the reverse situation when anyone will
soonly get nailed against a wall and asked why or why not are they writting
blogs.

I believe blog will have a strong impact on
the development of art and the artworld.
Not only blog are a new form of art,
accentuated on the now, the everyday,
the archiving, and the flutuaction
of process (admitting your mistakes),
but they shift a lot of parameters
in the conventions of information control,
much more directly than it was ever
predicted since internet became
a popular application in the early 90's.

I don't think Google Video is such a revolution
when you can already blog your own videos.

I don't think Kentridge in museums will last when
the next Kentridge will blog their own video animations on the web.

Why go in a museum see a video about the urgency
of the situation of aids in Africa when someone
else can blog his art about the same subject
the morning it's done (Google even offers you
to make people pay for a stream). For now at least
you can reply "Because Kentridge is much better", but that
is temporary. Chances are the future Kentridge will be decided
upon by the public, when they will not need anymore to be told by gallerists
the art they should be gazing at.

The media canvase is irremediably shifting (once again).
Media artists are getting new means to develop their way
of collaborating with the world. "Instantaneification of broadcast".
Designers don't have the monopole of web expression anymore as new media systems are
implemented. It will be interesting to see where all this go.

----------------------------

In the meantime, I've seen a lot of art lately
that didn't leave an impression.

I've seen art non-stop since 1987, and yet it's
the first time I'm getting a serious sentiment of
getting "blasé". I wonder if the sentiment is shared.

Even artists we once dearly believed in
now bore us (Damien Hirst).

"Why did I come to see this?" was a question
I asked myself a lot recently. Not too
far from "why do I write this?" or "why would
or should I write about this?".

Recently I have been more preocupied with
making art than sharing opinions about what
others do, probably because I feel my
skills are there in the first place.
I have no idea, to be honest (yet, plenty of ideas).

I've seen art in Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, and Boston,
during the course of April, cancelling a New York
trip after seeing samples on the web of artists I
planned to visit (I'm tired of painters using the skills
of other people without citing them...at least call it
Art Inc., or any name implying you are not alone, like
on the programme of a theatre presentation).

Nothing...I insist... Nothing enthralled me.
(except Claire Savoie in Québec, which was an
old idea of hers but, much enhanced).

Either I questioned the pertinence of a lot
of stuff, or I was left with art I had already seen
before (Lemieux in Quebec).

My hopes are on Toronto (that Dedicated show, that Bruce Mau show)
and Quebec (Manif) for some great art. Than Public Art Fund in New York
this May, with Ernst at the Met, and Janet Cardiff (again) in Washington.

Is that all ?

....maybe that Alberta Scene thing in Ottawa? (in May).

Until I decide to review more art (or not),
I will be sending notices about personal
wherabouts and projects here.

Here is my promissed Art Link Of The Month for April,
in a series attempting to dig ou where lies the real,
true, new art:

Avant Gaming

If you didn't know that one at least that gives you
a reason to come back here once per month. ;-)

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Have You Got The Mallarmé Blues?

2005-04-04T02:17:00.001-04:00

What's with Mallarmé Blue and the MACM these days ??

Cynthia Girard's paintings have it, William Kentridge exhibit walls have it,
the MAC historical site has it, and now what? If you bare with the color of this text for a sec,
there's a colloquium happening today at the MACM which sounds like not much more than
a huge plug hype for a future show at Optica by artist Klaus Scherubel, an impression
not foreign to the obvious clue that the invitation pamphlet, sports the exact same typo and blue layout than for the book project that this artist is soon to be releasing in its french version.

What is this all about ? Mallarmé's unrealized project of producing the ultimate book.
Throw him a Borgès anytime.

My reason to boycott all this? Including colloqium, publication, and artist's show?

This lame ass, retro-conceptual piece of publishing a book made of styrofoam.

Oh, what poetry...

The empty book hommage to Hervé Guibert published by Emmanuel Gallant last year felt much more honest and, besides concept, not devoid of emotion and more precisely: "poetry".

For blue bring me back some Yves Klein (dammit),

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Still Here

2005-03-27T01:24:00.000-05:00

Hello, I've been absent, focussing on my new dada which is early
computer programming.

Whatever happened to computer art anyway?

I've been pondering a lot about old
resurfacing art topics, about wrether
or not artists would be better off
quitting the stage of the gallery
space, stopping to wish to circumscribe
their art from everything else

I think the gallery space has been the 20th
century's laboratory for the exploration
of ideas long enough, and as art itself is
slowly turning back into commodity, I see
the future artists as expanding their
ideas into everyday sphere, at the risk
of defying categorization.

In 50 years, I see less galleries, less museums,
and more of reunions, festivals, schools,
where artists will test ephemeral ideas or
present prototypes of artistic infiltration,
assumed to be part of general life experience.

Sort of a meeting place where the terms design and art
don't mean a thing anymore.

In the meantime, so to grant you that you didn't
come here for nothing, I'm presenting this site
about GPS gaming and art which I consider to be my
Art Site Of The Month. This is the future!

I'll try select one site per month and than
categorize them with winners at the end of the
year. I'll be looking for the impossible:
sites that manage to break the foundations
of what is assumed to be art nowaday. I already
got my next month's link.

By the way, I still got 3 articles ready
since two weeks, but since I can only give
part time to this blog, I've yet to organize
all the necessary links for them (a process
that can take more time than actually writting
comments). These are comments on Norma Jeane,
Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn.

I will need to reduce this art gallery commenting,
which was the first reason I started this blog, to one
show per week (I'm already late), than add some
in row if I can find extra free time.

I am a pig at discovering things. I don't even
find the time to relate all what I've been into
in the past two weeks, but let's say that
I haven't seen a single art show since (for me,
that's rare).

The last show I've seen deserves an article
for all the wrong reasons. It was Language
Of Intercessions presented in 3 Montreal
galleries. A show that only prove that art
curating based on racial identity can be
sometimes problematic, categorically outdated
and a void of pertinence.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: actually, tomorrow I'll attempt to catch yet another show
suggested by Chris Zeke.

Your Fetish Is My Kitsch: Elena Dorfman "Still Lovers"at Edwynn Houk Gallery.

2005-03-16T17:18:00.000-05:00

"Men and women, women and men. It will never work."

Erica Jong

"The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him."

Immanuel Kant

"There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul."

Arnold Bennett

Elena Dorfman is an artist I had never heard from before visiting her show "Still Lovers" at Edwynn Houk Gallery, a show that fitted perfectly with the elegance of this space situated in the marbled 745 fifth Avenue building.

Unsurprisingly, it was her first solo, but the work already sported the assurance of an artist already a long way in her career. Somehow, the artist's own claim that she had to adjust her work accordingly to her investigations, slipping away from common playfulness and entering darker psychological territories, translated into the work itself. The delicate treatment of her subjects let a sense that her art had been thoroughly "researched", both in terms of subject and
mise-en-scene.

What is this work exactly? Grosso modo, it's a series of photographs depicting people and their relationships with the expensive sex dolls that they acquired, a topic that on press would make anyone expect shock value.

Well, actually, the first image seen from the entrance of the gallery reserved a bit
of shock, because it looked like the hands of an older man seeking genital contact under the skirt of a school girl ("GingerBrook 1", 2001). (By the way, you must all know that the schoolgirl attrait is actually a traditional japanese fetisch.)

I have a lot of imagination, and I know somewhere in this world people must be designing dolls for pedophiles, so I was expecting the worst.

But turning past the lobby wall, I was instead confronted with a multitude of ackward images, for the most non-sexual, of people holding or simply passing time in company of their personal dolls. Actually, if you didn't know those were dolls, some of these images could pass rapidly in front of your eyes and convey all sorts of common, standard human emotions. It is upon realisation that these emotions are experienced under the presence of human dolls that renders these portraits quite complex, psychologically.

Even though the photographs were all dispersed in the space when I visited, I will try to connect each case of "doll owners" to better illustrate my point.

The striking example when I entered that first room was a photograph of a man sitting on a bed, seemingly weeping in the arms of the woman that he is holding ("Rebecca 1", 2001). The woman, a doll of course, but drastically different from the stereotype of the young sex school girl that was apprehended at the entrance, sported sort of a "mature" type look ("Rebecca 3", 2001), with short hairs, and a tragic figure, closer to a princess Diana.

Without getting any sort of insight about what was the story behind this picture, building up from the way it was constructed, I was imagining the case of a man buying a human doll to keep present in his home the memory of a deceased wife.

Now...it's probable that I have too much imagination, but, if I'm anywhere close to the truth, than this is the marvel of great art to be able to transcribe so much in a single picture.

In this sense, if Dorfman calls her art documentary, it's actually more tilting at an edge between documentary and narrative cinema, since her work is fabricated as such that it allows you to infer emotional content. Or rather, this art is not so much about information than about communicating the "right emotion" from which you can infer information (don't they call this a cognitive process?). She's taking the path of formulating "tableaux", and this results in a very aesthetic outlook that perhaps is hereby justified by her focus on plasticity, and how plastic is apparently able to trigger emotion. What are the value of emotions experienced through plastic? Oh so, you might start to think these people are all but remote lunatics, but.. Isn't art plastic? What is the value of an emotion when I am experiencing it forward a Dorfman photograph? How does it compares with fullfilling sentiments through the familiarity of a personal doll.

Does art functions the same as a sex doll?

Coming to my next case, I realize that the Dorfman show was a perfect response to a lot of recent art subjectifying porn stars and its industry. Her photographs are generally as slick as a pornographic shot, as you can see in this example ("Taffy 2", 2002) from the series, one of the rare photograph here that actually shows the doll's genital, and
how these objects weren't made for kidding in the first place.

Again, it seems here that Dorfman "designed" a shot that best reflected the relation of this doll ("Taffy 12", 2002) with its owner: no, not the cat, but here, the true king, the glorious, "reh'l
mân" who probably decided that sex was way more easy to get that way. While the nonchalent atmosphere of the previous shot looked like this couple had enough of banging the night before, this latter, adorned not so innocently with the motif of a cat, with the doll laying like she's ready for another ride, seems to manifest Dorfman's wish to underline the haunting feminist aspect of the show, an aspect that culminates in the clashing ultimatum of her most recent work, the fantastic collectiv
"slut shots" ("Girlfriend 1", 2004), that would make Vanessa Beecroft run for her money. Have you seen the mutilated faces ("Girlfriend 2", 2004) of these poor things?? Wow!.... I'm still apalled, gazing as I write. Is that supposed to be seducing?? They all look like drug addicts !! With ping pong balls in their mouths!! Mr. plastic-maker, can your image of an ideal woman ever be more dumbified, puh-lease ? Gee.... I'm near to suggest those doll owners start wearing that famous "I'm with stupid" T-shirt.

Is there was ever a work able to demonstrate the problematic within the traditionally paternalist genderification of woman as an "object of desire" (read cinema theory, of which this art is akin), than it was Dorfman's! Yes I know, old trick, and probably that work would have had more impact in the 60's, but you gotta admit how crude and ferocious these mosaics are compared with the more "gentile" photographs of the rest of the series, even compared to the previous close-up portraits ("GingerBrook 3", 2001) which on the opposite almost seek to reveal the hidden emotions
trapped within these dolls ("Sidore 5", 2001) (probably a study of how their makers dealt with the issue of facial expression, in response to their buyers' needs).

One of two great examples of this "gentility" I was just mentioning, is the cases of "Lily 1" (2004), proof that Dorfman hasn't entirely derived from her usual approach, and featuring the most relaxed of her artificial couples, enjoying a sunbath on a courtyard grass, letting you wonder how close to a sculpture by Duane Hanson we are getting here. The other strikingly idealized image is a magnificent picture of a married couple moving toward their bed ("Azra 1", 2002), a photograph that looks like a fairytale gone sordid
once you realize that this marriage is none but a faked sexual fetisch. Brrr...I'll admit I was thinking of Hitchcock a moment there. The use of distance and blur in the shot only enhanced that impression of bizarre, whatever Dorfman intended to express. At least now you are warned: the marrying doll is not an image that every woman will feel comfortable with. Or maybe somewhere afterall fetisch, since it involves so much of cognition, is never entirely deprived of romance? If Barthes argues that love is not much more than a secret wish to control the other, than maybe fetisch is simply an abstract materialization of romance, a projection of
idealized emotions unto an object? Or...Is romance just the soft, humanized version of fetishism?

I have poor knowledge in psychology, but this is the sort of topics that I'm sure will be discussed in a book that is coming out shortly in France, I think called "Les Amants Silencieux", and entirely dedicated to the study of human relationships with sex dolls, and which will be fully adorned with these photographs by Dorfman.

The last category of photographs, which I found to be the most successful (after the image of the man and his "dead" wife mentioned at the beginning of this commentary), were the pictures of dolls sharing the contexts of everyday domesticity ("Galatea 4", 2002). They are perticularly surreal! Apparently,
a woman bought many love dolls as a hobby, each one representing a trait of her personality, and in these photos it is obvious that she has established her as a member of her family, putting her at the table at times of breakfast ("Valentine 3", 2002), in presence of her "other kids", who seem to be
pretty used to the situation.. The shots are the most blunt of the lot, for once borrowing from in-yer-face "documentary" aesthetic.

Here the doll looses all sense of sexuality. It becomes the irreplacable daughter, now replaced ("Valentine 2", 2002) . I was imagining the story of a little girl who loved so much to play with dolls that she transformed into one. That story was probably influenced by the subconscious souvenir of an old science fiction film which traumatized me when I was a kid (link coming later, I am trying to remind myself the title of this film which depicted a family faced with the tragedy of living in a doll house).

Dorfman's work is really complex because part of it seems to dwell on
feminism, when on the other side she seems to endorse, or rather, comprehends the special psychological needs of people living with dolls.

Be it for reasons of memory, solitude, sex, or pure family fun, Dorfman really succeeds here at communicating the different layers of meanings implied in the behavior of acquiring human-shaped silicone. By wandering this deep, psychologically ("GingerBrook 4", 2002), I thought she was bypassing on her first intention to be politic.

I first wondered how important it was to her that she selected only cases involving woman dolls, when I would have love to see some of the rarer cases involving boy dolls.

It was after perusing her artist's statement on her website that all my doubts were made clear: she is seriously engaged with feminist theory. She even draws the humoristic illustration of Eve as being the probable first doll given by one man, God, to another, Adam. She goes on that in usual mythology, as soon woman...

"comes alive and exhibits her thirst for knowledge, she becomes a source of suffering and death. Men, afraid of the impulses women inspire, set out to rectify this by creating their own women: statues, mannequins, dolls and dolls that function for sexual pleasure."

And further:

"Synthetic women that are more satisfying, both sexually and psychologically, than their flesh and bone counterparts."

Ah well....I always think that it's the men that are the
sex machines. Have you ever met a man psychologically satisfying, Elena ? I think men represent themselves woman as objects because they, perhaps secretly, but very sincerely, enjoy being treated as objects themselves. That is how further I'll attempt a psychological interpretation on this topic.

Nevertheless, I prefer the general idea of projecting desire and emotions unto plasticity. And considering that I can equalize desire for a sex doll to the devotion for a manifactured replicate of a crucifix, I was wondering if this exhibit simply proved that the ultimate in any fetisch isn't always that it be confronted with its own kitsch.

At least this is how I ended up summarizing Dorfman's work: hanging there at a sweet tangent between kitsch and gravity.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: by the way, Great show!! Should I just write that !?

PS2: The title of the article is actually the title of an
old tune of mine.

Elena Dorfman: "Still Lovers"
January 13-February 26, 2005
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York

Da Mario Code: Cory Arcangel & Paper Rad "Super Mario Movie" at Deitch Projects.

2005-03-14T13:28:00.000-05:00

I would love to say there was some contemporary artist who's work really got me thinking, but lately I have just been trying to sort out 20 years of garbage TV culture that is filling my brain.

Cory Arcangel

Thou shalt not bother looking further than SMB1.

PJaine

Deitch Gallery in Soho is perhaps the trendiest gallery of New York, which grossly means that wrether the art that is profusionly presented there is meant to stay or be forgotten the next year, the shows themselves often turn out to be the New York art thrill of the month, and their vernissages got the prestige that can entertain the edgiest fashion and showbiz crowds that they attract.

This sounds like a critique but don't misinterprete me: I adore Deitch, and there is always at least one of their shows that I found memorable when I visit Manhattan. All I'm saying is that generally you can expect art at Deitch to be either humoristic, light, slick, fashionable, shocking, or all of the above, and this, regardless if the art deals with more serious issues in the background (which it often does).

In this sense, the gallery really corresponds to the
"playful" tendencies of art that emerged in the late 90's, an everyday art of
cuteness,
gags and tricks that probably evolved as the only vivable solution to the harsh utopian lessons of the more dramatically engaged, be it romantic or politic, art of the previous decade.

This presentation will sound like I'm putting a little too much on the shoulders of the artists I wish to relate about in this commentary.

For all it's worth, Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad are indeed presenting a very
"light" and "humoristic" installation at Deitch, one that is loud and danceable enough as to be fashionable. Yes you heard me, this intallation is "danceable", with its trippy,
addictive techno soundtrack based on 8-bits computer game sounds.

This is nearly the first solo exhibit by Cory Arcangel, an artist that was discovered
by many at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, when he presented his two
"video canvases" made from pirated old computer game cartridges (some sort of minimalist loops of which I already saw an example a year before in an excellent group show at the
New Museum of New York).

Video Games you hear? Sounds like one big trendy topic, but let's just say that Cory is probably among those who helped this trend to affect the art world.

Personally, I'm a fan. This is much more easy to claim than to explain. Have you read
the Press Release for this show? It's a very cute statement of the artist detailing his
process, which mostly consists of pirating an old video game cartridge, and
transforming it into video art (in this case, a Mario Brother cartridge but those who already know Arcangel also know that he constantly comes back to the icon of Mario Brothers(tm).

In fact, one of the two installations presented was exactly that: a "detailed explanatation of his process", which included a short "making of" video, demonstrating how his art is really not that easy to do, and a wallpaper (covering two walls) made of an inkjet printed copy of the
computer "code" that he had to write for this piece (took him 343 hours!!), including extra notes for the second installation and a full fresh copy of the original cartridge.

But what it didn't say is "why"?....WHY??... Why this obsession with
old game cartridges? And specifically, with the character and accompanying bit-mythology surrounding Super Mario Brother(tm)? (he's
not the only one, and I really mean it)

Here:

The main installation, "Super Mario Movie" (2005), is a 15 minutes piece of "cartridge art" (just to differientiate this from traditional dvd "video" art) that presents a non-interactive
representation of the Mario World, now turned into this hybrid between animation, old silent film (they are intermittent
text captions),
music video (there is loud danceable music all the way through) and
abstract art. All this, to give the collaborators Paper Rad some credit, presented within a
set environment consisting of
a few columns of decorated cubes, and about
6 cubes offered as seats, on which are projected extra videographic "ornements" to enhance the impression that you are fully being enveloped into Marios's world.

Sounds koooooolll, heh? Well that was my impression too, and actually one that I was trepidly expecting while walking toward Soho. I sort of knew what I was going to get and I was not disappointed. I think I watched the thing 3 darn times!

But why do we enjoy Arcangel's work, exactly? What does this enthousiasm tell about us? To contradict what the authors of the work say about it, part of it is simple nostalgia. Cory and his friend may argue that they never stopped playing 8-bits game, and that every computer media is automatically outdated by definition (hence how nostalgia would loose a necessary "referrent"), the major issue here is that there is one little cartoonish guy that most of us "westerners in our 30's" have cherished as a child and lost in contact with since more than a decade. It's so nostalgic I had an urge to dig a version of the game and play it!

Then, the character of Mario was probably art in the first place. Could you look more ridicule, please? Why did they designed that mustache, exactly? Apparently it was the only way to make the "square" nose makes sense...A construction worker, he looks like your average dad turned into some sort of surrealist hero.

I had to look up to learn a bit about the
history of this game, which came to be a landmark for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in their early days (and ever since). Mario used to run across rolling barrels in the attempt to save a princess in the classic Donkey Kong (go figure), before he became a plumber, with the adjointement of his brother Luigi, when he had to cross a series of ackward sewers leading to an imaginary world filled with turtles, mushrooms, and other strange animals that he had to conquer in order to reach yet another princess guarded in a castle by a gigantic dragon-turtle.

....err....What ?!!

Forget the consumer world an instant, as with Cory's appropriation, pop art is defeated by the banging surrealism of the digital. This art is as autistic and outworldish as the material it originates from (and to which I might add, it is conveniently subordinated). With Cory there is no really secondary reading to what he exploits. Not much revolt either. The work is presented "as is", and you either accept to embark in this hallucigonetic trip or refuse it as a work of art. There's not much of options.

But let's not reduce this art to what it offers visually because that would be missing a very important point. One of its great merit is how it attempts to demystify computer technology, one that keeps tresspassing on common knowledge, as engineers are continually enhancing tools that we use daily without ever being able to fully grasp how they work (except for a few basic
principles).

By presenting us every detail of the process of his creation, Cory seems to insist on demonstrating how feasible the whole thing is, if you allow yourself some patience. I admire the trepidance of artists who
reveal their tricks.

I saw in the first room installation the outline
of a singular battle between man and technology, one that
resulted into man's victory. Somehow the juxtaposition of digital creation with the peripeties of an artist struggling to program some obsolete technology rendered a surprisingly humane aspect to the project. It was such a deliverance to witness someone explaining the secrets of early computer graphic language, since it gave us hints that a control over technology once lost was now regained. Can you imagine a world set against corporative computer societies, with every individual now able to construct their own computer applications?!

Also, and this will sound like a stretch, but, however silly and playful it seems on surface, you can consider Arcangel's work as taking part in a deconstructionnist tradition of formal painting. Nothwithstanding the conceptual approach of revealing the instructions for the work, what are 8-bits cartridge games but a series of
minimal colored squares aligned in movement next to the other? This connection with art history that I've perceived was really enhanced by the important amount of
abstract segments within the film. Can you imagine the influence of constructivism and subsequent minimalism on the craft of 8-bits cartridges? Don't we need to start thinking with "squares", mathematics, and probabilities before being able to
draw a Mario? In a sense Mario is a missing link between conceptual formalism and the figurative. Cory's work seems to dwell on a threshold between exploring the pure visual phenomenon of computer "data graphics" and what they are actually able to transcribe. This work in a way constitutes the compulsive demonstration that everything can indeed be calculated in representation. Don't seek for any other "Da Vinci" code: It's Mario!

It's been said here and there that Cory's "movie" is more akin to mathematics, sculpture, writting, than video art, because the work functions like a ready-made that is being altered, for one, and secondly because the way that images are normally
represented in video games, through a phenomenon of scrolling that would have give a hard time to Vitto Acconci, the concept of framing is also ackwardly altered. Games have their own frames which are virtual, and these don't actually correspond with what is shown on screen. They correspond to codes and their own algorithmical limits. What I'm saying is that what we "perceive" as diegetic in Cory's video is actually "quite there". Computer activity is functioning and thus the screen becomes only a threshold between two worlds functioning differently. By proposing to do a "movie" directly out of an old computer cartridge (and not a representation of this object, such as with the film
"The Matrix"), Cory is assessing the possibilities of a new media language, and how little of it we have explored yet, at least as a language for art. Are images really moving in Cory's art, or is it us that are moving in them?

If we need to agregate links with the history of moving images, we could argue that by being so process-inclined, the work is reminiscent of
early abstract animation by such luminaries as Norman McLaren or even, to look further in the past, the early formalist films of german artists such as Hans
Richter, again coming back to an extremely formalist reading of the work, which share of intrinsic logic is far from being deprived.

But thankfully, all these
analytical details are secondary to what is foremost a very sensual
experience (the room flashes constantly, and it's hard not to tap your feet to the funny kitsch electro rythms), one that is so empowering that you forget to read if the story proposed by the sparse captions actually made any sense.

Speaking of story, at this point I think I will need to wait and see if Cory provides an internet version of this thing (afterall here he is selling the installation, not the video rights) to add a comment. Believe it or not, after 3 times I couldn't really make sense of any plot, as I was mostly looking at the thing from an abstract point of view, with the incongruous Mario
running in every sense, or stopping to (apparently) weep on a cloud. From what I understood, the vignette was originally drawn as a comic strip by Paper Rad, so that Cory transcribed it as codes for the Nintendo cartridge. What story? Hmm....this is less interesting: Apparently Mario just runs everywhere in a chaotic world in order to get to a big rave party. A topic that was probably best rendered by Paper Rad themselves.

Did we really need a story? Maybe afterall that is the weekness of the piece to wish to trigger narrative when so many others (as seen previously) are already gagging on the Mario's theme with perhaps greater punch and effects. Anyway, this art "has a right to snobs", as it is not your average flash web animation. It is constrained to the possibilities that low-rom cartridges can offer. This said, a lot is happening on the screen as the piece is pretty much paced in the ups, so I'm not sure how relevant narrative would be to the work apart from the fact that it is titled as being a "movie", and that it aimed to reference the medium and compared with it. Actually it compared much more with a party!

Reminding myself of a recent article by Timothy Comeau, I was thinking that this work is probably symptomatic of the
Nike generation that Arcangel, at his young age, must be part of. The
"Just Do It" generation of those who know that their 15 minutes are going to be short
and that they must hit it with a bang.

Well "Super Mario Movie" functioned like such a bang.

Forget extraneous elements such as literature or art theory. From the minute you entered the room and the one you left, your eyes and ears were popping out like being in Clockwork Orange, and this is the greatest sucess of this exhibit to be able to captivate so much of attention in a cluster. It's a downright trippy
drug experience !

You come out of it, you have no idea what you saw, but it's like you were spinning in a rotor! I heard Jeffrey Deitch himself call it "the funhouse" when I was visiting. Well that pretty much summarizes it: fun art.

And... trying to find ways to formulate a reproach to all this fun,
I ended up thinking that if life itself is going to suck that much,
than maybe fun is something I want to focus on.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Cory Arcangel & Paper Rad: "Super Mario Movie"
January 15, 2005 — February 26, 2005
Deitch Gallery
76 Grand Street
Soho, New York
Tues - Sat, 12am - 6pm

Ok, as a BIG bonus, a tiny curatorial of links dedicated to the Mario Brothers world,
mostly those already cited in the article, with a few extras:

MARIO, THE GAME:

First, the original game itself(!). Or rather, a dead link of the work that apparently used to function.

Maybe then...try the very old old game when Mario first appeared?

I don't know how you can play this but it is defined as being the source code(!) itself for Super Mario Bros., so feel free and start hacking.

Some guy provided his version of Super Mario Brothers 2.

You can see the whole game Super Mario Bros. 3 being completed in 11 minutes.

If you get tired of innocent kiddy games, try this version.

The Super Mario Bros. original game can at least be played with a South Park character.

MARIO, THE ART:

A fantastic art project by Myfanwy Ashmore that hacks a Mario cartridge in order to reduce it to a worry-less promenade.

Art-induced portrait of Mario done with office sticky note sheets.

Paul Ter Voorde did this landmark flash animation replicating a famous scene from The Matrix in the Mario mode.

Alexander Leon did this incredible series of "epic" Mario cartoons forming a parody of contemporary fantastic cinema. A must!

I called this "average flash animation" in my article above exactly because it's not average. In fact, if you can cope with the scatologic sequence, it's a really bizarre short called "Mario Twins".

The people at I-Mockery have reviewed some of the most bizarre hackings of the Super Mario Bros. game, which you can all download and try for yourself. Here I've selected 4 of the most artistic. This first one is accompanied by a great essay on the clichés of game hacking which you will find to be thoroughly pertinent with the context of this article:

Another Mario Bros. hack that I've selected in context with this article. You got to try this to experience how flashy it is.

How about a bald version of Mario?

Cute version to play on a Christmas Day.

A dumb version where Mario seeks for weed.

A large collection of spoofs and animations based on the Mario character
(try the "relationships" section for very vulgar sex vignettes, or then my favorites not yet listed above which are "Behind The Mario Game", and the kid shorts "Super Duper Mario""" and "Mario's Jump").

MARIO, THE MOVIE:

The poster for the movie:.

The site about the movie.

You can download here, if you scroll a little, full homemade Z category films about Super Mario.

MARIO, THE TV SHOW:

A site devoted to the most absurd of these Mario TV shows:

An episode guide of every Mario TV shows you can imagine.

MARIO, THE LECTURE:

I adore this socio-philosophical analysis of Mario Bros.

An intriguing essay interpreting Mario as a communist.

A small article on what it means to admire Mario.

An essay about how to win the Mario game:

MARIO, THE MUSIC:

A lot of the Mario music can be recovered here.

Score sheets of the video game's music, slated for piano.

Guitar tablatures for every songs of the Mario games.

This pleasureble article covers the history of video game music, but does mentions the Super Mario games.

I did my own little improv demo, for a possible "ridiculous" Mario Bros crack of mine, up for a week because it's not even edited, processed or anything, really just fooling around yesterday, thinking about Mario.

MARIO, THE FAQ:

The ultimate Mario know-it-all site.

A concise description of the Mario Brothers game and its basic rules.

Another great and elaborate site on the the character and the games.

A very interesting historical chronology of the various shapes and styles of the Mario character.

All the ennemies of Mario catalogued here.

A full-fledged forum for those who wish to discuss about Mario.

The blunt list of all Mario games and thus, cartridges.

Another quick easy-to-print Faqall written in text-only:

MARIO, THE REST:

Apparently this Mario party thing is "The" thing, if you're able to make it function.

Why not try instead that little "breakdancing Mario" application, to which you need to first appose your own music.

Dress your own Mario.

Download and alter images of characters and designs from the Mario World:

A test to know which Mario Character you are the most alike.

The original boxe of the Super Mario Bros. game.

Apparently, if you can succeed downloading it, this video of Mario Bros with Ice Capades is amazing kitsch.

A FEW LINKS ABOUT CORY ARCANGEL:

An excellent interview from Petite Morte, you won't be disappointed!

A interview with a certain Eric Salvaggio letting Cory answers a couple of his own questions.

An interview with John Bruneau for Switch Magazine that provided many cool links for my own comment:

The "website for "Data Diaries", one of the most successful project of Cory Arcangel.

Art Fifa 2005 Coming Up.

2005-03-09T06:22:00.000-05:00

Well I got a few reviews coming up (I'm compiling links for the next one), but in the meantime I'll throw a few words about the FIFA (festival of films on art) that is starting tomorrow.

Well, basically, I just browsed the categories rapidly on their website, and here
are films that attracted my attention:

ARCHITECTURE:

- An obligatory documentary on Tadao Ando working on a new project ("The Architect, The Kids, And The Acorns", 2002)

- A film on the bulbous houses of Antti Lovag ("Les Maisons D'Antti Lovag")

- "Countdown For The Parco Della Musica" is about the construction of apparently the largest musical hall yet in Europa by pompous and all-over-the-place Renzo Piano.

- "Living Space" is about Frank Gehry and a few others receiving an heritage to build cancer treatment centres.

- If you're interested in the early construction of american urbanity, try "Tall: The American Skyscraper And Louis Sullivan".

- The best of all is "Heavenly Mud", which is about African architecture.

DESIGN:

- I am not missing the film on Art Nouveau key artist "Alphonse Mucha".

- There's a strange film about Bic stylos ("Le Bic Cristal").

- What would have been Art Deco without the flamboyance of some "Lalique, L'Homme De Verre" glass ?

PAINTING:

- There are a couple films on Quebecois plastician Molinari, including "La Derniere Conversation", which documents his activities in the last years before his recent death (2004).

- There are a few portraits of the usual great surrealists: Dali ("The Dali Dimension", Max Ernst ("My Vagabond Life, My Disquiet"), Roberto Matta ("The Eye Of A Surrealist"), and perhaps a couple others.

- "New York, 1943" is a french film giving a fresh perspective on the explosion of the Ab-Ex scene in New York of the 1940's.

- An hour with Antoni Tapiès ("Tapiès Tea") sounds like a great time.

- Are you intrigued by Lucian Freud ? "Portraits" is interviewing his paint models (often friends) to find out about him.

- If you wish to ponder on canadiana versus modernism, go see "The Pines Of Emily Carr". Or compare it with a film on Caspar David Friedrich.

- Finally but not last, do not miss the documentary on the ever ackward children picturist Henry Darger ("In The Realms Of The Unreal")

Comic:

- 3 documentaries on 3 dark artists of the comic industry: Art Spiegelman and his terrible Maus ("Le Miroir De L'Histoire"), french dark surrealist Fred ("Derrière Le Miroir") and recent scenemaker Chris Ware ("Un Art De La Mémoire").

PHOTOGRAPHY:

- a documentary on American portraitist Richard Avedon sounds like the piece de résistance of this section( "Darkness And Light").

- I would definitely go see "Sam Taylor-Woods" documentary, though I expect it to
be kinda formal.

- The same usual biggies are always here: Helmut Newton, Henrier Cartier-Bressons, Robert Frank.

- "Contact" is still here to present short portrait of more contemporary artists: this time Rineke Dijkstra, Roni Horn and Wolfgang Stillmans. Here hoping you can catch these as opener for longer documentaries of interest.

CONTEMPORARY ART (SCULPTURE, ETC...):

- There is a small animation on Giacometti that sounds pretty well done ("Eternal Gaze").

- She died a bit too prematurely but left a mark that is increasing in recent years: Helen Chadwick got a documentary here blunty titled "The Art Of Helen Chardwick".

- Grahame Weinbren is considered a pioneer of intractive cinema (any retro any place?). The film is titled "Frames", stealing the name of a recent project.

- A "Spot" documentary on light and weather artist Olafur Eliasson is better than nothing (and worth a dozen other documentaries).

- "The Saatchi Phenomenon": name says it all. You decide. I'm definitely going.

- A film on Panaramenko's retro machines sounds promissing, despite the ridiculous title ("La Magie De L'Art" ).

- Land artist Frans Krajcberg is less known to my ears but sounds like a graet alternative to Andy Goldsworthy ("Portrait D"Une Révolte" ).

- If you love Video Art there is an unexpected documentary on the carreer of "The Wilson Sisters".

- The proof that being a contemporary artist can mean being stupid is demonstrated in "Casuistry: The Art Of Killing A Cat".

- There is a whole film on a single installation by Antony Gormley in Norway (Broken Column").

- They are more than a couple documentaries on the big artworld focus of recent which is the China contemporary art scene. They are a few portraits of other asian contemporary artists certainly worth a catch.

- Last but not least, a short 11 min portrait of a Richard Serra Ellipse set in Italy.

THEATRE:

- There's an opportunity to compare Kabuki and Nô Japanese theatre with two documentaries.

- A film about Luigi Nono's piece "Intollerenza" which was an audacious affair.

CINEMA:

- "Cinema Dali" is about the films of this celebrated artist.

- Absolute best apprehended film of the festival: Aleksandre Sokourov presenting a portrait of his mentor, Andrei Tarkovsky. Two very rare cineasts that are as much artists as they are film directors. The film is titled "Élégie De Moscou".

- An intriguing post-mortem "Autobiography" film on François Truffaut.

- What does poetic realism means in 2005? Try revisit Marcel Carné with "La Caméra Vivante".

- Another good film must be the one on Antonioni ("Pictures And Times"). "Cinema in the 60's definitely is hard to beat.

- A rare film: the portrait of Perotinus Magnus, the medieval key composer of early polyphony ("Thy Kiss Of Divine Nature" is the title).

MUSIC (AND DANCE):

- In "Notes Interdites" is covered the whole avant-garde of 20th Century Russian music and how it deal within harsh political context.

- 3 hours of film on Mozart's "Genius".

- A profile on Arvo Pärt, neo-ancestral composer of excellence ("24 Préludes Pour Une Fugue").

- Not exactly music, but: don't miss this presentation of Noémie Lafrance's "Noir" site-situ choreography which was endorsed by the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

ART THEORY AND HISTORY:

- Should The antique "Elgin Marbles" of the British Museum return to Greece, in their original settings?

- A film about the problematic of identity "copyright", an issue I find of importance (contrarely to intellectual property which I find to be materialistic).
Title is "La Rue Zone Interdite".

- Germaine Greer is a theorist claiming that the archetypal representation of beauty is a "Boy" and not the usual perception that it must be a "Girl". She arguments this humoristically through the visit of many old museums.

- The life of collector Hilla Von Rebay and how she built the Guggenheim Museum collection.

- Should contemporary artist care about who owns their work and who shows them?
The issue might seem a little exaggerated but the question still holds in "Collection F. C. Flick"..

- There's a film about Piri Thomas, new york poet, writer and performer, in the Literature section.

Done.

I don't think I'm seeing all this, but they are my pre-selection
for the festival. Hope that helped in any ways.

I'm not going to start a long critique but it's when you look at certain sections, like the music section or the literature, that you realize the programmators are being annoyingly conservative. Like if anyone who likes Chadwick or Olafur Eliasson means that they are listening to Mozart and Beethoven. I'm shocked that money to organize these events pass in the hands of people who are not able to prove how they are passionate about what they do. They are a lot of spheres left uncover. This festival is way too tranquille. It is in great need of some ferocious, interdisciplinary, punch-knock curating. Enough of Michelangelo, will you??
Westmounts grandmas are better starting wearing spikes on their heads.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@homail.com

Trash White: Rudolf Stingel "PC" at Paula Cooper Gallery.

2005-03-04T20:42:00.000-05:00

"Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science)."
Paul Tillich

Following from yesterday's commentary on Gavin Turk, I thought of presenting
this new work by Rudolf Stingel, just seen at gallery Paula Cooper, and which to me constitute another of these "last nails" of conceptual art, like we've seen popping out in recent years: Art that questions its own value, and questions the market and art system in the meantime.

If you are reading such book as "The End Of Art" by Donald Kuspit, you may think this should have been all over since the 60's, but it seems they were a couple "last" proposals that needed to be made, and that hopefully in their dry appeal hide the potential of finally providing some light for change. I've said since a few years already, that the new major tendencies of art are trying desparately to get rid of the conceptual and embrace the decorative, what art yet succeeds to do only at a perfect meeting point between both design and concept.

You could argue that art never truly escaped from design and that is an impossible reality to wish this to happen, but I do believe the new "post"-concept art is more attracted by aesthetic presentation than it ever was when it only insisted on promoting ideas. Or rather, these new ideas attack the
staging of art itself, or what it represents to formulate an aesthetic form.

In this sense, without realizing it, minimalist art and conceptual art had a great influence on design put in the context of art, since the popular idea that art is only presented on its optimus ideal stage when it is presented in pristine white spaces: what has been referred to as the "White Cube", a concept of the exhibition space that thoroughly expanded since the second World War, and that is peculiar for being an affect of design that was influenced by new ways and considerations in the perspectivism of art.

If the minimalists were simply trying to convey ideas that already existed in the design activities of their era: functionalism, simplified architecture, new industrial materials, etc..all affects of a
technological
industrialization that led philosophers to start thinking like complex compartmental machines, resulting in the schools of structuralism and deconstructionism, than minimalism, which was already a meeting point between art and design, while influenced thoroughly by these new movement of thoughts, probably had a strong impact on this general conception that only a space devoid of the most forms, lines and meaning possible can really serve optimally the presentation of an artistic artefact.

Thus, the white gallery, or white cube, became the new "frame" for art.

The new spatial canvases on which anything could be thrown, and be considered art, as the elimination of any extraneous element from "reality" served the new conceptual aptitude very well.

The art, more and more dependant on this new frame, rapidly became no longer the art itself but rather its dialogue with any space that it found itself in. Not surprisingly, theory argues that as soon as it escapes the white cube, the art object starts to dialogue with its environment. But put it back in the "sterilized aesthetic cell", and the white cube functions like a
psychological seal. We automatically address it as a frame able to abstract any object from everyday reality, like if the gallery was a laboratory, a lense enticing the exploration and scrutinization of this same reality. The absolute spatio-temporal canvas, which Walter De Maria and Dia Foundation are so desparately trying to turn into intemporal somewhere in Soho since the late 70's.

Well, in these present tense of digital dialectics, the white cube days are probably over.

Finally we are able to switch it around and observe the gallery space as the work of art itself, questioning how a peculiar object it has become with age (it is still quite young), and what is with all the heavy charge that we have imposed unto it: all tricks of the mind, in the end.

Someone thought of directly attacking the topic.

Rudolf Stingel, here, presents at Paula Cooper a work that should not be mistaken
as being so original as they are a good number of artists that worked with
empty gallery spaces before him, changing them in spots to have a conversation, or replacing art by a paper statement, or a
subtle sound. What Stingel does that sounds strikingly new to my ears, is objectifying a whole precise context of a commercial gallery stuck in an art system, and using both minimalism and concept to actually dismantle the prescience of these schools of ideas within the arts.

Here is the situation:

When you enter Paula Cooper's space, it seems totally empty. You walk around and
find no art. After a couple contours, you finally face a gigantic realistic canvases that reads on the checklist as being the portrait of "Paula Cooper" (2004) (replicating with
definite skill a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, if there was ever one name whose corpus of portraits consisted really in a who's who of art of New York during the 80's).

If you're like me, you are looking around for the second "Untitled" piece, that is listed on the checklist. The curiosity becomes sensible enough that you need to ask for it. I did realize there was a new floor at the gallery, and had a reaction of thinking Paula Cooper simply wanted to flash (something I'd expect from being in Chelsea where every vernissage look more like fashion parade), but I was enlightened to learn that the second piece was the floor itself. Just a serie of pristine white rectangle boards (about 6 per 11 pieces in the main room) covering every surfaces of the gallery's ground.

Nothwithstanding the fact that the Paula Cooper shot actually looks like
coming from a fashion magazine, and you end up with an exaggerated artificial exhibit outlook that seems like the most superficial ever.

"Too good to be true", seems to be the artist's motto, as his intention
from the start was to show how people would normally dirt his flamboyant
floor... They are NO SUCH THING as a perfect white cube!! ah-ha ! What a kick in the ass ! I felt somewhat rejoiced, and "relieved", as I tried my best to imprint the
dirtiest traces possible in a left corner of the room that was still left too untouched for my taste.

Don't you like art that you're able to touch?

I was reminded of the famous walking painting by Yoko Ono, that she so wished Marcel Duchamps would have walked on.

I also thought about a piece by Jochen Gerz, called "Leben" (1974), and which consisted of the words "to live" (or here the french, "vivre" ) spelled many times on a gallery floor with chalk for people to erase them by walking over. Stingel is probably simply doing the opposite by creating his Pollock
out of ordinary living hazards. Afterall, who is this gallery's for? Why does it
exist? We never see any inhabitants when we are shown photographs of works of art,
be it on artnet or in catalogues. By letting life activity being recorded orimprinted in the gallery as the piece itself, somehow Stingel has proposed one of the most naturally (and automatic)
collaborative piece of art ever! I thought that was cute.

But the main image that we keep getting back to is Paula.

Cette chère Paula.

With the painting added, the exhibit is being pushed back to its junction between being unspecifically about reversing what I will term "traditional gallery design" on its head, and the specific context of pinpointing the reality of a commercial gallery confined in the world market of tastes that constitute Chelsea, New York. So indeed, Stingel is both flattering and teasing sarcasm at his gallerist by transforming her space into a temple devoted to her image. Indeed, if art has become
the new religion and the gallery the new church, Stingel is debilitating it all by presenting the powers at be, here the goddess that will decide what will be set in HER space from what won't (it doesn't help that Paula Cooper really looks on the picture like she's a star from
The Bold And The Beautiful, turning all this into pretty humoristic theatre rather than anything really upsetting).

Indeed Stingel exposes a myth to better undermine it (once you met God, I suppose there is not much less to desire).

But in the end I still wonder if it wasn't a bit too much, or rather, if by being this specific he hasn't also undermined the power of his piece a little.

Everybody understands the idea of whiteness, and how it's being in some sort of silly way associated with purity.

Everybody can grasp at the idea of taking a whole gallery and presenting
it as a sculpture, opposing its very constituent to the art market. But....
Who can care about Paula?

Who, apart from a few lucky art aficionados who take the time to travel to Chelsea once in a while, would be able to respond to the iconography of miss Cooper and the reference of her gallery? This is where, with all the best intentions in the world, and the cool trick of one full month of a show in Chelsea that choose to daringly caricature what's happening out there in those
garage slopes (this piece certainly serves as a great mirror to all galleries around), Stingel is facing his own limits.

All this because people are ignorant of one VERY IMPORTANT FACT that quite enhances Stingel's proposal: Paula Cooper is not "n'importe qui", but was one of the major galleries that supported and paralleled the carreers of the Minimalists. The gallery's statement even claims that Sol Lewitt exhibited his first Wall Drawing at her place. She probably also exhibited a few of the walking pieces by Carl Andre. Stingel is probably aware that he stands in the perfect spot to re-evaluate and crticizes a portion of art history, and thus his appropriation of the gallery space becomes charged with the specific, what he probably wanted to underline by adding that Paula Cooper portrait. Was it necessary? Or isn't it that without its presence those who already know about the gallery's background would still be able to connect the work to it? Or is the portrait of Paula not a little too distractive for most spectators who will have no clue about who she is? Bluntly: should the gallery intervention be read as an attempt to create a temple for Paula, or a temple for art? That is where I got a little confused.

As an artist who travels worlwide, I wonder if Stingel's next intention is to appropriate every galleries and their proprietaires as many "different objects", or if he'll be able to transpose his "attacks" on grounds much less specific (he's probably aware of the problematic, since he opted to separate his gallery show in two titled pieces).

Because if you didn't see any attack, I read two:
the long-run, now shorcutted, biting at the art market,
and a more interesting criticism of the affects of conceptualism
on the ways we conceive of the staging of art.

In a sense Stingel's floor is a piece of conceptual design, two words that a while ago would have sound as an
oxymoron, attached together.

Contrarely to a lot of conceptual art, which are proposed as dead ends in themselves, Stingel seems to really be pondering about what is going on next. Attempting to destroy the white cube can only be a sign of desiring to get rid of one big artifice and wishing to start on new grounds.

What will they be ?

Now that conceptual art is truly reaching its end, that ready-mades
and the framing of everything has been debased to quasi psychological ill,
now that we assume, thanks to Stingel's proof, that the white cube is a totally
unneccessary aesthetic fallacy, where exactly are we moving next?

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Rudolf Stingel: "PC"
February 12 - March 12 2005
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
Chelsea, New York
Tue - Sun, 10am - 6 pm

(Ps: within this month I'll try to review the show of a real hard-edged conceptualist: Lawrence Weiner at

Maria Goodman)

Your 15 Minutes Are Over: Gavin Turk "White Elephant" At Sean Kelly Gallery.

2005-03-03T08:08:00.000-05:00

"Wasted space is any space that has art in it."
Andy Warhol

Gavin Turk, the english post-pop art monger, is in New York these days for a very late first solo at Sean Kelly Gallery, entitled "White Elephant".

Remember him ? You may remember his participation in the worldwide famous Sensation exhibit, when he presented his wax replicate of himself as Sid Vicious in a Warholian Elvis pause, called "Pop", a sculpture from 1993 that was already the summary of his career, which revolves around attacking some loose ends of modernism, notably the notion of originality as a criteria of value for art.

In other words, and this is why I admire this artist very much, a lot of his works
function more like "replies" to previous artists's works, or styles, rather than art standing as immediately recognizeable as his.

The major issue at hand is a re-valuation of the object, against its own concept, since that concept lost of its value for being "re-hashed" as it is, under Turk's hands. Or does it? This is the question left to answer: what is the precise value, be it artistic or monetary, of a work of art made by Gavin Turk ? The artist will soon trick you on your own wish to debase his art.

The Sean Kelly exhibit presents a few works from his recent series that already made the press in Europa last year.

The first, I don't know if it has a name ("golden thread"?), but you could call it an april's fool series, are his casts of thrash, where he transforms the most mundane and banal objects into highly desireable icons, mostly made of bronze, that is than painted to make sure that the final product ressembles the original object ("abject") as close as possible. Now that would mean, very close, because I swear some of these "clones" are practically seamless, unless you know that they are Turk sculptures.

Here are presented the already famous "Pile (2004)", which consists in the ultimate pop extremism of reconfiguring a bunch of garbage bags into a slick bronze sculpture, a work that with "Pop" probably constitute the opposite edges of his carreer: identity of a work of art and its intrinsic value.

"Pile" is probably the last nailed attempt at replying to Duchamp's readymade, and certainly an occasion to consider the opinion of those convinced that a great majority of contemporary art is thrash. What is you want ? Your big monument for a park ? Turk lends it to you. What could encompass better every ends of humanity than garbage bags offered in a deluxe format?

Following from "Pile" (an intriguing form for a bronze, for those who wish to read it from an abstract horizon), we get to the next "ready-made", which is "Box" (2002), which really looks like an average small box, and when you come really close to it, it actually seems more like made of ceramic rather than bronze, but whatever, still an item that evokes the usual wrapping of luxury objects, now turn into the luxury itself. Close to it are two blasted beer cans, also made of bronze, and finally, a pillow made in aluminium ("Somewhere Between Sleeping On The Streets And The Silver Clouds" (2005)), which unfortunately distracts from the corpus for sharing too much of a ressemblance with Koons (though the title re-affirms the artist's statement, and apparently nods at a work by Warhol that I'm abashingly ignorant about).

The best of these ready-mades, or rather, secondary to "Pile", was actually hidden from public view, and consisted of the most vain of tiny styrofoam glass ("Drunk And Bitten", 2005), also casted in bronze. I thought that owning it means you can actually drink out of a sculpture: that is pretty genuine !

Basically, the show could have presented a dozen more of those objects,
and it would have formulated a great case about the aura of art itself,
insisting on both the joint and dichotomy between the handmade and the readymade, the replicated and the found, the signed solennel stance of sculpture brought against art's contemporary behavior at recycling objects of poor material value.

But instead, the checklist cuts short into another series
of Turk, presenting two works from an earlier "signature" corpus,
when he focussed on presenting his signature as the work of art itself.
First, simply by writting his name in white paint over a canvas that once
enclosed a print by Andy Warhol , thus authentificating the canvas itself as his forever (though the Warhol print could be inserted anytime beneath its glazed surface), but the best work is the piece of paper directly nailed into the wall, which to me is much more of an update on Ben Vautier than the previous. Called "Metaphysical Nail" (2004), the whole power of the work lies in that urgent, even violent, gesture of the artist at claiming his space on the gallery wall. You may laugh at will that only a signature is offered as art, or you may turn upset, but the form obviously insists on being intimidating. You may rispost, but this artist ain't kidding.

Past a small work delimitating black and white contours ("Positive Negative A4" (2005)) that I didn't understand, and could really well be a replicate or a reply to some minimalist painter (or is it just some sort of ying and yang play on dividing the proportions of a standard page size?), we move to the end room where are presented the huge canvases of the artist's most recent series: "White Elephant"

"Big noizes for nothing" is a phrase that could capitulate what the expression
"white elephant" means, and by thoroughly re-appropriating pop art, the artist seems to aim at attacking it in some peculiar ways.

At first sight, you will wonder if all these canvases depicting Che Guevara ("Pink Che" (2005)), Elvis Presley ("Elvis Blue" (2005)), or Joseph Beuys ("Double Beuys" (2005)) (Beuys? Hmm... already an indication that something is not right..), are not simply from Warhol, or if the artist isn't perfectly appropriating the colored silkscreen style of this giant to explore his own pop idioms.

Well, you're halfway there, but there is a punch. And the more you look at them, the more you'll discover the trick (if like me, you never read the press release prior to watching the exhibit).

These canvases are fake, they are no pop art at all: they represent all the same person, disguised. It's all Gavin Turk! There's even a series (not shown in gallery) of Turk disguised as Warhol ("Fright Wig Purple", 2005)! (I think he left them out because it's the one where it's the most obvious that it's him).

Nothwithstanding the fact that some of these paintings (that "Yellow Diamond Elvis" (2005) ) sparkles almost like there is sandglass stuck in the painting, the room now really looks like the artist's own narcissistic temple, if you can't smoke self-indulgence, but as a relocation for pop art it couldn't be better established. "Who are all these people, anyway, that made up history at my place ?" seems to whine Turk. But by re-using Warhol's palette, the artist seem to want to extirpate contemporary art from all of its fallacies, or if indeed all of Turk's art is based on fallacy , it's one that is more apt at glancing towards an improbable truth than anything that happened in contemporary art since Ben Vautier.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

(PS: Go ahead and peruse Sean Kelly Gallery's site for extra images of the work shown)

Gavin Turk: "White Elephant"
February 3 - March 5 2005
Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street
Chelsea, New York
Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6 pm

Baby, I Want Your Art

2005-03-02T12:33:00.000-05:00

Ok, there is one great article about the Lehmann VS The Project lawsuit right here (thanks to Chris Zeke for the link), that I find the be the Art World's "article du moment" because it deals with so much of the "right concerns" regarding how art is distributed through its market.

I'll comment on a few sentances, written by Christopher Mason, or quoted from the various people he interviewed:

And what dealers really don’t want to see is a work get flipped at auction.
(Christopher Mason)

I am hoping, and I think this is the case, that the big gallerists are giving privilege to museums and art institutions, and people who let pieces from their collections travel from exhibits to exhibits.

In that case I can understand that pieces are provided with "fair prices" to a special category of people, and that auctions must be feared, since than art can be accessed by big melancholists whose only good they'll ever do to art is to bury themselves with their private collections, already kept safe from world view in their sordid attics for an entire human life.

In the end I think this is what artists are seeking: dealers that will help them get their work travel constantly.

I would add that the only last detail that artists should observe, when a dealer shows interest in their work, is how gallerist attenders receive clientele, or how their work is presented at the gallery itself.

95 per cent of the time, it's very fine, but they are a few rare cases where a gallerist seem to think that putting someone in a bad mood at the front desk is the right idea. I think this job should be given to people naturally happy to discuss about the artists on show, or provide information. EVEN when an artist is so big that the work has already been sold since ages. Who cares? I think it's the events in themselves, the exhibits, that are prone to lead to interesting discussions. And that can't be bought, we are simply collecting some good times, here.

“If we started jumping our prices to match the auction market, we’d be faced with a limited group of collectors who’d be willing to buy,” says Boesky. “You never want to [then have to] lower your prices. So it’s better to have work that’s in consistent demand.” (Marianne Boesky)

And I'll add that the people who buy lots of art are probably limited in funds as art generally costs a lot. So if you want art to be in the "good hands", the prices must be reachable to them. Otherwise you end up with a company buying a big piece to flatter their offices, like Julie Mehretu's big Moma painting ending as decor for a bank.

Coming up the Lehmann case, here I'm opposing two sentances to argument
all what I just commented:

Lehmann testified that he was furious when he received a catalogue of paintings from a one-woman show by Mehretu at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “I was flabbergasted,” he said in court, “because I’d asked for a year and a half for a work by Julie Mehretu. And I saw that the Greenberg Rohatyns owned five, and people I’d never heard of owned them.” (Jean-Pierre Lehmann)

Than, later in the article:

Rohatyn and her husband, Nick, own a large, art-filled house on East 94th with a ground-floor gallery called Salon 94,
Rohatyn sees no reason to apologize for her Mehretus. “I showed Julie before she showed with Christian,” she says, referring to a group exhibition she helped organize in 2000. “I won’t sell pictures that I own personally. And I’m a happy lender to exhibitions. To me it makes perfect sense that I have them.” (Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn)

I think that pretty sums it up: if you have a gallery, or focus on lending art to major exhibits, you pass first. And I'm not yet commenting on the court issue itself, and what went wrong or not, but just wondering how in earth does Lehmann expect that he's gonna be first if he's just a private collector: did he send his own Mehretu to the Walker Art Exhibit? Maybe yes, maybe not, this is important info that the article should have provided, but from what I understand he doesn't own any gallery or salon, so I can only support that the Project would want works to be owned by those who will diffuse it.

“A client of mine was so desperate to buy a painting last week, he told me to tell the gallery he was starting a family foundation to build a private museum,”
says Amy Cappellazzo “I asked him if it was true and he said, ‘Of course not. Just tell them that so I can get the goddamned painting.’ (Amy Cappellazzo)

Oops...Well that can only come as a warning. Wait for facts, or ask for photos
of the foundation.

Ok, the case itself:

It seems that Lehmann, perhaps in all good rights (we haven't heard all details, but I'm suspicious of the fact 3 other people were sharing his privileges, and that he didn't jump on his computer and looked at photos of the Mehretu works when that first show happened at the Project....not the move of a real hard fan if you ask me..), won his case,

“unless the parties reach an agreement" (Judge Ira Gammerman)

My opinion:

Lehmann is not helping his case as a private buyer by suing a gallerist.

If I was him I would jump rightly to the agreement, and ask to be the next owner of a big Mehretu. Maybe Mehretu herself could help this case and just finish a couple canvases for once. It's kind of an urgency, Julie ? Your gallery is going bakrupt!

Another mistake from Lehmann, is that he probably should have met the artist since a great while if he was such a fan. Or just send a fan letter. Something dumb with a smiley.

It's good to sound dumb when you like an artist, they don't like it when they feel you are too brilliant for them. Caress and a "hoo, how you're so great" will do.
I'm surprised that Mehretu never asked for a list of her buyers herself,
since judging by the amount of paintings she offer, they are certainly less than 50
of them around the world.

Maybe after all The Project did something wrong? Maybe they asked for too many lenders and tried to please too many people at once, while at the same time trying to serve Mehretu's career the best possible ?

I think everyone is wrong in this affair and should make a case of serving as an example to every other dealers and buyers.

If Lehmann is too busy to attend gallery shows at first sight, than he can just contact me, and whenever I'll be in New York, for just a sleep on his couch, I'll tell him all what I saw during the day, and which button he needs to press.

I really don't think you can afford wasting time when you
have an artist in mind, because apart from some casual cases,
they don't really make art by the tons. Right? (Unless they are photographs.....but...ahem)

Also, keep in mind that they don't even need to, if they art is selling
by the big buck. One wonders what motivates Rosenquist to still paint.

Rich artists who do art only want one thing: GET THE ART SHOWN.

So simply open the tiniest spot in any garage, have it designed
by a reputated architect, publish a few accompanying books (curators
are not expensive), than maybe, you'll be first in line without ever having
to sign contracts about loaning money.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Riopelle In New York

2005-02-27T15:25:00.000-05:00

Riopelle will have a show in New York at
Robert Miller Gallery,
from March 31 to April 30 2005.

Isn't that fantastic?

Problem is that all his best paintings I'm sure are already sold
since a while, so if the americans wish to see one of the best early
abstract expressionists ever, they're gonna have to wait that a museum
"indulge" into setting up some kind of event, at least a group show
about the Automatists.

Speaking of Robert Miller, there was another "Category A" show there
recently that I didn't mention yesterday and which was a collectiv
assemblage called "Almost".

I wasn't always convinced by the pertinency of the works selected, judging
from the light of the curatorial statement, but most of it was really neat,
and extremely varied in style and approach. I like exhibits that show art for
every taste.

I may come back to this one.

---------------------------------------------

I was at Nuit Blanche yesterday, and my goal forthe week is trying to decorticate what was art from the "Sphere Loto-Québec", from what wasn't.

Because let's face it, as a physical entity it surpassed a lot of your average balloon art (insert here the link to Christo's baloon column but I lost it..;-P...).

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Back From The USSA

2005-02-26T12:41:00.000-05:00

Ok...Back in Montreal, just in time to
reach Nuit Blanche (White Night), an overnight of activities including a fair share of an art related programmation.

I saw between 60 and 70 shows in the last week, which is slightly less than usual
(I usually cross the boundary of 80), which is partly due because of many hours spent walking around the Christo work (I returned 3 times: normal day, wet day, snow day), and also that I lost a couple hours waiting to enter the Dali show in Philadelphia.

I will comment on some shows later on, but here is a rapid selection
(No, I'm not listing them all) that I'm slating under categories of
personal gradings (and a small comment).

The Bad shows (Category of D):

Laylah Ali (Gallery 303): I think she's quitting the political works and aims to move towards the fantasy world of a Murakami, but she's really not quite there yet with these half-assed kid portraits.

Anthony Caro (Mitchell-Innes & Nash): Colored Indus. metal sculpture never looked so dated, like pop songs from the 80's that are trying hard to beat your cool again, but failing. (added this part a week later: I'm especially critical here of the fact that the new works look not much evolved from the older work)

Jack Pierson (Danziger project): Is he really a New York talk-of-the-town? That show bored me, like attempting to make art out of fashion paper works, but coming out in style with a collage outlook that seems to be "designed" to end as subway ramp posters. Cute, granted, but not moving anywhere across surface.

Aleksandra Mir (Roth Gallery): Good intentions from an artist I usually appreciate, but this time these posters and small objects dedicated to the issues of abortion laws didn't look like they are going to reach their goal. A proof that art can be irrelevant.

Richard Wright (Gagosian): I'm sure it took him hours to draw those op-art meets minimalism frescoes for gagosian, but when I'm entering a gallery I need beef,
not the aperitif for a meal that I'm never going to get. These sparsed works seem to
claim a dialogue with Sol Lewitt, but we are in 2005, not 1975. Bring Ackerman instead.

Jason Fox + Richard Rezac (Feature Inc): 80's neo-figurative gone caricatural. Trendy punk painting that is really not my bag of tea. Rezac is a bit more intriguing with his exploration of sculptural motifs borrowed from the decorative world, but it's not going far with works that are so little as being..well, decorative.

The OK shows (Category of C):

Stephen Vitiello (The Project): Whirling slow-paced sounds of birds, pictures of shooted speakers reminiscent of De Saint-Phalle... Really not his best work, but ok for a 5 minutes rest on some shrink's couch.

Monika Bravo (Bruce Wolkowitz): So sentimental and fluffy, I think her statement outdoes her work. She should just write: "my work are moody and etherial video canvases, take it or leave it".

Isa Genzken (David Zwirner): How did the World Trace Center really affect artists?
Sometimes by influencing them doing lazy works like the new Genzken corpus, which looks exactly how I will describe it: Throwing and glueing a bunch of toys and party accessories on a few columns, splashing paint above it, and sticking a few carboards. If you're into bricolage... The architectural towers at the front space are much more interesting.

Steve McQueen (Marian Goodman): Ho stop the fuss will you? Just a bunch of vignettes with an overtly ambitious (read, pretentious) aim at re-telling the story of the world. Come again? I was wrong, these are appropriated photographs from a NASA experiment at launching images of earth life in space during the 70's. But the pace is slow and you just can't expect your audience to sit for 70 minutes on wood blocks. At any rates, still a couple works (or images) worth a curiosity glance (the red film where he's sculpting his skin), if you got at least one full hour of free time.

Barry Le Va (Ica Of Philadelphia): Ohhh that one is not going to be popular. Hermetic mathematical works on paper, with a few examples of his large sculptural sets, that looks like maquettes of micro-minimalist cities. Read a book
about him and see if you care, before attending.

Paul Rubens (Metropolitan): Is this kitsch or what's wrong with me? If you're into preparatory drawings... I think the Daniel lions are the best, this and the last drawings room, including overtly eery scenes of a marriage.

View Eight (Mary Boone): art that is design that is art that is confusing. Why is it always Jorge Pardo who brings the best work in these sorts of contexts? The Bontecou piece seems really out of place. Ambitious statement, but I think the curator should plunge and organize a museum show with major works.

Thrish Morissey (Yossi Milo): Well I couldn't think of a more "ok" show that this one, which prove its point (punning at conventional family photographs), but is not anymore intriguing than what it is: expectable art, "ok" photographic work, worth a few minutes of your glance.

The Really Good shows (Category of B):

Petah Coyne (both at Sculptural Centre and Lelong Gallery): My idea of a "goth" art.
Sculptures that seem to have been made through some sort of heavy ritualization process you're not certain you want to know about. Both dark, tragic, and beautiful. "A new form of beauty", once said the irish performance band Virgin Prunes, and this shows of waxed natural objects if sort of moving into that direction.

Marc Quinn: Oh well, what an easy pun at classical. But yet it functions. Cast of animal carcasses, if that is going to be one end that Quinn will finally reach through his art. For the moment it still looks fresh.

Log Cabin (Artists Space): One trend of the 80's that is often missed is one good queer related art shows, and this young curator is fulfilling our hunger adequately.
A few very fun works (including a perky comparison of tv biographies between Doris Day and Rock Hudson), and the intrigue of adding that majestuous "Empire" long-run video by Paul Pfeiffer.

Cy Twombly: I have a HARD time with this work. Yet I understand this guy's drama: being at the conjecture of loving abstract yet being confronted by its enemies the minimalists. This show is an intertesting theoretical experience, but at this point you will feel like making your own work at home. Let say someone HAD to do this work and CLAIM these statements, and so Twombly did it, and that was it. The late abstract flowers charm a lot of people in the ar crowds.

Fillipo Lippi To Piero Della Francesca (Metropolitan): About 50 works spanning the Florence and D'Urbino art flourishment in the years surrounding 1450. Quite a short trip but really worth it, especially for the demonstration of early treatments of architecture and background details. The work is mostly religious but average technical skill is fabulous and you will be astonished how the colors and textures of the paint seem so fresh after so many years. Go, really.

T.J. Wilcox (Metro Pictures): You saw the major portion of these at the last Whitney Biennial, but here slated each one with their own projectors, the works are much better served. They are loops ("garlands") of short silent films covering similar topics from one project to the other, poetic documentaries and micro-manifestos. Using both found footage and personal shots of objects or animals, these films present short and seemingly banal fables that flirts with philosophical or political essay. Charming.

Surrealists USA (National Academy School): Just a survey, presenting mostly paintings, and covering the influence of the surrealist movement unto american art,
specifically past the great world wars. Sort of a you-name-it collection, with all the big names present, including some of the originals that moved to USA (Dali, Breton, etc..), and that at the least provide with great education if you get tired of watching all these pictures of dreams gone wrong.

Felix Gonzales-Torres + Joseph Kosuth (Andrea Rosen): Actually, the square floor of liquorice candies from Gonzales-Torres was really lazy for a continuation on his past work, but Kosuth saved the show by his comparative study of literature quotes, journal news articles, and comic strips. A great experience with synthesis.

Wolfgang Volz (Chelsea Museum): don't miss this opportunity to see some other Christo projects magnificently photographed by their personal assistant. The extra landscape works are sometimes lavish, especially the nice shots of russian country.

Logical Conclusion (Pace Wildenstein): 40 Years Of Rule Based Art: a museum worth trip around minimalism and conceptual art, both presenting art from the roots of these movements, and art that was influenced by them. Quite a varied show, presenting mostly works from the usual gallery roaster. They built a few extra walls so expect a packed show, featuring works from Judd, Lewitt, Nauman, Darboven, Holzer, Koons, up to odd additions like Andrea Zittel or.

The Excellent/Fantastic shows (Category of A):

Dali (Museum Of Philadelphia): believe it or not, I underestimated the influence of this artist. I didn't know that pop art and even minimalists are probably coming directly from the guy. Here is a true master, and a must-see show on your year-list, even if you think like me that it is going to be so predictable and annoying that his name gets on everyone's lips again for a while.

Cory Arcangel (Deitch): The new art is punning at the core of digital. This is your top cool-du-moment show, and it will entirely rock your fun. Why this obsession with Mario, specifically? The show doesn't make much more sense than a moustache, but who needs a moustache to make sense anyway, when it's already so entertaining.

Elena Dorfman (Edwynn Houk): Quite emotionally strange photograhs of people living with plastic dolls. Don't expect to simply laugh, it goes much psychologically deeper than that. An artist I'm discovering, but this project is really fascinating and I can't wait to buy the accompanying (french) book, coming out shortly.

Tim Hawkinson (Whitney): One of the top best show in New York presently, featurings many corky, geeky, obsessive artworks, including sculptures made of toenails or hair, or involving insane mechanisms replicating the artist's signature or creating a beatbox out of water drips falling on buckets. I have not even mentioned all the personal body topographics yet, but I'm sure you're already running to see this as I speak.

Norma Jeane (Swiss Institute): You can't be indifferent to a motorcycle rumming at you as closer you approach it, or to a sofa that emanates sexual pheromones. A quick but perfect little (but noisy) show in Soho, entirely worth the detour.

Kim Keever (Feigen Contemporary): the lost romantic lanscapes are re-found at the bottom of dirty old aquariums. Simply amazing.

Christo (Central Park): You've heard enough, right? Yes it's this breezy crazy thing in Central Park that formulates an orange corridor under great winds. If there was ever a work that communicated an impression of abundance, when most art concentrates specifically on the rare and unique, that was it.

Sarah Lucas (Barbara Gladstone): So disappointingly simple, but an impressive re-take on the premiss of arte Povera to reflect on issues of gender tensions, more specifically on the woman body and its constant objectification. Is this feminist art? I don't know. I think of it as sort of a pornography of the banal.

Eugene Meatyard (International Centre Of Photography): Weird photos made in the attic with your kids never looked so artistic. A fine retrospective of his "constructed" world (specifically, his "romance" serie), but a couple other ackward shows as a bonus (the collection of prostitutes photos from a certain Mr. Bellocq, and a quasi embarassing show about racism featuring mostly white artists).

Rudolf Stingel (Paula Cooper): A show more important than being discussed, and that will pass unspoken for. The artist transformed the gallery into a supreme white cube, adding a gigantic painting of the gallerist (replicated from a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph). The gallery gets dirtier as visitors pass by. I think you should go and decide for yourself what statement or issue you think the work is pinpointing.

Sarah Anne Johnson (Julie Saul): a wall patch of photographs depicting canadian forest campers and workers, intermixed with images of the same subjects made with wood dolls, in pittoresque micro-sceneries. Quite an interesting approach to sculpture. Or photography. A great discovery.

Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba (Lehmann-Maupin): Performance art made under the sea and presented on videos in a clubby danceable format. One of these piece featured some sort of common respiratory geometric structure that some kids were holding. I thought that was neat.

Ok...that will be enough for today.

The show I missed the most was a Leigh Bowery survey, but I had to cancel
a few video shows (Bowery included a few films), because after the Steve McQueen experience at Marian Goodman, I realized they take a long time to visit and are not necessarely the best art.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

In New York

2005-02-20T23:33:00.000-05:00

Well...

I'm here in New York.

Saw Christo, saw Hawkinson, saw Arcangel, saw McQueen, saw Quinn, saw Dali....oops....Dali?..yes, went to Philadelphia too.

Let me tell you that I'm already OVERWHELMED!

I must have seen 30 shows in 3 days dammit: Can someone cure me?

Best gallerist is Andrea Rosen.
She's often there when I'm at her gallery.
She seems to be a cool, very approachable person.
I was too shy to go and say "hey Andrea..pick me...I'll
rock your space"...but I'll grant you that her gallery is
a little more risky than average, which means that I think she's
one of those Chelsea gallerists who have some potential of being
"really" aware of where it's at, concerning art trends or choices.

My biggest reproach to Chelsea is that gallerists ar focussing on "objects"
(sculptures and paintings), when it's really not that necessary anymore.

Not if they sell their this art to museums (like they should). Museums are ready
for "art" and are just waiting for gallerists to be ready in their turn and surprise them a little (Andrea does by inviting Felix Gonzales-Torres for a serie of special projects).

I also saw Deitch, the Man. Sounds very relaxed too.
Soho continues to be hot in great part because of him.

I'll come back on some shows later after my return...

Elena Dorfman is a must, so is Hawkinson, Kim Keever, and a weird trio Magritte + Robert Williams + David Lachapelle at Tony Shafrazi.

Christo: I'm going again..it's crazy.

Being here in person made me realize how much of a pilgrimage this whole thing
ressembles. My first impression is that there was a gigantic religious procession being set up, but that I didn't what it was for, and what symbols are signified by the use of a brillant orange ("ambre", if you will).

The base seemed to be made of some sort of hard plastic. You can knock on them and hear the nice sound created by the void (I don't know why I just said that, but I always felt the urge of tapping unto them: read into this whatever you want). The drapes are so thick thy could serve for blankets to the numerous homeless citizens of NYC. Now that's one good idea for recyclage.

The sizes change depending if you are on a small or large path. I never noticed that from the photos.

Basically..it s really a crazy project, but to know it you really gotta cross the park for a minimum of 3 hours walk.

Whatever ..I'm tired...
this text is full of mistakes, cheap words and bad spell,

I'll be back,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Furnished: Marianne Corless "Further" at La Centrale.

2005-02-16T15:48:00.000-05:00

"Our land is everything to us... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it - with their lives."
John Wooden Legs, Cheyenne

Ok,

you got until Sunday the 20th to visit yet another of the best Montreal exhibits
since 2005.

Remember how I said recently that BGL stole Marianne Corless's show
at Mercer Union (Toronto)?

Well, the girl took her revenge.

The Centrale gallery show is a total art experience, including tactile environment. A must-see.

I thought colonization was a tired and cliché topic of canadian art, but trust me this doesn't detain at all on Corless's work.

Maybe because she went just that extra limit where other artists wouldn't go,
working with materials that would give an heart attack to Brigitte Bardot.

If you're too sensitive, please evitate this show, but you're missing on a lot
of skiils.

Maybe I'll come back to it, but otherwise it's pretty self-explicative.

Just remember that europeans transmitted variola to native americans, through the trade of contaminated tissues, and that part will help you understand the rest, including how far (indeed, how "further") she links back the responsibility, in the meantime reversing back the process of colonization.

Can culture be contaminative ?

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Marianne Corless "Further"
January 14 to February 20 2005
La Centrale
4296 Saint-Laurent Boulevard
Wednesday: noon - 18h
Thursday, Friday: noon - 21h
Saturday, Sunday: noon - 17h

Mini Mani Mo: "3 X 3: Flavin / Andre / Judd" at Leonard And Bina Ellen Gallery.

2005-02-16T06:41:00.000-05:00

"non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem"
William Of Ockham

I'd love this blog to be minimal.

Yesterday I went to see the exhibit "3 X 3: Dan Flavin, Carl André, Donald Judd" at gallery Leonard And Bina Ellen at Concordia University (Montreal).

A selection of 3 works by 3 landmark minimalist artists, all works presented were from the permanent collection of the National Gallery Of Canada in Ottawa.

It was short, nostalgic, but I enjoyed it.

Slick, design-oriented, thoughtprovoking.

Thanks,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

......I can't really leave you this way, can I ?

Is there any such thing as bad minimalist art ?

Tough answer, maybe that is why they are still so many artists
doing it nowadays.

Yet to some, all minimalist art is bad: merely an invention of pedantic snobs laughing at the face of good-intentioned people.

There was a pretty heavy critic of the Bina Ellen show at the Voir journal by general onlookers, so much that I felt an urgency to reply over there, and explain why it is that minimal artists are so important (regardless of personal taste).

To be honest,I don't think that minimal art pieces by themselves are always that fascinating. I believe that what is truly fascinating in minimal art are artists' approaches on the subject, how they were able to focus on very specific points and respect them for a lifetime.

It is true that many of these specific issues are theoretical explorations that could hardly be repeated today (once something is said, it's said), unless in contexts of recyclage by the design industry, a field on which indeed minimalists probably had the greatest influence.

I'm thinking of this obsessive layering down of the basic "mathematics" of art, which was really the most evident here in the works of Dan Flavin and Carl Andre (to keep with the artists selected for this minimal survey).

As I mentioned elsewhere, and as you may all know, minimalists emerged at the convergence of two problematics:

1) Theoretically, aesthetic had been called obsolete (you like blue and I like
yellow, they are no critically pertinent common grounds on this aspect).

2) The industrial world was rapidly dephazing art on the level of material exploration and visual effect.

Therefore, deconstructing aesthetic in its most simple forms, and attempting to reach back the design world by erasing the human touch through the use of industrially fabricated material, became the main concerns of minimalists. Minimalists worked beyond representation, as they were aware that our world was already overwhelmed by it. Through their art they elaborated a thorough critic of the visual, turning back art unto itself, negociating its pertinence. Finding ways to create an art that would be logic, and essentially demonstrating visual parameters of perception, which we experience in everyday life.

In a sense, minimalist art was aiming at becoming "functionalist" art.A sort of strict, supra classical form of art that had an aesthetic purpose: expliciting the materialistic laws of art, not in the sense that it was all that theoretical, but more in the sense that it extended theory into an art that indulged into formulaic researches.

And the best way to experience these "formulations" is when you're able to see many works from one of these minimalists put together. "3 X 3" only permitted 3 works per artist, so I'm tempted to criticize the show from the educational standpoint of what could be learned about each artist from such a limitative context.

Let's see....

Dan Flavin:

Main Interest: Immateriality (How can one make a painting or sculpture out of pure light?).

One work was missing from the Montreal version of this travelling exhibit (Icon IV (the pure land) (to David John Flavin [1933-1962]), 1962-1969). It was required by the National Gallery of Washington for their recent Retrospective of this artist (which, by the way, will feature in my eventual top of the year 2004, something I expect to write somewhere in early march). What we were left with was the famous "Monument 4 For Those Who Have Been Killed In Ambush (To P.K. Who Reminded Me About Death),1966", a fine work but one that was already seen in Montreal during the "Global Village: The 60s" exhibition at Montreal's MFA in late 2003. It's one of those intermittent works of Flavin that attended to other preoccupations than plastic. It is not merely a canvase of light: you are invited to read into the cross format, something menacing that projects towards you. To me it looks like a canon or a hanging pole. The red obviously refers to violence and blood, and it would be ridicule to refute that reading, however literal it might be.

Some could argue that this work is not representative of standard Flavin interests, but it does serve him well as it proposes the audience how much can be said by the assemblage of a few neon lights. By itself, the work is reflective of Flavin's carreer.

The other work, titled "The Nominal Three (To William Of Ockham) (1963 )" couldn't be more representative of either Flavin's art or the aim of minimalist art in general. I have no intention to resume to you here the philosophy behind the "Ockham Razor" theory that it refers to, but let just say that the work itself is simply a demonstration of logical reasoning. It is the minimal format of a series. If you take one white neon, and install two more at a certain distance, it can still mean anything. You can read it in any direction. But if you add another chunk of three neons, at an extra distance, you get a serie, since from logic you can presume that the following set will include 4 neons, and then 5 neons, etc... The problem with minimalist art is that it deals so much with first-sight materiality that people tend to forget that these works sometimes hide such tricks behind their superficial outlook. What I just described sounds obvious to any real art amateur, but a great quantity of spectators don't expect art this demonstrative of its reason to be. Minimalism is a religious art that is fascinated by pure thought and the reductionism of all possibilities.

In all its godly white hermetism, this work just described reminded me that the major aspect lacking from Flavin's art in this exhibition was a work demonstratring his use of multicolored neon lights, and how he used to shape them as being the plastician of light that he was.

Carl André:

Main Interest: the expressive power of objects (what are the different configurations an object can take, between unit and its multiplication?).

carl André is the artist best represented by this exhibit. Not only his assemblage in series of a similar object, sometimes done by hand, is magnificently examplified by his work Lever (a series of 137 white bricks aligned on the floor in a precise row), but with the two copper works we are being demonstrated how André loved to reconfigure a same unit in all sorts of spatial possibilities (and sometimes shifting materials to explore even further visual possibilities). Here we are shown "144 Copper Square (1969)", a floor of 12 x 12 copper thin squares that visitors are invited to walk on, and in a room nearby, "Pile" (1977) , a serious amount of the similar copper squares who are piled up to form a perfect column against the corner. These sculptures look mathematically rigid, yet they are fragile since no units were ever glued or screwed together.

Carl Andre is an artist who is often disliked by the general public for being so radically blunt with his art. That is pretty understandable. In the last two works just mentioned, he is layering down possible mathematical extensions made of thin square in perfect contact with each other: horizontal and vertical. They are a few other possibilities (that he certainly exploited), but his work usually rapidly reach a cul de sac, and so he is forced to shift units. To circumscribe this problem, he also shifts materials as a mean to explore textures and reflection, therefore they are a few versions of the 144 squares floor listed above made with different metals. Now how much can you manage to enjoy x versions of a work that was already boring at first glance? Andre is obviously the least entertaining of the minimalists, but he's also probably the most true at heart with the original philosophy of the movement.

We may be missing a wood sculpture of Andre here, which would have added another layer: the transformation of organic material into fabricated order, and the tensions inherent in these oppositions.

Donald Judd:

Main interest: Identity Of The Object (how can two similar objects also be different?).

Donald Judd is a fantastic artist, perhaps the best of the minimalist. His works seems to scrutinize the materials and shapes of industrial design, synthesizing them into pure forms of art. They seem to emerge, or extend, from architecture, but with such character that soon recall of their autonomy.

The best way to comprehend the power of Judd's work, is to be able to see whole series of physically similar works, and be able to ponder at what differentiate them from one to another, as unique sculptures of art.

The problem with the selection here is that the three pieces, otherwise magnificent, are from very different series, so there is no way that one can "Judd"-ge (pardon the pun) the main focus that the artist conveyed throughout his career.

What is left is the slick look of industrial design, and shapes that almost seem practical, when it's all tricks for the art and meant to be not much more than pleasing to the eye.

Because with Judd comes a real pleasure in shaping things, and how objects (and their colors) cuts out from the space. It's a deliberate audacity at exploring the new materials and shape of the new technological world, and having fun at creating unecessary artefacts recycling the shapes and forms of an essentialist and neccessary approach to design. Judd is the ancestor of techno.

The "Untitled (1963)" wall piece is a pretty large example of a very known series of similar works, this time a copy all made of gavanized iron, with no use of color plexiglass. A sculpture that functions like a zigzag between plain and empty space, as well as rendering the full monolithic graciosity of pure architectural shapes, this sculptures moves even further with theory, in acknowledging that as a whole it is actually formed of a series of similar fragments. But are these fragments really exactly the same? No, they are never, because through the process of perception, you can never see two of them exactly from the same perspective. Dumbfounded yet ? But the best part is that it just look damn sexy.

The two other works "Untitled (1963-1975)" and "Untitled (1964)", also look like portions of architectures or furnitures, recycling the shapes and materials of industrial design into pure abstraction. The latter specifically take the shape of a metallic shelve, or some sort of futuristic post-deco heater, but with a closer look it resolves to be nothing but object-play, physical-play. a "painting of spatial experience" as he would probably prefer that I described. This is the type of works that called out for a future in artmaking, at a time when everybody was pronouncing the death of art, and we only started recently to grasp all the possibilities these artists announced.

The exhibits also presented one or two preparatory or post-facto drawings related
to the exhibit sculptures from each artists, such as a perspective study of Untitled
by Judd, another drawing of a neon work by Flavin, or this poem "Leverwords" by Carl André, which aligns series of 4-letter words as though they were objects deprived of meaning:

Leverwords
(8 February 1966)

beam
clay beam
edge clay beam
grid edge clay beam
bond grid edge clay beam
path bond grid edge clay beam

reef
slab reef
wall slab reef
bead wall slab reef
cell bead wall slab reef
rock cell bead wall slab reef

root
heel root
line heel root
rate line heel root
dike rate line heel root
sill dike rate line heel root

room
time room
hill time room
inch hill time room
rack inch hill time room
mass rack inch hill time room

carl Andre
8 february 1966

In another corner of the room were archives, including books, photos, and even personal letters. I felt stressed to read anything because at this point you are 1 meter away from the counter girl who watch you, probably wondering if you enjoy the show or not, as she must be used to be face so many different reactions.

Overall I consider this exhibition a necessary stop.

Minimalist art might be a dead trend, but not the relation between art and design that it launched.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

"3 X 3: Flavin - Andre - Judd"
January 14 – February 19, 2005
Leonard And Bina Ellen Gallery
1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 12 pm - 6 pm

Show Me Your Fish And I'll Show You..: James Prior "Fishing With John James" at Skol Gallery

2005-02-15T06:58:00.000-05:00

"Little fish. big fish. Swimming in the water."

PJ Harvey

Last week I saw a show by an artist I had never heard from (I think) named James Prior at Skol Gallery (Montreal), and which was called "Fishing With John James".

It looked like a series of different pieces but apparently,
the artist meant the whole to be an installation, and so
didn't title anything.

Here in details are the seven "stations" that were included:

- One large portrait of an old fisherman sitting in a landscape.

- Another large, quite pittoresque, photograph of same man walking along a woody coast.

- A third large photograph of the inside of a fisherman's camp.

- A full wall patch of at least 60 photographs of different sizes and resolution, showing fishermen holding their fish captures, with related images (the more you watch this, the more you realize the photographs often represent the same people).

- A large collector's glass cabinet showing items pertaining to fishing activity, from a boat motor to a small canoe oar, to fishing lines to a plethora of fish hooks of all sizes and origins.

- A video installation of 6 or 7 "besided" monitors showing loops of boat motors eitheir in full stop or motion.

What to make out of all this?

Here are key terms: Male | Fish | Identity | Stereotype | April's Fool

The images of a dozen men showing their fishes should already speak for themselves. There is something homoerotic about this work, though I'm not certain this was the artist's intention. But what was the most interesting function of this exhibit, is the way it fabricated narratives from the adjointment of personal photographic archives from a real hardcast fisherman (named George Riddell), with a few "artificial ones", specifically shot for this show.

Throughout this assemblage we are welcomed to create in our mind the ideal
identity of a non-existing character, John James: the ultimate, the absolute,
Mr. Fisherman.

Most, if not all, of the photographs are pictures of our original fisherman and his friends, transformed here into archetypes of identity. Archetypes not only of men, but also of photography, since all these photos represent different periods of recent history.

How did these "real men" managed to stay so exact to themselves throughout all these years ?

What is this portrait on manhood that Prior is proposing us, and how do we respond to
it, especially now that fishes are momentarely magnified , thanks to art, as extentions of masculine identity?

By insisting on this male bonding activity of photographing fish captures as being a common expression of masculine pride, Prior seems to aim at unleashing the hidden mechanisms at the bottom rock formation of male chauvinism. The question is open-ended as far as what fishes may represent symbolically, either as objects connotative to sexuality or linking back to an idiom of self-foolishness.

You are free to decide in the end: men are either predators or prey, of themselves...

Please invite your dad or uncle to this
show (if it settles iself somewhere else). It was really meant for them. I dare say that this exhibit hits so good that it will never make you see the activity of fishing the same way again.

The hooks in the cabinet, sort of installed in the shape of an ancient natural history curio, all looked like over-used tools representing as many failed attempts at capturing gender identity: let it all hang out sort-of drill. Or was it that it represented how the false images that replaced it are so firmly pierced in?

The outboard motors on the video monitors seem to be fueling on testosterone, fighting for some pride concourse: which can rumble the best or the longest. To me they looked like video-fountains, and I surprised myself to find their arched panoramic view quite relaxing.

There is nothing to say against this exhibit, apart from
the fact that I feel I'm gonna have to wait that museums
buy some of the works to get their titles right.

The only minus to the A tag that Chris Zeke himself gave to this show, is that it's not exactly the first time that the theme of fishing and male identity is brought up together.

I can think of various loose examples, but one worthy of mentioning is the maritime artist whom I'm so forgetting his name right now, and have no idea what is up to these days, but used to play out themes of gay identity with many campy works using mediums and images related to fishing culture. He had a show at B-312 in the late 90's. It will come back to me soon (this part is pending to be edited).

But Prior's work is first and foremost a terrific essay on the photographic territory
of identity.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

James Prior
"Fishing With John James"
14 January - 12 February 2005
Skol Gallery
372, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest
espace 314

Tango With Christo

2005-02-12T22:11:00.000-05:00

Today is the birth of the most recent project by Christo and longtime companion, Jeanne-Claude, in Central Park, New York.

You've heard about it.

It's called The Gates.

You got 15 days left to attend.

Be there or be squared (I'm going soon).

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: Here is a cool slide show curtesy of New York Times, in case you are going to miss it from this very cool page of articles.

Indoor Marathon

2005-02-11T20:31:00.000-05:00

Please visit Skol Gallery and say hi
to Jean-Jules Soucy, the artist responsible for the Saguenay "Baie Des Ha-Has" pyramid and many other extravaganzas, while he is working out his indoor marathon, travelling on a still bicycle all the kilometers needed to cross Canada from his native "Baie Des Ha-Has", a place where he complains none of the big art stars ever visit, to the edge of BC, and then perhaps even across the world.

He would explain it to you better than me.

He's a very sweet guy, don't be shy to talk to him.

Once the necessary kilometers are done, he's moving to a next stop.

I know he'll be in Toronto soon but I don't know exactly where.
Please ask and provide the info here.

In the meantime, you got until tomorrow to visit
the joyful exhibit by James Prior at the same place, a fantastic play
on photo-documentation, and male stereotypes, that I firmly
advise you to see (I'll try to come back on it).

There's also the Frederic Lavoie exhibit at B-312 which is not
bad at all (also ending tomorrow). Stay a while before judging.
Valérie Blass got also a nifty video piece, stealing from the focus
of her own show.

I've seen a few exhibits recently (Oboro, Circa, Dazibao, Vox, Bina Ellen,
that Egyptian show, etc..). I got about 3 articles that I need polish before
posting, but I'm always so busy.

Let's just say for now that I think the most important Montreal
exhibit these days is the minimalist show, ending in about a week at Leonard
And Bina Ellen.

Between Egypt and Kentridge, please try a visit. It's really short,
but the best you'll have until someone over here thinks of providing
a decent retrospective.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Blog World

2005-02-07T01:20:00.000-05:00

There's got to be at least one post a week from
me on this thing.

What have I done this past week?

Done art, worked, saw a couple shows,
and answered many other blogs
(including some other Simpleposies)

Here is a quote from an artist I always admired, named Tom Ellard
(of early electronic band Severed Heads, who's been working with film score
lately, and still in 2005 creating the videos accompanying his own music:
all info on his website: )

You can't have dialog with a blog. One person is 'on stage' and the rest are 'the audience'. Even with links and responses, blogs enforce a unequal conversation between the person doing the asserting - the performer, and the rest. They can only set up their own stages and thus blogs multiply as people errect their own stages. Eventually when all these people have stages they may as well have set up a mailing list.

We all spent a long time trying to break down the stage, but the 'kids' are
busy building it up again. Let them, they will spend their lives trying to
be celebrities and maybe their children will despise them and reinvent the
notion of community.

Tom Ellard

(the quote is from the mailing list from his site, a forum of discussion
on mostly, electronic music and computer geer)

Of course I replied to him, saying
that blog can be purposeful depending
on how much it is focussed, and certainly
an interesting medium for artistic explorations.

Blogs are autistic and suit me very well:
they provide with self-channelling and
exactitude in the task of archiving.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Colour By Numbers

2005-01-29T19:05:00.000-05:00

I've been replying to the last few questions on painting
on Jennifer McMackon's Simpleposie site (a fave site of mine where a different question on the topic of art (or life in general) is asked each day: do feel welcomed to reply).

This series of questions took inspiration from an interesting text on the subject
of the future of painting found on Timothy Corneau's blog "Good Reads", a text that I will oblige myself responding to later (on "his site", as I'm not keen on creating a blog out of responding to other people's blogs), after I'm able to swallow his bad taste in painting.

(..;-P.... If you read the story on his site you'll understand how this comment could be interpreted as traumatically castrative!).

Coming back on artTwit, I'm gonna have to juggle a schedule between the (not that) vast amount of exhibits I see and the ones I will endeavour time to write articles about.

It would be helpful if I could acquire myself a portable.

The thing is, I do not wish to write gallery ads: a few paragraphs to entice
people for a visit. That is not my point, they are already too many people more skilled than me who can do that for you.

I'm here to rip you friendly neighbourghood art show in its parts.
I'm your next artworld's boogeyman.

I write to steal art ideas from people.

I'm a self-imposed art inquisitador.

I write as a mean to reply to artists
that never asked my opinion.

bla bla..

But definitely, returning to the painting subject, I must be having a problem if I had more fun at the BGL show in Toronto than at the closing night of Modigliani at Ago.

The only thing I will say about the Modigliani show is that the best works looked like casual "goth": bloody backgrounds, cathedral faces, and, well, you tell me if Marilyn Manson didn't
steal his look from her:

look at the eyes closely:

(....dammit...bring me a high resolution version of that image NOW!)

At any rates, a fine show about a bound-to-tragedy fellow who seemed to enjoy the company of people (especially women).

(Or Elohims.)

This said I'm gonna have to read reviews about it to find out how you can speak for hours about it. It's pretty blunt. The best insight was to learn he was in fact a neighbor to Constantin Brancusi. Donald Kuspit at Artnet speaks of a humanist reply to Picasso. But I wonder if it wasn't rather a humanist tendency at exploring a similar essentialism as Brancusi.

In the crowd I heard people arguing Modi had an eye disease and so it would explain his interest in longitude and empty orbits. Wasn't it Gauguin?
I couldn't find info about this.

The show's big conclusion was that tragedy doesn't warrant against sweetness.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

PS: can't wait to see the film

(the picture is "Young Woman Of The People" (1918))

The Best Of 2005

2005-01-27T04:50:00.000-05:00

Well I haven't yet compiled my best of 2004 that there is already an exhibit that is
a SERIOUS contender for the list of best exhibits in 2005.

Yo ! People ! Don't miss the BGL show at Mercer Union !

It's called "Besoin De croire/Need To Believe" and there ain't nothing more I'm
able to say about it at the moment because it functions as a pun and I don't
want to spoil your fun.

Maybe I'll wait after the exhibit is over to write my thoughts about it,
but let's just say for now that it ends February 19,
and the adress is 37 Lisgar Street (that micro-Chelsea of Toronto, strictly speaking of outlook).

I repeat: best of 2005. Ok?

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 7 (Final): Eve K. Tremblay + Michel De Broin "Honeymoons".

2005-01-22T10:46:00.000-05:00

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

~ Voltaire

Remember that serie of late reviews from December that I've never finished?
Here is the last one, from the lost and found department of my drive, but it's not yet fully edited (I will re-arrange the layout later).

PASTE:

It's always a pleasure for me to visit a new Michel De Broin exhibit. He's one of the best artists in Quebec of recent years (with a couple others, Nicolas Baier, David Altmejd, Julie André T, Massimo Guerrera, I'd have to think about this, actually).

He's certainly "THE star" of the Pierre-François Ouellette roaster, in my opinion (Luc Courchesne has done excellent installations in the past but he's been turning around in circles lately, literally).

You can always expect deadpan humor with De Broin's work, the sort of cynical wit that he hides elegantly beneath his deadly serious pose, if you
ever get a chance to meet him.

The new exhibit is no exception, though it's radically different from previous exhibits by De Broin, certainly because of Eve K. Tremblay, who becomes his partner (let's assume they are lovers in "real life", unlike with the popular television serie "Un Gars, Une Fille" by Guy A. Lepage, of which this exhibit constitutes sort of a surreal version) for this precise installation. Eve K. here is the one that comes from photography. Michel is much more of a sculptor. As they both deal with performance in their works, they developed this new corpus from this common ground.

And guess what? They've made their way up to a Parachute cover with it! Go figure? I never understood that front picture and how it could've been a Michel De Broin's artwork until I got all the context right.

"Honeymoon" is a contemporary allegory on, you've guessed it, love relationships. It dwells on various issues related to coupling, like the ritualization of marriage,
the mythology of archaic couples (think Adam and Eve or Tristan and Yseult, without of course ever referencing any of this directly. The basic concept is one couple's appropriation of their surroundings. How does one make ("mate") one with another and thus "One" with their environment.

The installation functions like the photographic diary of a couple's travel that went wrong. The "honeymoon" in question becomes the plot motive to linger in all sorts of situations and adventures. I insist on the loosely used term "installation", because some of the pictures wouldn't make sense if they were extracted from the corpus, or not associated with the nearby images. In this sense I was a bit confused by the way some of the pictures following typical narratives were mixed out throughout the space, while other were aligned in series as though they consisted of sequences. This is the major (but only) flaw of the show to juxtapose two different reading propositions.

Here is the worst case(note that you can go and peruse the Pierre François-Ouellette site where I'm extracting my examples, and scrutinize even more pictures from the series).

The two photos on left seem to "reply" to each other ("Honeymoon VCP (Skip)" and "Honeymoon MTL5 (moon)"). They seem to pun at the archetypal positions of the male and female attractive poles in stereotypical heterosexual relationships by using the hidden formal metaphores in architecture. There is little extra connections to create in the visitor's mind than what is shown at first sight: people in a signified environment. Than we move to a few of the "forest" pictures (more on that later), intermixed with otherwise unrelated pictures, including one that should
have been with the "coast ensemble" (I'll come back to this in a minute, but let's just agree for now that on itself, this photo of a wharf doesn't make sense with the theme of the exhibit, unless you add a huge neon above it that
mentions "honeymoon"). Maybe I'm not poetic enough to have crossed these distances ? Maybe it really supposed to mean that Michel lights the bulb after Eve puts down the underwear ? I'm naive with sexual topics, but the
bottomline is that a path have been crossed between representation and typical codification. Now I'm asked to recline from narrativity and match an allegory of symbols, or rather, invent narrativity from a series of abstract relations (that underwear....this bulb...etc...). I'm sort of being reminded that this is a photographic show, and that I'm able to criss-cross my reading levels between what is shown in the pictures and what pictures as graphic object can do, and this is
the part that left me with a sentiment that is not-so-ironically best described by a Tarot card named "The Lover": glancing in between an aesthetic dilemna.

This hesitation is deriving from an option between deliberately indulging in the "dj-ing" of a series of loose but codified associations and interactions (think of a wharf as honeymoon, think of all these fragments as metaphorical to the experience of love), and the sentimental idea of creating little narrative "niches" within the installation. Consider, for example, that the two best series of the exhibit would have been gathered each in their own spot. I'm referring to the "deep forest" series and the "coast" series.

I like the idea of gathering all the forest photographs together: the ones dealing with parts of bodies appearing amongst the bushes or within trees (at this point I'm excluding the photos dealing with urban apparatus, like when Eve stand above the kid sign). Together they form the most intriguing series of the lot. They link back with a tradition of art dealing with Eden and the lost paradise (regained), as they symbolize an absolute union, not only sexual but fertile, dangerously harmonious, through the representation of a symbiotic contact of humans with an abundant nature, and here precisely upholding the Romantic gaze as a "diegetic world"*, without having to recall to extraneous abstraction. Maybe it is better to keep with classical
edit when referencing classical themes ? As I said, it is all a question of options, but my main point is that it's a choice that as any need be decided.

Overall, I find these forestial photos really admireable: the ackward kamasutra pose ("Honeymoon AP1 (capture)") , the arm stretching out of nowhere in a deep forest landscape ("Honeymoon AP3 (game)"), the two animals climbing a tree ("Honeymoon AP5 (Ripe)"), etc... Together they are far worth the singular photo with the giant priapic doll ("Honeymoon CASRDQ (big B)"), that everyone seems to enjoy. The show could have focussed on these sylvid scenes: the essence of their proposal lies in them. Why has nature separated us in lonely parts and use desire to make us reach her back? Through their re-enactments of the act of love Michel and Eve seem to want to reveal all the absurdity behind their mutual attraction. This work is almost a self-critique, though done pretty humoristically, and is certainly warrant of a certain courage from our protagonists to face the limits between emotion and reason.

The other great chunk of the exhibit is the contrasting corpus of the coast series, which seems to deal with the insecurities and dark moments of relationships, when the line becomes thin again between being alone or with another. I choose the photo of Eve calling on an emergency phone ("Honeymoon SF5 (help)"), looking at the menacing scape of ice, as a standout: brilliant work, that would mean all sorts of things on its own without ever being deprived of its power to evoke anxiety. Totally surreal. How did they find this place ? A lucky mise-en-scene! It should have been a huge format like the one when she is with Michel and we don't know if she is supportive or dangerous to him ("Honeymoon SF8 (vertigo)", best described in an article by Udo Karl De Sauriac that I "translated" below). These artists have explored two sides of a medal. What more could you ask?

If you ask me, these two series are what this exhibit's at, the rest is all filler.
But if you ask them they will probably tell you that I'm wrong and that they are no
separated series, that all photos must be read as a whole. I'm more of a romantic type. I don't like it when bovine imagery intervene with my Potemkin , and I've been a strong discriminator of VJ culture.

Pursuing the route of this exhibit, in one corner, a selection of tiny canvases are arranged as though they form their own separate micro-exhibition. On them, tiny photographs are associated in a similar approach than through the rest of the exhibit. The images are even more drastically outbounding. Extraneous documentation on micro-bits of life during their travels. The general outlook made me think of Malevitch, and his craft of assembling micro-planes one next to the other. Maybe I was only trying to contextualize past De Broin interests. Or was it me being critical about their purpose? It looked like a different work altogether (perhaps it is), exaggerating to full excess the abstract associative aspect I was just criticizing. They look like the continuation of the giant picture of the priapic doll to which they are juxtaposed, a picture that otherwise would have seemed pretty cornered and alone, like coming from a different corpus.

Maybe this was a missed opportunity to create a clear division in the show between the older "narrative" series, and this new experiment with plasticity and abstraction: coming to this stages where objects (and their associations) start to speak on their own. When photos are becoming as tiny they are here (and depicting radically banal travel fragments compared with the mise-en-scene of the coast and forest series), it becomes evident that a pure plastic reading is being informed: these are constellations of chance meanings, as the work is reclining further away from classical narrative to approach form itself as a language.

Bonus:

As a bonus I'm offering the debased artTwit translation of the TEXT written by Udo Karl De Sauriac and Eduardo Ralickas (2004), which accompanies the little catalogue of "Honeymoons" (which can be bought directly from gallery Pierre-François Ouelette).

Note that I'm respecting the original outline.

"I sense that love is illusive and that in reality we just live for ourselves"

(cheap translation of Jacques Lacan)

Conceptual Love.

(ok..here we go..)

Fuck Barthes and all other theorists attempting to create an intellectual discourse about love when actually they only end up falling in love with their own rationales rather than reaching anything about "love' itself. I'm taking these "Honeymoons" pictures for what they are: material representations of love that only but flirts with the conceptual.

In "Honeymoons", love becomes the ideal subject for all sorts of formal and symbolic experiments, but it's not treated stupidly or without critique.

It's important to know that these two artists, here interestingly contrasting two different artistic approaches, form a couple in real life. These photos are the staging of an union that like all unions always seem to slip away. Narratively they function through a process of "repetition and development" that is very effective (Cedric's note: like in a good old classical film).

These photos basically show the failed attempts at a couple of reaching one another as they are desparately attempting to "fit" their love with the empty spaces that are unwelcoming or indifferent to them. A good example is "Honeymoon SF8 (Vertigo)", by the way a rare photo showing the two artists together, which seems to re-stage two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich on the theme of solipsism (lonelyness) and loss: "Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog" (1818) and "The Sea Of Ice" (1823-25). The "Honeymoons" photos seem to stage the constant renewal of such themes, as to substantiate for the impossibility of an absolute unsubjective conjugal union.

Isn't it remarkable all those mating scenes in wild natural landscapes?

Schopenhauer, great defender of wilderness sex, would have loved. The artists here look like mammals beasts trying to make one with another with nature. But when they seem to succeed, it is always only on surface, like in this photo ("Honeymoon AP2 (Beast)") where the hand of one and the head of another seem to form one creature through the help of a rock that hides the truth. There is no real union but on the surface, therefore photography is used to convey that desire can only be superficially gratified and that the gap with otherness will always remain. The two artists, like primitive men, are here attempting to develop a language and communicate with each others by referencing or singling out motifs from each other's artistic background, what result in the exploration of symbolic fantasies.

These "signs" are what they are: by constituting the main elements of representation, they both help to render visible a dialogue about love (that we can decipher through interpretation) as they resist communicating anything really tangible. (Cedric's note: they are both passage ways and blockades).

Forget Plato and his fable on the origins of love: there is no plenitude in subjectivity. This work is all about limitation, and the best about it is that it shows how these limits function, by ways of demonstrating two artists personificating their attempt at joining their artistic identities together, and how it translates visually.

My comment on this text:

These artists took a path of joining their pratices to comment on an ideal of love. The results, judging from this point of view, seem to not stand afar from irony and cynicism. I am not sure if it was all meant to be this dark. I perceived much more of a balance between a celebration of this ideal and a warrant of its downsize, covering all aspects of one condition of "love" but yet re-affirming a life choice (they agreed to endeavour this love) that is all but voluntary: these artists don't simply comment on the subject of love but expose their own intimity in the process. This said, to follow the link of thoughts engendered by this text, maybe this "ideal of love" is better reached into an abandonment to the other? Maybe the trick in love is to leave each others be the "material" and subject portray of one work by the "other". Maybe love is really about Michel portraying Eve and Eve portraying Michel but not about any interaction that happens in between. I raise myself a question: is it a better proof of love to let yourself abused, erasing yourself into the work of another, instead of delimitating your territory? Is total surrender the supreme resolution in love? Ain't love, just like art, a form of madness that we control the best we can?

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

This Blog Is Not Dead, But...

2005-01-22T04:21:00.000-05:00

After the sickness came the computer kaput.

A good portion of this week was spent re-installing computer components that had been recently installed but ended crushing my power supply box.

Luckily the hard drive survived.

But atop of that I've been working on some sort of silly little art project. More news about this in late February.

Where are we at now: Already January 21?
What a lazy month.

I've got a couple exhibit reviews to edit before pasting,
but then I'm off again for a few days.

Today at 2pm there is a talk that you probably haven't heard about:
Nicolas Mavrikakis (Montreal's version of a Jerry Saltz, critic from the journal Voir) will discuss along with artists Manon De Pauw, Clara Gutsche and, get this, Alain Paiement, about "his" current exhibition "Comment Devenir Artiste" (How To Become An Artist), which is an intriguing curatorial project, to say the least.

The talk happens at Musée Des Maîtres Et Artisans (615 Avenue Ste-Croix, Cegep St-Laurent, Du College metro station) at 2 o'clock pm (as I repeat).

You got until 5pm, Sunday the 23rd, to visit the two parts of this exhibit that occur
at Maison De Culture Plateau Mt-Royal (465 Avenue Mt-Royal Est, Mt-Rotal metro)
and the MMAQ cited above.

Be prepared: it is overwhelming. You'll need 45 minutes just to watch 2 videos
(including the excellent artists interviews: Mathieu Beauséjour, Nicolas Baier, Marie-Claude Bouthiller, Yan Giguère, adding to the ones listed above).

By adding a portion of the exhibit ar MMAQ, Mavrikakis seems to suggest that he isn't unaware that his exhibit doesn't answer his questions on every levels.

None of the artists in the exhibition insisted that one needs to know or master his craft before attempting creating art.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Sick start of the year

2005-01-09T02:34:00.000-05:00

Hello there, how do you do ?

I'm surviving!

I got this "cold" this week that rapidly turned into a gastro.

A gastro so bad, that someone attempting to help me got
sick within 40 minutes of attending me (!!).

I've heard stories in the past of Montreal hospitals
closing down for a week because of such epidemias.

I'm slowly recovering, thanks to heavy doses of medicine
and 3 days of sleep.

My thoughts are on south asia:
I hope we are sending all what they'll
need to recover similar diseases.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

The New Year

2005-01-03T08:24:00.000-05:00

Well, well, my dear friends,

I'm just here to wish you a very sexy New Year!!

I'll be a few days off as I'm changing computers
(and running in Ottawa to see a couple stuff).

I unfortunately witnessed a couple very bad accidents
as I was getting back from Boston so please people: drive carefully.
I should even venture in suggesting to try "not" drive at all. Stay home.
It's really that bad.

In Boston I saw one of the best exhibit of 2004 ("Art Deco"),
and one of the biggest disappointment (the Artforum-recommanded Wyn Evans
retrospective). I'll try write comments soon about those (and maybe some
other shows).

All I'm going to say for now is that you've got until the 9th
of January to attend the Boston MFA for Art Deco,
worth a visit for its concision and every bits they
could fit into this small 5 rooms survey introduction of this
flamboyant design style and historical period.

If you're gasping for chic...

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

(no links yet in this message as my browser seems corrupted)

Late On Schedule

2004-12-29T17:36:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry about all the tragedies.
I haven't look at any news reports yet.

80 000 deaths (yet) makes it the worst
since Tangshen, China, in 1976 (above 300 000 deaths).

The worst ever (post-paleolithic) was Shansi, China,
with 830 000 deaths on the 23 January 1556.

The 50 foot wave taking you by surprise is no longer a myth.
They just discovered a whole train that was flooded, all filled
with people. Blasting.

Ok, I'm here to tell you that this blog is off for
a couple days.

The two last "late Montreal reviews"
are gonna be the duo Michel De Broin/Eve K Tremblay,
and the Ruhlmann exhibit.

If everything goes fine, I'll be visiting
"Art Deco" in Boston in the next couple days.
I might leave Ruhlmann off as this one contains
its share of pieces by Ruhlmann.

Alas, I won't have time for a gallery stroll
in Boston.

Mother Nature, please calm down,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 6: Mona Hatoum: "Mona Hatoum (René Blouin)".

2004-12-29T06:05:00.000-05:00

"If a new layer was revealed, it had to do, perhaps, with the spirit of the times: This group of objects seemed to be more about design than politics."

Frances Richard, ArtForum, Jan 2000

There used to be a time when Mona Hatoum produced important works for montreal galleries.

I've seen excellent shows of her at Oboro ("The Light At The End", 1989), Musée D'Art Contemporain, various times at René Blouin, and a couple other spots. I'm talking of the type of shows which you build an art carreer with.

These days, Hatoum sends to Montreal a collection of extra multiples that didn't sell from her previous shows. Not that these are all bad, but, really it's a missed rendez-vous as the René Blouin's space is indeed, "spatious", and full of potential. And let's face it: it's one of the obligatory stops in a gallery-filled building that attracts a large amount of art fanatics weekly. Montreal is a cool town filled with so many cool people, and they deserve so much more than half-baked art.

So yes, for what you can make of Hatoum being "an art star", the show at René Blouin consisted mostly of recent multiples, smaller works of the category people can afford around here (but if art can't be afforded in Montreal, where can it be, I ask? In less than 10 cities across the whole world? Something is wrong here). These works didn't provoke much in me. They're mostly cute appliances preserving meanings that sometimes are obvious, sometimes hard to decipher (it doesn't help that René never writes press releases: for a good part this attitude can be interesting, but some works here absolutely begged for an explanation).

Well, let me see what I'm able to receive...

Generally: images of microscosms, cytoplasms, cells, etc, created with the shapes of everyday objects like cut bottles, tea cups, and human hairs (a note that she doesn't use found objects, her work is technically sculptural).

The best work is the sculpture of the siamese cup ("T 4 2" (2002)), two cup that blends one into another like a cell caught in the process of duplication. Obviously, this work deals with notion of clonage. I'm sure the fact the artists lives in England adds a special political resonance to the use of a teacup. I'll grant that the piece was worth my visit (I even tought of buying a copy, but at 2500 grands a piece, when they are 100 copies, I thought it was a tad expensive).

The other central piece in this exhibit was the image of a cell fabricated with reproductions of halves of bottles (of what I presume is alcohol, but it could be medicinal bottles), of which ends were "rounded" in a manner that gives the impression that the bottles are emerging from invisible water (or actually sand, to be honest). Before you realized the fragments are pieces of bottles, it looks like an old floor sculpture by Richard Long. Hatoum seems to appropriate the popular "sos in a bottle" idiom. I'm stipulating a sense here from its title, "Drowning Sorrows" (2002), which suggests a psychological interpretation. Though these aren't baudelairian jars, these are liquor bottles. Alcoholism seems to serve a rather blunt objectification of despair. But the shape of a cell also lean me to infer issues of artificial biology, or the sickening of the human dna. Or was it simply some drunk cell ?

Next, the two drawings made with human hairs again formulate micro-biological aesthetics. How many dna researches in the world are executed through the use of hairs? How much do hair can tell about the identity of an individual ? With the title "Hair And There", I can imagine "where" this is going, but aesthetically it's not as flabbergasting as Kiki Smith's own hair drawings.

In "Hearing Voices (Moi?, Toi?, Lui?, Elle?)" (1993-02), the wall urges to talk: 4 rectangle glass cells are engraved with the interrogation marks Me?, You?, him? and Her?. This piece seems again to engulf the popular idea that in the cloning of representation we lost an aura of the original. Just like coming back to good old Walter Benjamin, as if redundance didn't exist (it's an old work, mind you), except that now of course we are dealing with real life and identities, or rather, Hatoum lets these quasi-identical, quasi-invisible tablets speak for us. Is this what the work is really about? I have nooooo clue, darling. I'm only guessing, here. Maybe that work would be a good reply to the minimalists, but in the end my guess is that not so many people are ready to read deep into the meaning of a work when it shows so little on the surface. Right?

On the opposite wall, there are two drawings made of wax paper: they look like residues of a performance, or linked to a process that is unknown to me, involving kitchen appliances engraved into cooking paper. I have noooo idea. Let's call them "Failure 1 and 2".

The two textural pink frames in the other rooms are handmade papers. One is representing a brain ("Untitled (Brain)", (2001)) and it really shares the fleshy organic texture with what it represents. The other use deadpan humor by juxtaposing its title, "Hand Made Paper" (2003), with the representation of an arm and hand. Ohhh, the preciosity of connecting with the artist's body and craft. Been-there-done-that sort of gallery fillers. Where's the beef?

Finally, the two marble gobelets ("Set In Stone" (2002)) linked by a tiny rope imitates the form of an ancient toy phone, that sort that kids often bricolage at school. They are adorned with arabic descriptions. This is as uncommunicative a work can get, but I guess that is the point. Communicating with yourself to see if you hear any better ? I did some research. The words spells "East" and "West" in arabic. Ok, now I see. Does the work shift meaning depending on where it is shown? Intriguing.

Not bad, but a lot of these objects seem to be made to decorate the walls of those who can buy them. I'm not certain where exactly does Mona Hatoum senses that she can have an impact. Not that the work is oblique but more that it is toned down by an aesthetic of bibelot.

Finally, some of these works are obtused by their clinical aspect. Is there a sense of humor somewhere ? Am I allowed to find it funny ? The tone is uncertain.

Why is surrealism dead when so many art seems to derive from it? At least with surrealism we could laugh.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

MERRY CHRISTMAS !!!!!!!!!!!

2004-12-25T01:09:00.000-05:00

I just want to wish the merriest of christmas or X-Mas
to everyone reading !!

May we all be graced with redemption !!!!!

Err,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Notes on the last few days posts:

I am of course seeing way more exhibitions than I can review.
The exhibits I choose to review here are selected following
3 simple criterias:

1) I exceptionally love them

2) They present "interesting failures" (I hated them with passion)

3) They deal with issues that interest me as an artist, and thus are prompt to tease dialogue.

They are 3 more late reviews coming in from the Montreal series (as in, exhibitions from Montreal that just ended). I wanted this to be done "before Christmas", dammit !! ;-)

Later I'll look at some of the year's favorites, in early 2005.

Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 5: Art Mûr "Novembre 2004", with Holly King

2004-12-24T23:34:00.000-05:00

"When artists come to me and say they want to show their art, I tell them to start their own gallery"

Jeffrey Deitch

Would you believe that I claim to be a serious gallery goer, but yet never visited Art Mûr since their departure from their Old Montreal spot two years ago?

This might have to do with the fact that I'm forced to be selective with local shows as I'm often out of town. I simply figured that Art-Mûr was little too far a distance for me to cope with. Hey, this is afterall just "one" gallery: why would I go there when I can go elsewhere and visit more than 5 galleries in a day?

Well, this is where I was wrong.

Lately I had heard rumours that the space at Art-Mûr had got pretty large. It took the new works of Holly King, a photograph I'm following since many years (my first show of hers was at Articule in 1988!), to finally urge me to visit the place.

First reaction: "Oh my gaaaawwwdddd!!!!!".

Yes, this gallery is the LARGEST gallery spot in Montreal.
With its 2 full-apartment-size floors, they had 6 ongoing exhibits when I visited.
Would there be only two artists on show, they would probably be major retrospectives.

Grant you, they don't come close to Quartier Ephemere as far as width is concerned, but Art Mûr have arranged their spaces so they could show multiple shows, while Quartier Ephemere seems to prefer deserving their space to gigantic installations that couldn't enter anywhere else but at their address.

Nevertheless, Art-Mûr has strong potential to become an
important art spot in Montreal (if it's not already). The fact that
they both combine a commercial gallery and open spaces on the second
floor for more experimental projects is absolutely incomparable with any
other places in this city, and will certainly provide with very interesting artistic encounters. This will all depend on the way this is going to be curated. If they open the door to established curatorial projects it will be the more interesting. I think the future of art lies in this combination of commercial with experimental. The owners did the right thing (hopefully their spaces aren't too costly and I suggest they invite major sellers for the ground exhibit (even foreign artists, why not) to ensure viability).

Ok...let me attempt to cross those 6 exhibits with you:

Space 1: Ewa Monika Zebrowski: "Remembering Brodsky"

Well, it's mostly the photographic portrait of a book ("Watermark", 1992) from an author (Joseph Brodsky, of nobel prize fame) who himself tried to portray Venice through his poetry. Unless I'm wrong, this is not the major work from this author, but I've read people recommending reading it prior or after planning a travel to Venice .

Personally, I found these works (a dozen large photographs and a group of 25 photos with an accompanying artist book) a little too traditional. The precise referent is asking much from the knowledge of the viewer (take on me: I haven't read this book) and I'm afraid that these retro black photographs might be a little too illustrative (those stairs near the water of a canal reaffirm a quote where Brodsky compares the fluidity of life activity in Venice with the fact that the city is dwelling on water: hmm...well...Maybe he can write this better than I did).

Why Brodsky was chosen by this artist ? Why Venice ? That part of the artist's passion for her subject never translated to me.

Nevertheless, you can look here and judge by yourself (here's my favorite picture).

Space 2: Holly King "Vistas"

Vista
Function: noun
1 : a distant view through or along an avenue or opening
2 : an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events)
(Webster Definition)

Slope, 2004 Beauty, 2002

I came specifically to see these new "paintings" by Holly King. At first sight they looked like more of the same from her past work, if you will, but recently she picked on the format of 19th Century oval portrait to present these new fabricated landscape, as though to convey that nature is only truly created through perceptual gaze and a process of identification. As she mentions, the oval form is eager to bring back in memory the archaic age of early photography, an age that brought into desuetude the sorts of solemnful and heroic representations of nature that King has been so obsessively dragging back in style (in her own kinky way).

Like the surprise of tumbling on an ugly brushstroke in a Van Gogh, the fun with Holly King is to compare her works both from distance and proximity. As you approach them, they reveal details of their bricolage that deliver all the kitsch implied in their making. Yet when you move back, these scotchy apparitus disappear and the whole look almost like it revendicates the sublime (I'm thinking of "Exquisite" (2004), a majestuous fake waterfall, but it could be said of her other photographs sporting such evocative titles as "Lush" (2004), "Stream" (2004), and "Wonder" (2002)).

Exquisite, 2004

It's this correlation that King establishes between the kitsch and traditional landscape that I always find so interesting. You're never sure if you're being too cheap and sentimental for liking them or not. The oval shapes enhance that impression genuinely.

Space 3: Guillaume Lachapelle: "Passages Avides"

Guillaume Lachapelle builds tiny wood theatres that propose neo-surrealist scenes, often linking man with the animal world or dealing with exhilirated sexuality.

These both minimal and figurative scenes share with the works of such artists as Jake and Dino Chapman or PaulMc Carthy a tendency to revisit the lost fantasy scapes of childhood, though for what they lack in the sensational extremism of these artists, they gain in proposing subtle subersions not deprived of elegancy and technical genius.

Neat stuff...

The question is to know wrether this artist intends to comfortably dwell on a tangent with naive art, or if he intends to pull the nerves out of his sculptures a little more.

Space 4: Maureen Rodrigues-Labrèche: "Belonging(s)"

Now this is what I call "photographic installation". Nearly
none of the pictures assembled here (in the largest and best of all
the gallery spaces at Art Mûr) would make sense on their own.

What would you make of two picture of the roots of a tree ?

Well, when juxtaposed with a series of photographs showing social workers, a chinese girl on a farm, an old kitchen, a father, a cemetary in snow, and various diary texts hung up here and there, you can begin to accept that they belong to an exhibit which thematically revolves around the consequences of adoption.

This exhibit was meant to tear-jerk you. I felt really uncomfortable (not embarassed, more intimadated) because I felt so much anger and pain coming from this artist, especially in the ending section, which showed a video loop of an icy river superimposed with the constant typewritting of the phrase "You left your belonging(s) behind".

What is surpriseful is that apparently, the exhibit was built up from an assemblage of unrelated families photographs, and from various banal images of landscape (dyptichs of coast and trees, a man walking near a lake, etc...).

This work is pure fiction, though at the origin the photographs document the lives of people who "really" experienced adoption . The installation set up is very fragmented. Even the words on the walls are probably not coming from the "same minds".

But because of the use of the first pronun, which influenced my interpretation that this work was narrating the artist's life, I felt engulfed by a tragedy that turned out to be fake. Where does the fabrication of fiction begins and ends when it is created solely through the association of random documentary elements ? Does this trick makes it better art? Well, it's at the opposite of pomo works of the likes of Nan Goldin. It doesn't pretend to make you connect with the intimate lives of anyone. It deals with the problematic of adoption from an universal standpoint.

This said, it was all a bit emotionally manipulative. How would you react to such self-pitiful affirmations as "I was meant to be abandoned by these people"? People who live close to their family members are not necessarely in better terms with them. I wonder if biology is of any relevance or simply illusory in the way humans are able to psychologically bound together. My final opinion is that the majority of people who make kids shouldn't make them. There: I've expressed myself now. How about that for unprofessional art journalism?

Space 5: Gisèle Ouellette: "Repère" + Joane Poitras: "Pour L'Instant, L'Arbre"

Past a forgettable paper curtain serving as canvas for the drawing of a circular vegetal shape ("Repère" by Gisèle L. Ouellette didn't help me find my way towards it, despite it's title), we get to another artist dealing with the creation of singular shapes proposed as many hommages to the natural world (addendum: I found out later, after doing a little research, that the form Gisèle Ouellette intended to draw was a nest).

Joane Poitras's installation "Pour L'Instant, L'Arbre" is probably the best show of all this late 2004 programmation at Art-Mûr. It's land art made for the indoor. She piles up thousands of leaves of a same tree species into shapes that look like insect hives, cakes, or bluntly, simple angular shapes of no definite prescriptions (though some titles like "Conduit" and "Tertre" evoke masonry). There's nothing more to read into this but a re-organization of nature, except that as a discourse on sculpture it's really this interesting: most land artists create ephemeral works with rocks and wood in the outdoor, but this artist chose to extend that experience by working with even more fragile and ephemeral materials of nature. Her sculptures wouldn't last seconds under the wind. It wouldn't take much to crush them inside either, and they would burn under the lapse of a minute if someone had the bad idea to light a match at a near distance.

Then what ?

Life, for what it is, constitutes a revolution against time. Everything about it tends toward battling against the doom of entropy and destruction. By making the most fragile life residues stand like the most permanent of monoliths, the artist exposes her enthousiasm in participating in this ongoing homeostasic war against chaos. Next to the sculptures are a constellation of 19 miniature drawings of branches, and a column of empty boxes, ready to be filled with the leaves that the artist will ritualistically reconstitute in a future exhibit. It's a beautiful hommage to the essence of life when you are able to take that much care for its most banal detritus.

Space 6: Clara Bonnes: "Saisissement" + Jean-Maxime Dufresne: "Rest Area"

This duo of works by two young Montreal media artists was organized by Jean Dubois as part of his "Interstices" curatorial project, and I had the opportunity to meet the artists and have a good chat with them while I was there.

The work of Clara Bonnes, young french artist, assembles 3 (I heard elsewhere there was originally 4) organic sculptures pending down from the ceiling, each encasting a small monitor. These monitors constitutes small video-loop portrayals (one per sculpture) of people living in their immediate environment: eitheir their home or their apartment.

Here is the interesting part: you are able to touch and manipulate these sculptures, what triggers an interactive aspect that makes you able to pause random snapshots of the videos. This is supposed to signify the potentiality of any contact being made with a (the) proposed identity(ies).

As I was arguing with the artist, the fact that I was able to touch these pictures enhanced my impression that I was connecting with them, an impression that rested on an utopy, but nevertheless, that helped me trespass the usually superficial level of gaze and representation, and let me enter another world much more having to do with experiencing sensuality (note the word play in the title between the terms "uphold" and "being upholded", as in "being taken by surprise").

These organic forms, looking like cocoons, eyes, or even spermatozoids (not such an ackward idea in 2004 when artists like Matthew Barney have all layered down these subject matters), provoke the most interesting aspect of Clara's work: her merging of video art with the plastic, pre-conceptual tradition of sculpture. As she is a beginner artist, I can only encourage her to lean toward the sculptural. We have seen enough of video wall projections. She might be on the right track, though she gonna have to hide a little more of those electric wires on the ceiling.

As for Rest Area, the work of Jean-Maxime Dufresne, I was dumbfounded to learn that the artist is part of Syn- Atelier, after I had compared his art with outputs from this group (of which frankly I could until this date only name Jean Francois Provost amongst the members). Luckily for me (and Dufresne), I'm kind of a little fan of -Syn Atelier, so I only have good things to say about most of (his) their projects.

As I mentioned to him, I think this was the second time that I've experienced an installation asking me to sleep into a cubicule and watch a video at the proximity of my forehead (the other was a fantastic installation by Mariko Mori ("Wave UFO" (2003)). There is no other option, this is where his work succeeds the best: when inside, you're able to see two video loops at once, one being a video collage, installed inside the tent, of the artist sleeping and doing various activities related to living within a tent, and another video across the room as the horizon wall, in which the artist is shown installing his tent in the most bizarre and unconvivial of spaces, reminding of the famous work "Hypothèse D'Amarrages" by Syn- Atelier when they installed pic-nic tables all across Montreal city in the most univiting places.

My only drawback with Dufresne's work was the confusion at first glance with some of the footage that showed people doing sports, as when I entered the gallery I was wondering if there was two different pieces (there was a large field of polyutherane moss in front of the video that looked like a sport-field). This ended to be coincidental, as most of the video show a selection of delibarately uncomfortable spaces (like near a superhighway) where the artist attempted to live for a few hours in a state of survival.

Is there still a place for the nomad man in contemporary society? This is what this exhibition entails. How much of the built world can be alienating towards the survival instinct. How have we come to this? Where and how are we able to live though this ?

The installation is the mise-en-scène of the documentary of a performance. Where the art really happens is not in style, montage, or technology, but in the actions that originated them, and in the honest attempt to want to make us revive that experience.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centimen@hotmail.com

PS: as if all this wasn't enough, Art-Mûr have launched the new cd of Sylvie Laliberté that I will be buying soon. There is also a nice window where they show extra works. It's a fantastic place. Try it for once's sake.

Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 4: Steve Heimbecker "Pod".

2004-12-22T23:13:00.000-05:00

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."

Edith Wharton

Until this day in my "entire life", it was always crispy clear
in my mind which art shows I attended and which I didn't.
Isn't it obvious? I could name you any shows on earth and you
could tell if you were there or not. End of the question. NEXT!

This is what leads me to the Heimbecker problematic,
maybe a new art syndrome I invented for myself.

I had heard about and saw (from a distance) Heimbecker's
installation of his Wind Array Cascade Machine (WACM) on the Ex-Centris roof (which I suppose is still standing as I speak) a little while ago.

Early last week, when I went to the Oboro gallery, where Heimbecker's show "Pod" had been slated, they were pulling everything down. "Oh geez....Wh..What...Where am I? What happened?", I asked the coordinator breath-takingly. "Ohhhhhh You've missed it! It ended Sunday". I had to face my fate: apparently I had written down my schedule from a misleading press listing. Ah whatever... I saw parcels of it. I saw the poles (many were already on the floor), but of course the room was in full light and nothing was functioning. Than later, I saw footages of the installation, that included a video projection of the Ex-Centris roof in the entrance hall.

Now...I'm left to decide.

"Did I see this show or not??"

I'll presume that I've seen it, merely because I've seen the "objects" (the poles)
that structured the Oboro space, and enough "moving images" to give me a slight idea of what it looked like in the dark.

Basically, this installation invites you to sway into a bed of light. The poles are adorned with leds beams that shift in colors gradually as the wind outside send signals to the "dreamcatchers" standing on the Ex-Centris roof. This was the main interpretation that wouldn't leave my thoughts: that this work was related to ancient myths that the wind is a container of souls, such as in the beliefs of native american or ancestral asian religions, who used to consider wind chimes as transmittors of the chanting of spirits (there was no sound for this installation, but I'm told that the next exhibit using this system will be a sound art piece (HOPEFULLY with a visual element, hmm?)). Does the work of Heimbecker captures spirits and transform them into beams of light?

I'm projecting all this. I'm sure Heimbecker links his art much closer to the work
of minimal environmentalists like Walter De Maria. Aesthetically, it does look like
Dan Flavin on speed. Or maybe, a gigantic promotional room design sponsored by Pimp Watch?

Seriously, it's really an impressive work visually. Equal or even better to
the installation of light bulbs by Artificiel at Musée D'Art Contemporain that cheered
a bunch of people a couple of years back. Why are they no museums buying this stuff? I swear it's worth nearly half of Dia Beacon, as visual impact.

Ahh....those 90's artists.... How hard aren't we tapping on them.
Back in the 70's, artists "were allowed" or rather, allowed themselves
to sculpt beams of light for their pure fun. In the 2000's, artists (especially in Canada) are obliged to start from concept, would it be only to make certain they receive
grants. I'm not sure you could succeed nowaday in Canada if you weren't the
slightliest of a conceptual artist. Given these considerations, Heimbecker chose to render visible the naturally invisible force of wind. The question is: does this "translate"? Isn't the work a little too dependant on a set of relations that I need to intellectualize before entering a world that is mostly attractive to my senses? I'm pondering.

It's a chance that there is a projection at the Oboro entrance of the WACM capters (a 40 minute document, not a real-time capture, but I think this is irrelevant), because it is the only way that the neophyte audience could possibly link the installation with another structure.

I'm poised, basically. I think the project of creating art with a natural matter
such as wind is not only legitimate, but a beautiful idea. Don't we all love to create kites? In a sense, the Heimbecker installation is such a kite.
A kite made of light. So, being that kites are mostly decorative objects, why would I reproach Heimbecker's work to propose me (or not) a theoretically abstract liaison?
What is all that can be written about wind ?

Here, maybe I'm worried that with the post-conceptual art of today, we refute to
accept things for what they are. Every sound and visual aspects of every works must be analyzed and explained thoroughly. But Heimbecker's work is actually so
contemplative!? You could admire it regardless of your knowledge of how it functions. Are you missing the work if you do?

This is the major issue that this artist (an excellent sound artist might I add) and others, will need to confront.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Steve Heimbecker "Pod"
November 12 - December 11, 2004
Oboro
4001 Berri

Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 3: Sévérine Hubard "Coupé Coincé".

2004-12-22T05:48:00.000-05:00

"Home is in your head"

Warren Defever

Severine Hubard is a french artist whom I had never heard from, but judging from her website, she is already quite prolific at such a young age (she was born in 1977).

Nevertheless, prolific doesn't automatically imply quality, and as much as I enjoyed certain of its insights, I keep reserves about Hubard's piece at Skol called "Coupé Coincé" (2004), which have been lauded by the local press, and which constitutes the conclusion show of her residency at Galerie Est-Nord-Est in St-Jean-Port-Joli.

What's wrong Ced ?

What's with the grumpy attitude all of a sudden?

Well, it's not a bad exhibit. I complain solely because on the matter of disrupting familiar architecture, there has been (and I have seen) a lot of ferociously interesting works in recent years, and the Severine show left me with the after-taste thought of "too little, too late".

Quickly, the centre piece of the show is the prototype exoskeleton of a traditional Quebec house (its shape was influenced by houses in the Chauddière-Appalaches county), that she installed on its side, perpendicularly to standard housing position. You must enter it by crawling through a chimney, if you want to see the 4 principal elements that are hidden inside: a hole-as-window where you can pop your head out like Alice in Wonderland, one door exposed on its side as leading to an imaginary place (you will need a LOT of imagination to infer that, as it looks set up for restoration), a small wood scale that leads to the "roof" (the front side of the house) where you can observe a couple flower pots thrown there perhaps a little too nonchalantly, and finally, so you are not left too disappointed, the addition of an older work which is a small diaporama that you must action on your own, showing a multitude of parked cars (one per slide). This latter self-consciously-boring piece actually made me smile. It's genuinely been incorporated with this present installation (I wrote the title down somewhere buy can't find that piece of paper for the moment). These cars (and trucks and boats) are microscosms of the domestic world. Here, they appear dumbfounded, like they are waiting on a leash for their "masters" to come back. It's as if Severine meant to infer the little soul they seem to lack, when actually they are directly linked with a wide range of personal histories. Being so common and out there, we tend to ignore them visually. Hubard is pulling our attention, at the distress of the rest of her installation.

But the car piece on its own wouldn't have been enough (there's a gallery to fill here), and the house is unfortunatelly deceiving quickly after the surprise of first sight.
Nicolas Mavrikakis does his best to defend it in the journal Voir, pointing at the fact that contemporary arts of today are getting bigger than the homes they were originally intended for. But on this topic of reappropriating traditional architecture through art, I'm reminded of a plethora of artists, not the least the german Gregor Schneidor, who won the Venice Biennial with the deconstructive reconstitution of his grandmother's home. Then closer to us, Julie André T cut in two a whole gallery space, with her fabulous performance-apartment project at Dare Dare (I must add here that I've got my own project that deals with shapes of traditional Quebec homes, but that is a wildly different proposal).

The only thing that differs between Severine Hubard's home and these projects is that her's functions as much as a sculpture than as an environment. But than, perhaps this is where it missed its goal: sculpturally, it sucked. I'm forced to employ a term that the artist used to describe her work: it looked like "bricolage". Something made by a collective of kids during parascolar school activities. The idea is brilliant but it's not pulled up to what it could have been. The show works like the blueprint of what it wishes to achieve.

Luckily for us (or her), Severine added another layer to her exhibition.
The real success of this show comes from the manner in which Hubard infiltrated
the standard working spaces of Skol with a series of preparatory works, that the visitor is forced to visit prior getting to the house entrance.

The pieces themselves, once you found them (I counted 7, with an introductory text), aren't too dramatically moving (a profile of a horse made of wood, a tiny house model, a much larger model of the Skol show, a collage of housing ads, 3 drawings of piles of chairs, and a photographic panorama of an earlier work when she aligned windows on the side of a building in Europa). The big fun here is the way these settings are intrusive, and how Hubard is allowing us to visit what is normally hidden from us (what Nicolas Mavrikakis calls "the foundations of the house"). In that sense, the offices in a gallery space are the opposite of the white cube. They are filled with people working and well, people are just naturally messy. They put posters on doors, decorations on walls, piles of mails on furnitures. Hubard had to negociate the spaces where she could insert her own materials. There was no map or indications on anything so I had to ask to make sure I wasn't missing anything (oops, right there: the rocking baby chair with circular pads, see what I mean?). For this portion alone, if only it didn't only consist of its preambule, the show had something to bite on.

The substantial "home project" here is not the half-baked sculpture, but the investigations of the living space of Skol's employees. I find infiltrative and "parasitic" art to be the "coup du jour". The best art trend revival of recent.

Wherever Severine is going next, she surely got the potential to amaze simply because
she is already curious enough herself for looking at life from unusual perspectives. This half-gown of an exhibit couldn't make anyone pronunce themselves on her pertinence. On the contrary, it can only titillate our curiosity in apprehending how this will lead her to future proposals.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Séverine Hubard: "Coupée coincée"
Nov 11 - Dec 18, 2004
Skol, 372 Ste-Catherine W., #314 398-9322

Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 2: Bill Vazan "Cosmological Shadows".

2004-12-21T06:27:00.000-05:00

"I’m fascinated with how people, no matter where, have tried to communicate with something other than themselves—the other. I guess my way of making contact with the other is by taking a parallel position with what these people have done. Of course, I’m only in one time and place. Is there a connection with God? We all want to connect with God, whether or not we deny his or her existence. We eventually realize, one way or another, that we did not bring ourselves here, and we have no control of how we’re going to get out of here."

Bill Vazan

This show, in true Vazan form, is a whole pilgrimage of a show. It's been running around since such a long time that I have no idea what in the world made that I hadn't catch it yet. I remember being in Ottawa and missing it in a wink.

I always thought it was a retrospective, but it's not: it's mostly a specific
photograph project linking lands in Quebec (Mingan Islands) and Egypt.
The "water" and the "sand", as the artist would put it, a metaphor
of the juxtaposition of the "new" (vivid) with the "old" (dry).

Vazan is the "Goldsworthy of Canada". Probably our most important land artist (and also one of our first video artist). Over the years, through the mean
of documenting his works, he started producing art that was, as I
just mentioned, specifically photographic. Bluntly: think Alain Paiement.
The show "Cosmological Shadows", at Centre De l'Université De Montreal,
consisted in a series of gigantic grids of photographs (5 in total), added
with 3 medium works and around 30 smaller works (grouped together on
one wall), all using a similar aesthetic of mosaic. In addition to this, I counted 6 large photos of various Vazan's land works (including "Cobra Stand For A Parallel World" (2001), a motif
made of stone somewhere in India, and other ambitious stone sculptures, reminiscent
of paleolithic art, which to Vazan means being in the same position as the first men who tried to communicate with nature and universe).

But let's concentrate on the show's most elemental characteristic: the grid.
By "grid" I mean that the photos are individual fragments of one unique
large landscape subject, sometimes overlapping in representation (kinda like
watching a nude landscape descending the stairs). One wonders if he had to photograph every of the photos for the larger works, a method exploited vastly by Alain Paiement.

The artists mentions that he uses the space between the individual photos
(forming a decipharable grid) to help the viewer infer a graphic shift on the horizon line, what triggers the optical illusion from which, with the help of switching the horizon axes on each photo, leads the impression that the photographs as a whole form a 3d globe, or three-dimensional curves, when they don't simply expand their standard axes horizontally and vertically.

From there comes the self-evident focus of the works: Vazan associates landscapes with universal forms such as cells, stars, waves, rays and other forms
influenced by theoretical physics, that he's attempting to simplify for his audience. Add to this the juxtaposition of archaic egyptian reliefs with contemporary raw Quebec landscape (as in this work, which depict an egyptian relief crossing the circumferance of an "island", splitting it into a perpendicular), and you're getting dangerelously close to esoteric.

But frankly, Vazan's work is much simple. He means to
remind us of a pre-Galileo world when we didn't know that it
was round. He means us to assert how little we know from the cosmos
and that much of it is still a mystery. The use of reliefs from ancient civilizations
underlines both the wonder of man towards nature and his failed attempt at
controlling it. The self-reflective images of the Pyramids here at the left propose a gaze toward the hidden shapes in all things.

In a sense, Vazan treats landscape photography from a minimalist's point
of view. You can accept the beauty of his work once you indulge
in tolerating its overtly systematic aspect.

Like with any minimalist works, the essence of its success lies in the way simple mathematical shapes help us breathe with the work, both physically and intellectually. The major recurrent proposition is the opposition of perfectly formal mathematic grids with perfectly curved and spherical representations of landscapes. Once we get familiar with Vazan's approach, and regardless of the overwhelming amount of photos (especially on the wall collection of small works), we are able to straddle from one piece to the next at ease, rapidly grasping the general forms at play (though a surprising amount of urban subjects in the smaller and medium format seems to disrupt the relation established by the greater works, maybe getting slightly too Melvin-Charneyish here, but I found out later that some of these were actually older pieces).

The best work is the oval shape separated by a path, installed as two beds against the floor (I think it's called "Oval" (2000-2001)). The format recalls a pool, or the reflection of landscape on water. I rarely ever seen photographs positioned that way above a floor, and therefore I declare this work
the "major" Vazan piece deserving to be bought by a museum. For this piece alone, the visit was well worth the distant travelling.

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Bill Vazan: "Cosmological Shadows"
October 28 - December 19, 2004
Centre D'Exposition De L'Université De Montréal
2940, chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine
Local 0056, Montréal

Year End Art Exhibit Rush (Montreal) 1: Marie-Claude Pratte "La Marche Du Monde".

2004-12-21T06:09:00.000-05:00

Well, I've seen a plethora of art exhibits this past week
in Montreal, paving my way through the Christmas rush.

Good news is there's a lot of good stuff.

I'll comment some of it in the next few posts.

.

I ended yesterday with Marie-Claude Pratte at Quartier Éphémère,
which was a real cherry on a sundae treat. Kinda like watching
a christmas mechanical window. The main piece is a full surrounding
wall fresque that functions like the paths on a board game,
depicting urban activity in downtown Montreal. You follow
from the start (Hydro-electric crash creating a flood, and cars getting off their suburbs homes unto the Jacques-Quartier bridge), and after wandering
in various streets of Montreal (Ste-Catherine, St-Laurent
Chinatown, etc..), you end either at the Casino, or a giant library called "University" (and presenting books sporting names of chain stores as
their titles), or an hospital (my guess is that it's Hôpital St-Luc).

Everybody is painted in black, and you start realizing that the
tone of the work spells "bleak". This is afterall, "punk" painting,
but I insist: this was not how I perceived it at first, since
the layering of colourful shops and bars reminded me more
of the carnivalesque atmosphere of late Friday night activity
on St-Laurent (especially in summer). I am not certain that the
artist chose the best streets in her intention to attack local
consumerism. Where is Ste-Catherine West or St-Hubert?. But
then I figure Pratte is linking St-Laurent as a pittoresque path
that will lead you to Marché Central (the spot in canada that makes
the most money by square foot). The work is transitive.

Pratte added another subversive element to this piece. She sells everything by square foot, meaning that she intends to cut the paint in parts amongsts the buyers. That saddens me: I think it should all stick together.

On the checklist, Pratte seems to separate the "suburb" and the "city"
portions of the work into two separate entities, but I think they consist of one.
I'm deciding for her what pieces should go together: apart from the cityscape fresque (which includes the flood series as provoking the transition between the natural and urban scapes), I counted 6 other groups of paintings. Two are about Jesus: the clouds vignettes leading to a dirty st-suaire, and the little church pointing to a canvas of Jesus being sick in bed. These and another allegorical tableau showing people living in a gigantic shoe under the sea are the weakest parts of the exhibit. They disrupt the general topic by focussing on other themes such as decadence of religion and ecology.

There is another large "fresque" consisting on a series of public buses leading people to a gigantic shop, from which they follow (by foot) a path that leads to a "death station", where they all align to pass trough a meat grinder that piles the fleshy residuals into a gigantic and surprisingly colorful depotoir. This quasi-abstract painting, adorned by a queen sitting on top, is a stand out. Snobs call this "naive painting", but I call it "heritage" painting. The sort of work that may end up at the McCord Museum, where it will make everyone go "wooo" when they finally get the chance to see it. The fragmented aesthetic recalls the ancient assyrian or egyptian wall reliefs that were often layered as a mean to lead into various narratives. The overall texture and sizes of the fragments also reminds of medieval icons. Maybe afterall this is Pratte's version of a Last Judgment, and there would lie the reasoning behind her choice to depict a religious scene.

The two last "ensembles" consisted of: 1) a tiny assemblage depicting some sort of dark explosion (? I didn't pay attention), and 2) the entrance work consisting of 3 parts: people attending an important concert, a huge parking lot with an impressive range of cars, and one painting of a gas pump. Arguably those are only fillers to the two main fresques, which pseudo-folk attire impose an ambitious scale (not the first exploit in dimension for Pratte) that makes me wonder if this isn't a landmark work in its genre. I don't recall seeing any painting recently that were both this huge, complex, and intricate. Maybe Monique Regimbald-Zeibeir's monument to Marguerite Bourgeoy, but it doesn't even slightly relate (Monique was more about concept and repetition, if you can figure 426 little canvas similar to the one shown here). Haven't seen any Ackerman mural recently either.

The final fun is that, though the street series don't exactly depict the St-Laurent shops in their right order (I wonder if it was all painted from vague memories), I can see the spot where I live behind one of these shops. Hey!! This work talks about me!! What more could I ask? I walk on these streets every day, though I never felt like being part of it like so many scenemakers seem to think they are. I'm the least pro-St-Laurent fellow around. I've known the place all my life but always felt like being the stranger around. I don't meet people I know at every corner. I think people who recognize me are discreet about it.

But I disgress.

If painting is going to be this good (I'll admit I'm very severe with paintings, as I'm wary of conventions), than I'll need to reconsider my definition of contemporary art, and pay a lot more attention to what the "traditional artists" are able to do (and if you don't see where I'm coming from with "tradition", please revisit the folk art section of McCord museum ).

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Marie-Claude Pratte: "La Marche Du Monde"
Nobember 19 - December 19, 2004
Quartier Ephémère
745 Rue Ottawa
514-392-1554

Hommage To Agnes Martin 2

2004-12-19T01:28:00.000-05:00

As my hommage to Agnes Martin,
I tried to see if it was possible
for the common of mortals to replicate
some of her work on a program like
Paint in Word.

It's really hard.

Try it. You must use your mouse
and do it by hand.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

Homage To Life: Agnes Martin (1912-2004).

2004-12-18T16:55:00.000-05:00

.
(Charles R. Rushton/Whitney Museum of American Art)

Agnès Martin, the godmother of minimalism, passed away yesterday.

The seminal artist of canadian origin (she's from Saskatchewan), deceased at 92, which is about the age of Louise Bourgeois these days. The reason I bring this up is that two days ago I was thinking about Louise Bourgeois as I was sharing with someone the titles of works that brought me really strong emotional experiences (emotional as in: versus intellectual, versus sensual, etc..). I mentioned then that I hope Louise got still many years before her because I believe she's been reaching summums in her art recently.

Two days later, Agnes's death takes me by surprise. There's much less emotional urgency coming out of Agnes's work. On the contrary it's quiet and blissfully intemporal. I guess I always figured Agnes as some kind of immortal being from out of this world. Her death is not even shocking, like all her life's work prepared you for it. You know? Just in case it took you by surprise.

I often feel frustration for Agnes that she didn't receive as vast support as other artists from the Minimalist movement (which is a portion of american art history that all the artists themselves refute in partaking). Her early grid formats in the 50's so much announced Lewitt, that it's only an half-relief that she got a one year temporary exhibit going on at Dia Beacon, where all the big minimalist dudes all get their self-important works shown in permanence (thanks to some perticularly obsessive patrons), with only about half of them really deserving such imperialist devotion.

But this is no day to feel bitter. On the contrary, the death of Agnes Martin fills me with a serene calm. I think I owe her that: everything in her art was about dedramatization. Probably even therapeutic. She was the most optimist of artists you could imagine. I can only perceive her passing the threshold with a confident smile on her lips. She had done what she meant to do: her legacy is untouchable.

Recently, I had seen both the Dia Retrospective, which shows a good portion of her early works, and therefore circumbscribes at ease her basic theories and aesthetics (ones that she would follow religiously throughout her life), but I also visited last May what is considered to be the last pre-mortem exhibit by Agnes Martin, an exhibit of recent works that took place at Pace Wildenstein, her affiliated gallery on 54th street, New York.

I am reviewing this show as my hommage to her, my first art review on this new blog. I am not an official art reviewer, and please note (if you haven't already) that english is not my prime language.

I will not use the word "irony" to characterize the title of this show, which was called "Homage To Life": on the contrary I think the term genuinely can serve as the epitaph for her entire career. I wouldn't blush seeing it as the expression to front cover a catalogue raisonne. Not if it would be her's.

But what is this homage to life that she proposes, exactly? It's a meeting between two forces. It's a meeting between the eternally firm, rigid and the temporary hesitative, precarious. It's the most human of hands attempting to draw an impression of the scale of the universal and absolute. In painting, this transcribes as the tension between the polished monochromatic and the handput colour application. It's the tension between the mathematical grid and the act of drawing over it softly with one's hand. It's en encompassing of perfection and imperfection. It's a sacrifice of ego against the monumentality of existence.

Did that sound all discombobulated ?

Martin's work is actually very simple and accessible. Yards away from the mentions of "dryness", "austere" and "pretentiousness" that you may here from times to times about her works from those who never understood it.

Bluntly: Martin is a "philosophical" artist. She proposes through her art that she is engaged with the thinking precepts that guide her. In a sense she functions like a medieval painter that would have focussed all her life on perfecting the depiction of Christ. Instead, she chose to devote her life to the transcription of her own beliefs in zen and other oriental philosophies through her use of pure aesthetical forms (kind of obvious if you know the least you need to know about zen). She indeed provoked a little the art crowds when she employed terms as "classical" to describe her work, but she had a firm belief that through her interest in simple shapes, patterns, and colors, she was exploring a vision of beauty, and perfection (the essence of classicism).

The grids that Agnes Martin adds by hands with pencil on her quasi-monochromatic canvas are humane. They are at the opposite of say, computer "cgi" design. Her work seems to emphasize the fact that mathematical deconstruction is a human ability, an act of intellectualization that in fact originated in the sensual and emotional histories of our existence (remember how you counted candies on Halloween). Also, Martin's grids are imperfect and present no focal point: they enhance what the artist refers to as "formlessness". The grids interact with the gaze as you approach and distance yourself from the paintings, and this creates a sense of opacity, like the work is hanging out in the atmostphere, ethereally.

The use of overall chrome is more rigid. It's a void. It's both plain and empty, you're never too sure. But then Martin used a large palette of tones and colors that I will indulge in tagging "as many emotions". Like the cold grid that spouses the shapes of the human form by being drawn by hand, the peculiar choices and treatment of pure earthly chromas render Martin's work the most down-to-earth minimalist art that you can imagine. In a sense, yes, you could think it's a feminized version of minimalism , but I find that expression diminutive when all this art was consolidated pre-facto the history of american contemporary art. It's NOT feminine, it's rather the reaching point between those two poles, if you absolutely need to distance them.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, "the show".
That show at Pace Wildestein, which lasted from May 4 to June 30, 2004.

The press release mentions that "Homage to Life is the first body of work that basically defy her signature grid. Floating shapes, as well as new divisions of space, are now present in the new work."

See? Now, you can all forget whatever I have said about Agnes's work.
But no, seriously: the thing that this exhibition did was to show that Martin had found other means (if nothing too radically different) to express her beliefs, so hopefully that will evitate her in retrospect the accusation of being too systematic.

As you can notice by clicking on the pictures on the Pace Wildenstein site, she had made a long come back to 50's geometrical form (isn't it a spiritual bliss to be able to revisit your sources when you approach trespass), and started using vertical shapes and separating sections on canvas.

How does this translate with the whole formulaic pilgrimage that constitutes her oeuvre ? If you look at the title piece, "Homage to Life" (2003), you will
notice that the monolithic aspect of the black trapeze is apposed to a surface that seems etched by hands with graphite. Same goes with the two triangles of
"Untitled # 1" (2003), or in the opposite proposition of "Untitled # 17" (2002), where two graphite squares are undermined by solid black (and a high-level horizon above,
hanging like Prometheus` fire in a Rubens painting). The contrast between the sharp edged geometry and the soft aspect of the pencil drawing propose a similar tension than with past Martin's works. Similar? Maybe it is even more obvious now. Why the use of symmetry? My only guess is that they constitute clusters of repetition that help re-evaluate the idea of the grid as the pre-eminent choice to argue a same proposition.

Now let's come back to more comfortable terrain and judge this "Untitled # 6" (2003) which you will agree, with its overall washy-violet tone and the hand-slide pencil horizontals, that this is the most soft and humane form of minimalist art ever. Call it classical if you will, afterall her work does function like an aesthetical theorem (especially with quasi theoretical "Untitled 5" (2003) that looks like the same painting as before but cut out from the extraneous emotional (and personal) information of color).

"Untitled 8" (2003) looks genuinely like your good old
universal writting paper, and maybe I'm being too litteral by deciphering
a definite representation of Agne's method: isn't she more a writer than
an actual painter? Or rather, doesn't she paint as though she was writting,
and here I make no references to conceptualism but link more with the ancient craft of graphology, and the fact than with the earliest forms of writting, it was self-evident that the modes of communication inherited from drawing?.

Martin Creed would cringe at this:
"The Sea" (2003). It looks like a rain of neutrinos (before they fall vertically down on earth). You hate it? I think it's wonderful !!
Maybe it would be less sublime if there wasn't the whole history of Martin's work behind it, I'll grant you. I'll grant you that her work functions as a corpus with precise delimitations and focus, and that if she had been hypocritical but only once to her unequivocal aspirations, it would have been as critical as being an heretic in the 13th Century, France. What can I say: there's responsibilities with dealing with the sublime.

These pastoral ones, "Untitled # 4" (2003), "Untitled # 9" (2003) and "Untitled # 3" (2003) are, well, "pastorals", in the sense that they almost look like wallpapers (do I make sense, here?), quasi decorative, but they are probably as therapeutic as soft green tea (no cheap pun intended). Maybe this is why they seem so radical. Like a deconstruction of Matisse. I find them less appealing, but they're all very consistent with the rest of the show (and Martin's approach to art). I am more surprized by the shapes than the use of soft tones (evidently, or that would be like admitting I know nothing about her art).

I'm ending with my favorite piece of the show: "Untitled # 21" (2002) with its earthly colors, the graphite grey "path", and the two black voids. They seem to taunt us, invite us out of the precarity of existence. There is mystery. Feedback of the gaze (they're at eyes level)? Two extremities of one black hole ? There is something about the number two: It precedes the universal law that two elements must interact in order to create a third (1 + 1 = 3), as in art resulting from the meeting between an artist's proposition and its audience. I'm sure these squares signify something, as much of Martin's work is transcendental to her beliefs. Somehow Agnes is on the other side of them today.

It was overall an excellent last show for Agnes, if we only let ourselves envelopped by the concision of her entire work, forgetting a little the moment that had passed since her early experiments of the 50's.

I know what some of you are going to say.

I'll reply that: you can't really reproach an artist to be this autistically focussed when the matter of her art is wisdom itself.

Her work, which general schemes and colors share attributes with some schools of oriental art (I'll even venture into comparing it with some anti-decorative forms of islamist art), will last as long as it can reach people able to grasp the devotional and faithfull aspect of an artist who in all humility spent a lifetime communicating universal tensions engulfing the fate of existence.

It was a nice lesson,

Thank you, Agnes,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

FANTASTIC ROADSWORTH SITE!!

2004-12-16T13:34:00.000-05:00

I just found out a FANTASTIC website on Roadsworth's street art, which seems to have been set up this morning as the "viewed counts" on each picture didn't exceed 1 or 2 (a cool and important html attribute that will serve to show the court how much impact (or not) his work addressed on popular opinion).

The site is provided by the young art afficionado Mike Patten, who sounds like he's been seeing lately nearly as much art shows as I do (hey, I'm hard to beat, I saw over 80 shows in the last two months) as you can observe by moving across his personal art diary at:

http://www.mikepatten.ca

To be polite, here's the full link for the Roadsworth (aka Peter Gibson) pictures site: http://www.mikepatten.ca/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album10&page=1

I do hope that Chris Zeke at Zeke's Gallery will install a retrospective of these pictures as part of the future (and first) exhibition of Roadsworth that is supposed to be on schedule for the gallery sometimes in 2005. Personally I can't wait.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

RoadKill: post-graffiti artist Roadsworth arrested.

2004-12-16T01:15:00.000-05:00

Well, everyone in Montreal is whining these days the arrestation
of the until yet quasi-anonymous artist Roadsworth, whose work
consists of painting iconographic forms on the concrete street pavements,
as though they were decorative extensions of the general utilitarian street design.

I said a few times already in many places that ornementation
is the new art subversion. I don't think there's anything nowaday
that can pretend to be as anti-artistic as the action of coming into a gallery
and pretend you're there to decorate, apart from really believing it.

At any rates, the story of Roadsworth, which art
I can see no other reason of existing than as an indicment
against urbanscape boringness, has been told a few places.

I'll am going to propose you is that you go to
http://zekesgallery.blogspot.com
for a magnificent (if only slightly obsessive)
coverage of the affair, or write here:
maire@ville.montreal.qc.ca
if you think that Roadsworth shouldn't go in jail
or pay 50 000 dollars of tax worth.

Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

(I actually wasn't sure when I saw the first Roadsworth pieces if they were art or
part of a publicity campaign. Maybe that is because the work used archetypal
typography to transcribe seemingly harmless doodles: Owl, plant, electric cable and slots,
etc)

New Art Blog

2004-12-15T23:30:00.000-05:00

Well I'm Attempting this New Art Blog thing.

I first thought of calling it ArtBitch, but I'm not yet that pissed
off an individual, and I thought ArtTwitt would cool everyone off
on that matter.

Everyone?

Who's everyone?

I don't know...

Have you ever watched Empire, the Andy Warhol film,
from beginning to end ?

There you go.

That's what blogs are for,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

1

2004-12-15T22:07:00.000-05:00

ROCCKKKKKKK NNNN ROLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!