Category Archives: Reviews

A recent preview for Galleries West of Tara Nicholson’s exhibition at Deluge Contemporary.

A recent reviw of Robert Youds’ show at Deluge Contemporary via Canadian Art. Thanks to Leah Sandals for editing and links.

Choice

[Originally published on Exhibit-V, February 2011.]

Referring to Debora Alana’s recent piece for Exhibit-V on Rebekah Johnson’s The Hamlet Panels, Christine Clark has commented, “Poor Hamlet.” That seems to be a good place to start. Why? Hamlet is one of those roles that consumes the actor’s personality, or insinuates itself in. Thinking of Daniel Day Lewis on stage frothing & neurotic, or Mel Gibson’s jocular striving to show himself to be both robustly and pragmatically insane,  or my old favourite Lawrence Olivier, absorbed, withdrawn, narcissistic but tender (in response to what? To whom? To the form of the play, to the script. His tenderness is almost John Cage-ian in its withdrawn, abstracted amorousness for passage.)

Why this aside? The role is famous for connecting player to part to play to form. It is acting about acting in a play about plays (literally the theatre Hamlet creates within the play but also his own “antic disposition”.) That is important to notice here because the piece that RJ has made references Minimalism, specifically (in the statement) Donald Judd’s ‘specific objects’, for instance. Now the old debate about Minimalism (esp applicable – or at least the fight worth fighting- in the case of Judd), is Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” in which Fried argues that Minimalism engenders a theatre for itself…a theatre of viewer response, self-consciousness and action.  This is a problem for Fried, who argues that ‘absorption’(a kind of self-forgetting) is a key experience in western art. Minimalism, with its call to action, its theatre of the literal, disrupts this contemplation, spectacularizing itself in a way that becomes a didactic object lesson. OK.

Now, the problem (meaning the knotty problem, the interest, the tension) in The Hamlet Panels is that it is a theatre itself. A theater about Minimal form and its concomitant action…the surveillance cameras record your responses. A second clue is the floating ‘X’, like a patch of gaffer’s tape marking a spot for an actor in rehearsal, insinuated into the glass sandwich which is the the small zone, the puppet theatre if you like, for real viewer interaction in the piece. Caught between absence-presence-x-marks-the-spot and the cameras trolling, self-consciousness becomes self-surveillance. Obvious enough but keep it in mind.

Now we are quite acclimated to self-surveillance, as it has become pretty much a social form online in ways that pursue the courtly mirror-world of Hamlet. It is an adolescent environment, and Hamlet, though thirty, is an adolescent character, which explains why some playwrights despise him and modernists adore him. Moderns also love him because as a neurotic non-decider, Hamlet’s diffidence between problem and action becomes action itself, an interstitial zone that is rhetorically dynamic but practically static, indicating the importance of the courtly mechanism, the mechanism of the play and Hamlet’s playing as pivotal within it.

I want to argue that self-surveillance inherits this trope, that social networking for instance with its passion for text and mechanism and prurient curiosity for exposure and echo is very much the fit to this glove. It is important that Johnson’s not-quite-Minimalism-as-theatre-of-Minimalism has plenty of open ends when thought of this way…the absolutist qualities of many minimal forms as something we now accept as part of designed environments, both real and virtual for instance, reminding us that the big Hamlet-gambit of ‘specific objects’ (that the Minimal object is non-relational, anti-Cartesian, irrational in its insistence on unity rather than a compromising interplay of parts) has long since been absorbed into the current state of virtual environments as theory, but that as practice, having space ‘to stretch one’s arms again’ (as Rothko, pre-minimalist and dramaturge once said) is very important.

Thus the Fifty-Fifty for this show, thus (though I think it’s a weak point) so much loose swagging of cable around the site. Outside of the institutional habitat of the UVic Visual Arts department where this work was made (itself a nod to Judd, clarified) Johnson  has shifted ground to surround her work with cameras and their cordage and the close walls of an artist run centre that has long made a name for itself as an ad-hoc venue. This is an authentic strength of the Fifty-Fifty at times, and a ranklesome irritant at others. Here it works, mostly. Knowing what we know, it would be great to see Johnson work with cameras again, and aim them more directly at the problem of lighting (attention that grants what Fried called presentness, grace) vs. surveillance (attention that implicates and frames), and all this vis a vis the question (thinking of Viola’s Room for St. John of the Cross) of connecting or divorcing the space.

“Visceral Bodies” at the Vancouver Art Gallery

[This review was written for Exhibit-V and posted April 29^th, 2010. It has been edited slightly from its original form, mostly to eliminate redundancies in language and argument. ]
Part of the Cultural Olympiad, the exhibition Visceral Bodies at the Vancouver Art Gallery (curated by Chief Curator/ VAG Associate Director Daina Augaitis) is presented in dialogue with the accompanying show of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies, The Mechanics of Man. Visceral Bodies is itself divided into three sections, “Visceral Bodies”, “The Scientific Body” and “The Fragmented Body”, invoking both hard and social sciences, or as Gallery director Kathleen Bartels put it, “the body as a subject of anatomical, social and psychological study.” Strange bedfellows with skytrain station advertisements displaying the sleekly x-rayed physiques of athletes in motion (faster without their skin on), the notion of the paired exhibitions is to present Leonardo’s sketches -taboo-transgressing scientific humanism – alongside a more radical inquiry in which ‘humanism’ as such may not survive the procedure by which the taboo is excised.

At the entrance to the gallery containing “The Fragmented Body” is a collage by Kenyan-born, New-York based artist Wangetchi Mutu, I belong to you, you belong to me (2007.) Gracefully negotiating attraction and repulsion, smooth skin cut from advertising and illustration presents a soulfully luxurious tension that is ruptured by clutches of plastic pearls that spall incomprehensibly, uncomprehendingly out of unexpected orifices. Skin as such (and our gaze skimming it, drawing pleasure) becomes inadequate to cover what lies beneath (an interior decomposition, or more threateningly, like an expanding universe or spawn of maggots, recomposition.)

Mutu’s materials are at one with her content: Mylar (the synthetic cousin of vellum, calfskin) feels like skin and is manufactured for drafting; craft store ‘pearls’ are at once both agitating grains and corrosive kitsch. Everything frightening in its natural manifestation has its synthetic echo and all of it cajoles, upsets, and ultimately objectifies our involvement. It seems too obvious to say that Mutu’s imagery speaks to gender or race (in another gallery, we see more collages made from old medical illustrations of sexual organs infected with disease), or rather of one race or gender’s view of another exclusively. They are the fear of multiplicitous categories, of mutation, loss of resolution’s dignity and segregating language. They are powerful because they acknowledge that desire undoes these things as readily as disgust or dread.

Other works in this gallery are not as strong. Shelagh Keeley’s Writing on the Body (1988), is a massive multi-panel wall piece consisting of drawing as deliberately crude atavistic/confessional sign systems referencing bodily fluid, internal organs and amputated /alienated body parts. It was originally a site specific piece, in which the artist covered the walls of a gallery in Tokyo with a mixture of wax, Vaseline, and pigment. Here the panels have been cut out of their original architectural environment and propped against the wall, appearing as matter-of-fact slabs mostly absent of tension; the space the bodies would seek to assemble themselves in cannot thicken around them or attenuate threateningly.

This point is underscored by a small row of drawings on vellum by Betty Goodwin on the opposite wall. The Goodwins are taut by comparison; merciless in their ability to marshal stray swipes of carbon into a deft, dramatic economy. Positioning these two bodies of work across the gallery from one another robs each of something important. Keeley’s work looks like poorly informed illustration when it means after all to appeal directly rather than portray; the terse mythopoeia of Goodwin’s drawings get crowded out by a much larger work that seems to extrovert and vulgarize its palette and technique. It’s a superficial comparison.

Overall, it has to be said, that the gallery would benefit greatly from some judicious editing. The overwhelmingly sensuous affect of works as varied as a papier-mâché skin by Kiki Smith and a video of several sonorous larynxes by VALIE EXPORT would have more impact in an evacuated, clinical environment, the lucid surveillance of a contemporary art space merging with the sterile caution of the care facility.

Perhaps the only work that makes a virtue of the crowding is a haunting sound piece by Teresa Margolles called Sonido de la Morgue/Sounds of the Morgue (2003). A pair of heavily insulated headphones hanging from the ceiling in a corner proffers listeners the sound of an autopsy being conducted on an anonymous murder victim in Guadalajara, Mexico.

The sounds are mostly a continuous, slushy slicing and sawing remarkable for both its professional efficiency and its homogeneity. I am reminded immediately of the seemingly endless string of unsolved murders in Sonora County, excoriatingly documented in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, and like that narrative, the relentlessness of the situation is by turns both horrifying and giddily absurd.

In a crowded space the sound becomes gravely intimate, the grim reaper sharpening his scythe heard as cricket legs rasping together on the fringe of your hearing. It almost feels consoling to note its persistence as one strives to shut out other sounds, feeling the relief that the worst is after all over and the procedure carries on unhurried. It’s only when one tries to have an interior monologue in response, that the continuity of the sound becomes gratingly intrusive, demarcating a boundary between internal and external, and interupting the predatory progress of expectation as development. Death is distracted.

The next section, “The Scientific Body”, suffers from overcrowding, but in a way that more directly undermines the operation of some of the artworks. Notably, works by Gabriel de la Mora and Mona Hatoum propose the artist as manipulator of medical imaging, and rely on a place for the viewer’s body to relate directly to this imagery so as to be implicated in its projected diagnostics.

Mona Hatoum’s Deep Throat (1996) presents a blandly innocent dining table and chairs, with a screen neatly inserted on the bottom of a dinner plate. The screen shows a video of an endoscopic exploration of the artist’s digestive tract. The title of this work calls up the famed pornographic film of the same name, with its overlapping associations of eating, speech, and sexual penetration. The arrangement also suggests an homage to the work of surrealist René Magritte, notably Portrait, 1935 (a slice of ham on a plate that stares out at the viewer from an unblinking eye) and The Rape, 1934 (a face whose naïve features are a woman’s nude torso.) The implication is of sexuality without intimacy, but more properly of a body alienated from itself. Like the victim of an eating disorder or childhood abuse, the self of Deep Throat has lost the horizon upon which to envision the negotiation of its thresholds. Paradoxically (and pathologically), nothing can be controlled but everything shall be witnessed.

The problem with the presentation of Deep Throat here is that the room is too crowded to approach the table at some remove, as ordinary domestic tableaux. As a result, the initial sting of bourgeois betrayal is lost. Likewise, the chair is barred from sitting with both conspicuous plastic strapping and a large sign. This seems like museum security overkill, and disrupts the fantasy that it is the viewer who is invited to sit and stare, and by extension, weakens the implication that the abyss we gaze into represents our own internal workings.

Likewise, Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora’s Memoria I (2007) wants to make a space for the viewer as participant. Using MRI technology and a 3D printer, the artist produced seventeen replica skulls based on those of his close family from both live and posthumous scans. These include the skulls of a stillborn sister and deceased father, all placed at their owner’s respective height with the exception of the tiny infant, who appears as if cradled at chest level. As a memento mori or vanitas (reminder of death’s inevitability), the piece is compellingly direct, yet also delicately tactful. At a distance, the synthetic skulls emerge only gradually from the background wall, calling forth their idiosyncrasies and differences as they do so. Up close their appeal becomes more immediate and irresistible, their evident fabrication hinting at both material and virtual presences; now, elsewhere, and later all at once. In a tight space, this transformation is not enabled, and the pieces can too readily be taken up as ethnological curiosity -Day of the Dead carnival-, their mirroring potential passed over (It’s worth noting that this is one of those pieces that rewards, or even anticipates the gap between online purview and firsthand encounter) .

In the end, it is not really only a question of curtailing or choreographing certain works to a greater or lesser degree. The more important issue is how the various works come together, and it is here the charge of crowding becomes most detrimental. Having two works each by Wim Delvoye and Marc Quinn, for example, means that each piece by a given artist, though distinct formally and conceptually, has more obvious similarities with its sibling than with other pieces in the exhibition, so that the artist’s brand is more strongly enforced than thematic links from work to work across disparate disciplines and milieu. Of two sculptures made by Berlinde de Bruyckere, one maintains a delicate balance of sacred and profane grotesquerie while another is less subtle, weaker in placement and ultimately supplementary.
In some cases, artists should have been reconsidered, relocated or not included at all. The exoticism of David Altmejd’s work feels generally ill-supported and out of context in the midst of its more somber neighbors. Antony Gormley’s Drift II (2009) accomplishes itself brilliantly in a room of its own while Luanne Martineau’s provocative Dangler (2008), stuffed into a corner by a doorway, is hard put live up to its name. Martineau’s felted sculpture has fantastic but complex presence, much subtler in reality than in reproduction, and this is part of its tactile/semantic undertow. To deny the work its softer operations is, significantly, to curtail the viewer’s  progress through the hazards and liberties of critical reading.
Visceral Bodies suffers from organizational problems that obscure both the power of individual artworks and the greater gesture of curatorial intent. I hope it does not sound like post-Olympic grousing to state that the challenge faced by the proposition of Visceral Bodies are a problem of curating as commuting meaning versus programming as engendering spectacle. The body is a potent frame of reference when come upon unexpectedly, offering both the informational shock of the facts of life and the contemplative unpeeling of their artefactual presence. To repeat this revelatory act of skinning the cat so many ways in such close quarters however, is to risk robbing mimesis and allusion of their power to transform in any lasting way, which is to say, within the body of the viewer’s sensibility. Denied sensibility, the works must become bodies without politics.

[written November 2009. Never published]

Like a film in which doomed youth try in vain to escape vengeful spirits only they can see, I have of late been menaced by my experience with Daniel Laskarin’s sculpture. Criticisms I’ve read of Alberto Giacometti’s work leap to mind too late to save me. Peter Schjeldahl, David Sylvester, and Jacques Dupin all detected a tie between object and observing eye as surrogate for the artist’s absented concentration. Enveloping the viewer in the largesse of an artwork’s undertaking, it is the promise of undecided form weighed against the threat of overall disintegration. Like the money that comes in dreams only to evaporate upon waking leaving somehow less than nothing, the plays of possibility that had appeared initially enter a vacuum as the work becomes obdurately, inevitably present. In the way that only dreams and artworks can steal back something never really owned, the viewer is suddenly indebted.

At the opening of Sticks and Stones, his recent show at Deluge Contemporary Art, I was with chair, one (2008), alone despite the crowd, feeling backed into a corner. The chair resembles the one occupied by the music teacher of Matisse’s The Piano Lesson (1916), both body and chair as skirted fetish, sternly listening. Blocks suggested by a cube emerging from the chair’s seat and the filled void beneath it are reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s Cast of the Space Beneath My Chair (1965), in which a displaced mass speaks to the residue of an absentee author. Recall Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Poetics of Space, in which the accumulative nooks and crannies of domestic memory become the warrens of creativity’s accretion.

But Laskarin’s chair is not a residual artifact, it is an interactive device. The chair’s solidified voids respond to the viewer’s body through agencies of sheen and sound. When I saw the chair in Laskarin’s studio, he paused as we spoke across it, his voice taking on a rustling ring, “Hear that? It registers.”

The hollowness of the chair as both throne and bell supports the authority of its profile, a traffic cone defining the centre of an accident scene, expanding to become a cone of silence enclosing the room, an inquisitor’s cap dropping down around your ears, shutting you in against a ringing throng (thunderous something-not applause-surrounds…)

Back at the opening, I was thinking, this work makes me feels stupid. Plenty of things make you feel stupid in passive principle, but this work was doing it on purpose. On first take, it might be like a painting by Luc Tuymans, a shivery proposition cum preposition, not the thing one thinks but a construction of the mind, a revenant placeholder for lost politics, resilient as a complex. The person to whom this chair belongs has felt stupid (second take), the person for whom this chair has been made was persecuted as ignorant, (third take: tortured by education).

On the wall there are three pictures and then somehow more of a building wrapped up plus a monument with a golden statue on top (and yet, and, 2009). Blue-grey wrapping, grey sky and gold statue compose soft relief nestled in a grey niche. They present themselves sculpturally, if sculpture didn’t seem to always be moving; the impression is of the medium pointedly denied its dynamism.

You watch each picture for the plot but each is the same. Now you are wishing you had not constructed this line of thought, as obviously wrong-headed as it is when all of these images are readily irreconcilable (the pleasure of stereo being, for instance, not in reassembling two sounds into one, but in becoming two places musically). It becomes a taxing match game, double-checking for story and scale as the hypnotically bland beauty of each image demands estrangement from its doubles. A companion piece to Laskarin’s more demanding objects, the photographs compose a vanitas to both the travel snapshot and the public monument as two languages stranded on the wrong side of time. A digital-age moral lesson ensues, in which the pangs of multiplicity pay for the pleasures of spastic relativism.

Nearby a large, boxy object (like a postbox, or the filled cube/skirt of the chair) flattens a punch line beneath itself, evidence appearing in a comically still-there blob of plasticky resin, a throbbing, blood-red, thumbs-up (the trouble with longitude, 2009). You feel the freight hit its mark, but the sanguine exclamation doesn’t quite surrender its absurdity and become a full-blown joke. The box is really very smooth and rhetorical, and floats before ever it falls. The crimson curl is not crushed -a supine quotation mark or deferential comma- so that the impact of the statement (it falls) never settles (‘it falls’; it falls,) but rests…

Dupin writes, “The purposeful indefiniteness which readily isolates the objects and figures, expresses my separation from them, leaves them free, that is, in a position to choose among various possibilities.”

Like those phenomenological reads of Cezanne’s brushstrokes that assess each one as representing infinite choices, the posture of Dupin’s argument assumes that the counting doesn’t cost, configures a viewer who is not bound even as the work is made free.

In three separate works, a small figure-bust with head down -not to chest, but like a dog offering its concentration- broods. The most consequential-seeming of these is at the end of a plank counterweighted with books (considering the quotient, 2009). A uniform brown in concert with the wood, the books once belonged to artist’s father, and speak of schooling stacked up on a distant, dusty grade. The axis is a chunk of industrial flooring still surprised at itself, and below it all a pole negotiating a kind of tripod or jack rigged with improvised shims.

The handcraftedness and precariousness of everything but the little man make it look as if things are as they are for a reason. The books (mathematics and improbably, Macbeth) offer a column of causation we’ll never grip in one hand and saw off with another. Such is school. Plank and man form a kind of jumping-off point for a line of thought about texts that won’t be penetrated, places that can’t ever be reached, or retaken, from the memories that have yoked them to one gaze, when that gaze turned down and followed its feet, observing nothing, shoving whittlings of wood into the crevice between bed and wall, all this time spent alone with one’s words, working without talk.

Silence is what you can measure the spaces between the artworks in, a matte silence belying the striated, fractious destinations of your body. The effort to stake out silence is undertaken with seriousness by the duped photographs, by glassy planes rendered in CAD, by prosthetic antlers crisscrossing in several directions from a dandling hub, or a tiny bronze rocket and what resembles the dross of its casting. What do I mean by silence? It isn’t choosing not to speak in aid of asking something, offering consent or (as often happens in dialogue) indictment, but not offering to speak regardless because withdrawal is a finer expression of the gesture of instruction. The works would make us silent too, neither looking and asking nor looking and acknowledging, but watching and waiting, not expectant of a reply.

Midway above the stairwell down and out is a video monitor of the endless steps of an escalator, each stair rising up to fill the frame. The hovering plateau completes one wedge of dark and shimmering parallelogram of light before coughing up its double (there’s a slight lapse, things shudder along less sharply than expected of simulacra.) The drop from which you view the monitor is not rhetorical: the suspension of the loop in the confines of time-space read as tread/riser/riser/tread should be obvious to your arms and legs, but your brain has clasped itself around the theories of stairs. Everywhere else in the gallery you suspected it but now you know it in your bones: Laskarin’s work robs you of your place in this world, bulls you back into the season you just passed through, because, after all, it is an art in aid of an origin, and an eyewitness to the intellectual drift of its adventure.

For a static equivalent we could think of the drawings of Charles Sheeler who, like Giacometti, organized visual surveys whose signal motive was a massively tactile effort at disambiguation, electrifying with doubt whoever stands in the lighting rod rectus of the watcher’s shoes. Laskarin has expressed his admiration for critic Richard Shiff, who writes of doubt (and related experiences identified as prophecy, paranoia and projection) as ‘interference’ phenomena in the communication linking viewers and artworks.

In a recent exhibition at Vancouver’s Access with Toronto artist Jennifer Hutton, one of Laskarin’s works appeared adjacent to a Hutton text piece that read, “Things, not pictures,” echoing William Carlos Williams’, “no ideas but in things” the little sails of these italics blown by a breeze we’re all made to feel when we read,

“so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

An earlier body of work by Laskarin, Agnostic Objects, borrowed from illustrations in 19th-century farming manuals, re-plotting horse-feeders and fleece-crates in a way that lent them the virtuous virtuality of minimal sculpture. Take Laskarin’s interest to be sincere, and apply the will to animate objects of utility intimately linked-as in Williams’ “variable foot,” both arch and plain- to his testing of the sensuous thresholds of cognitive dissonance. Like Williams, Laskarin builds knockdown plays of form propped up by oblique semantic gestures. Treacherous to the prejudices of the educated, commanding in their contingency, they read as operating manuals for anti-academics.

[First published in Coagula, January 2010]

When Wendy Welch was a grad student at Cal State LA in the eighties, she tore up an Ed-Moses-style abstract grid painting on paper she had made in front of studio mate Barbara Kerwin, throwing the pieces over her head. “Does the world really need another abstract painting?” This story could be a fable about the way painting’s playing out of its own demise has developed into throwaway theatre, the acrobatic humour of Welch’s gesture itself prophetic of her future work. Welch’s recent exhibition, Circuitous Routes: Excess/Abundance features six new works that expand upon the artist’s evolving commitment to drawing and installation, while at the same time using castaway matter in a manner that recalls painting.

Welch’s pieces are assemblage via cutting and culling: doodles or scribbles are cropped and coloured, landscape photographs are snipped into spiralling double-binds, and domestic objects are sorted, braided and taped. The latter has led to a reading of Welch’s work as a critique of consumer culture. This understanding should be investigated more closely. Her objects are clean/bright rather than soured/stained, recalling the instantaneous waste of bulk-buy stores instead of the homely old artefacts of Rauschenberg or George Herms. In this, she comes closer to Jessica Stockholder, who has been known to rhapsodize over red plastic gas cans (“they embody colour, their colour goes all the way through”), while at the same time making their material’s innocuous gratuity seem like the elephant in the room. Like Stockholder, Welch is not interested in the abject glamour of everyday waste, but in its license to elicit sympathies located in the body’s wishes.

Welch has said, “A huge investigation for me is the ‘natural gesture’…I have a fascination for how people doodle, how these marks have an authenticity whether or not the person who makes them is an artist.” Welch is also the director of an independent art school, undertaking on a daily basis the weaving and weeding of gestures, the democratizing of riffs.

I am thinking of these points as I follow the curling shocks of a piece called Circulation (Administrative). Elegantly boxed in a taught network of call-and-response, they evoke an athleticism that classy art critics might relate to both Pollock and Poussin. I can’t restrain them in such linear spin-offs; tracing Welch’s cut and paste demands a willingness to think plural. The drawings were scrawled on envelopes in spare moments then pared carefully, along or against the mete line. Consider the editing room’s splice and jump, the piled-up days a store of gestures made one way then another, like martial arts manoeuvres or the finer points of table talk. Deployed, they uncoil into miraculous transformations of white wall into stolid or foolish commentary on space and pace.

Central to Welch’s show is Tumbleweed (Reconstructed), a massive tangle of recycled objects in primary hues: vinyl roses, plastic tubing, coloured tape wound around Christmas lights…a cultish collection for a forgetful flock. Looking at this work suspended centrally in the gallery is also looking through it to the surrounding walls, an act of reordering in itself. Its masses soften optically into a dangling diagram, the cluster of shrubbery choreographing a lover’s tryst in an Italian garden. Comedy and tragedy turn on symbiosis…the assemblages of paper, painting and photography on the surrounding walls are Tumbleweed’s metaphysical support-network, underwriting its fact as pattern and distraction. In another universe (across the room, over the shoulder) Tumbleweed becomes a ghost at the banquet, deepening our engagement with the threat of more object-hood, more knowledge, more history, more undoing.

In fact, Tumbleweed is ten years worth of Welch’s materials reconstituted for this event, and it risks unravelling the other works, relocating their logic in the unmanageable drag of waste-as-place. It is a credit to the integrity of Welch’s structural tact that this never happens. Instead, the piece is an organ grinder, a monster still-life in which colours surrendering their objects and objects enacting fantasies of spoiled credulity are disciplined by a composure that becomes both order and offering. Its apocalyptic narrative, reorganizing desire in the face of truth-or-consequences, gives way to a freedom from fault, a paradise of perfect placement.

[First published in Border Crossings, August 2009]

A year and a half ago when reviewing Robert Youds’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, beautifulbeautiful artificial field, a phrase popped into my head: ‘commercial commons’. I found myself comparing the tug-of-war within the work’s aura of commodity and possibility to the liminal drift you are prone to while loitering in airport kiosks and shopping malls…the sense of free-floating leisure that sometimes emerges in a way that feels parasitic to your intended timeline. These “temporary autonomous zones” (to borrow Hakim Bey’s phrase), are blind spots in an age of self-imposed surveillance, in which the search for an authentic sense of the present amounts to a creative act.

Originally a painter, Youds identifies his work as “structures”; his material vocabulary resides in the designed environment, including Plexiglas, fabric, foam, LED and enamel-coated aluminium. The resulting work, while clearly not painting as such, invokes painting’s effects if not its means. It might be accurate to say that Youds makes ‘specific objects’ that are best discussed within a criteria of perception, projection, and transport, all the more freshly-mobilized for not displaying obvious debts to the matter of painting. In trying to locate the in-between-ness of Youds’s work (between painting and sculpture, domestic and public, manufactured and tinkered with) I’m reminded of a phrase the late David Foster Wallace once used to describe his writing: neither self-reflexive ‘metafiction’ nor minimalist realism, but “meta-the-distance-between the two.”

The foam structure Youds calls Jesus Green Tofino Sunset leans against a wall. Propped up and plugged in, its gentle oscillation of coloured bands gradually initiates viewers into a feedback loop; sensation and afterimage become casually haptic. The overall installation resembles a staging ground, open to intervention from the outside world. The real Jesus Green is itself an anomalous commons at Cambridge University (one field guide has it as, ‘a quiet retreat to roll up a reflective spliff.”) Adjacent to the larger Midsummer Common, it was originally intended to be a railway station, featuring a line of picturesque plane trees, but also an anachronistic specimen of open-air swimming pool called a lido.

The marginal utopia embodied by the lido is cited here because much has been made of Youds’s uses of luminosity as a linkage to a Romantic heritage of ravishing lyricism. I think this interpretation misses the point. Despite the impressive “finish fetish” of his structures, Youds maintains an intimist’s economy; his wall pieces address a single viewer. There is something catalytic in the baffled frontality of his presentations, Like academic landscape’s Cartesian metaphors of chamber and window, the framing devices and concurrent shadows of the series entitled “X,Y,Z,A,B” suggest an ethical dimension in their conspicuous contingency. Here the event is the viewer’s immanent sense of restraint, as it gradually recapitulates and dissolves the pretence of the scene.

The real test of the exhibition may be embodied in the seven spun-aluminium stools collectively titled Verner Panton’s very best day. With their hand-painted tops and dedicated plastic mats, the stools resemble a kind of votive stand-in for a viewer’s investment, both offering and ashtray. Their narrative titling, recalling the Danish designer’s immersive, chromatic interiors, suggests stakeholders in a failed -or fantastic- seriousness. There is an urbane irony here, a flattening out of possibilities. It is an important part of Youds’s operation, projecting the shallow, cubist backspace of his structures into reverie’s narrative theatres.

This can be evidenced in For Everyone a Window, which takes the viewer through a six-minute cycle of shifting colour and time sequences that suggests a much longer duration. This mnemonic lapse had both temporal and spatial dimensions for me, a few moments drawn out into the eternal wait separating Jay Gatsby’s lookout from Daisy’s green beacon. By now, the collegiate connotations of that romantic story have doubtlessly become both more poignant and less useful than they once were, acquiring a polish of irony that does not diminish their currency but preserves it at a wishful distance. Youds’s angling play of coloured light feels a little like those shafts beaming down on the verging words of an Ed Ruscha drawing. Being both artificial and affecting, they announce a moment that is already over with, vacant, but in the light of attention cool and trucial.

[First published by

Art As Authority, San Diego (Artasauthority.com), November 29^th, 2008]

La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose.

- Paul Celan

In the corner of the gallery sits a small blue object, like an egg. Its blueness seems concentrated in the white noise of the shabby corner, small and dense, tight and aloof. Looking closer, something protrudes from discreet folds in the split surface: a hand, a cartoonish call for help. It’s a temperature-sensitive gel suspended in puckered plastic, a soother for teething infants. The little fingers seem to invite us into the surface of the sculpture but it’s a pacifier (a “dummy”). Suddenly surrogate, it reorders the terms of the contract: we grip; it becomes part of the mouth.

Sandra Doore’s work depends on equilibrium, of hot and cold or my space and your touch. Compulsion (title of three of the works in this exhibition) is after all a desire to augment and adjust, in the name of achieving the grace of the initial, virgin context: the compulsively cleaned, trimmed, brushed, filed, locked, polished or tied. The Compulsion pieces protrude from the wall in a row, the size of a petite fist or breast, streamlined but soft. Through tubes (the transparent handles of soap-storing scrub-brushes) bra straps wend their way, in weightless, sensual suspirations of corporality and control. Lingerie also fulfills this function on the floor version of Paradox of the Absurd: an ornamental constraint, it can’t commute the mass that extends from it. Like the fluffy synthetic band of Venus in Furs, it invites touch while defining the borderland where surface slips into formlessness, unknowable becoming unthinkable.

What can or can’t be thought of is part of what Paradox provokes. Teething toys, lingerie, kitchen utensils or fold- away furniture, they offer the signifiers of domesticity without the relief of interface, creating a Trap or object lesson out of familiarity. Body image occurs as part-object, from which we cannot possibly assemble a whole, (a sexual organ, a self, a mother, a family household) or a cancerous mass whose growth defies any internal economy. Their rounded edges recall the amphibious lines of contemporary consumer goods from SUV’s to cell phones, designed to insinuate themselves into habits’ niches. Poreless, they seem to emerge from a virtual space, as in the very narrow gap between sorted and unsorted recognition at the mirror, the split-second gap in which we decide whose side we’re on.

Beyond provocation and protuberance however, the ungainly balancing act of the pieces, their ultimate co-dependence, wins out. Experienced in the round, the objects become funny as well as unbearably candid, sensible as well as demanding. Their utensil-armatures assert themselves as a structure of foreplay, their cruelty the necessary discipline for a therapeutic confrontation. Over time, it becomes apparent why Doore still considers herself involved in an extension of the dialogues of painting: surfaces and touches that defer and deflect, forms that role-play interchangeable scenarios of illusion and material cause, craft as the desire to arrest a body’s limitless flux, a language that projects its vulnerabilities in order to expose our own.

[First published in Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2008]

Brenda Petays’ drawings line the bead board walls of the Slide Room Gallery in a darkly flickering cinematic progress…which is to say that as one moves from picture to picture images meet others halfway, seeming to breed one another, as if naming the viewer as complicit in their having been dreamed. In the corner propped and straightened like box camera or guard dog is a composite constructed from a portable easel containing two shredded books and many neat cigar boxes, one of which undertakes a miniature mock up of a studio apartment grown dark from spending too long in a forgetful region of the conscience. Above the whole a light bulb is dangled, somewhat redundantly granting the air of watchful dereliction.

Nearby on a wall are scrawled the contents of the easel’s boxes, which tend to recuse themselves from too much inquiry, excepting perhaps the identities of those books that have been soaked and scrubbed until they are platters of pulp…A Thousand Plateaus is one of them, and Petays’ visual mastication undoubtedly undertakes the oral promise of Deleuze’s haptic/nomadic commons. Around the base of the easel is a big sailor’s rope, like a punchline dropped before being properly delivered. It’s a bit of a lover’s knot: the band around the oval plank of a Cubist souvenir collage…so the tether’s broken, but the contents hold tight. Do you want to get this or don’t you?

The watercolours are adolescent humour-as-momentary-connection: morbid, grotesque, funny before or after the shock their humour giddily insinuates. Faces of family and friends are doctored, mostly unpleasantly, reminding us that to do injury to others is a way of being oneself touched (the nauseous intimacy of another person’s lips and teeth to the knuckles)…this thought aided by a group of comic-book mock-ups, Nurse and Wound, featuring “Witch Nurse”, “Action Nurse”, etc., that could be read as a way of working rather than disparate acts: artist as nurse. The wound pulls faces to the surface of the picture, sends stress-signals to that almond-shaped bit of the brain that twitches the hippocampus to record this face forever; for sensation’s sake (it hurts) and not compassion. Pain appears here as a prosthetic extension of attraction, a way of making curiosity more doable.

The mistake is to believe for more than a moment that Petays’ subjects are in the way of any serious harm. They’re injuries are comedic. A series of scarred and perforated Vogue magazine covers are more seriously acting out. The images belong to all of us, and seeing them change mints an introvert’s humour into shining sarcasm. The scratches and rubbings on those celebrated faces and bodies look devotional, amplify fame whilst bluffing with persona. They are rich with the fondness of the real fan, and we can almost see ourselves in them. Down below are cut and stacked sections of the mags: “Vogue Bucks”, conveying rather ungraciously the deadweight of a good cosmetic purchase. It’s the necessary counterweight to the filmy shallowness Petays achieves with her webs of scar tissue: the slump under the glamour, the unconsciously dragged pickup skip from hope to gloss, reflecting back the depressive sleepwalkers we can sometimes seem to be. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock (quoted by Petays on the wall) said it memorably of a night as full of dull promise: “Like a patient etherized upon a table”