thumbnail_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeB.png

Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeB.png

md_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

sm_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

thumbnail_Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

Mackenzie_Bundle_Mar2025_SizeA.png

Mackenzie

thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Feb24_SizeB.png

WorkmanArts_Feb24_SizeB.png

md_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

sm_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

WorkmanArts_Feb20_SizeA.png

Workman 1

thumbnail_CMAG - web banner (mobile) (300 × 250 px).jpg

CMAG - web banner (mobile) (300 × 250 px).jpg

lg_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

md_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

sm_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

thumbnail_CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

CMAG - web banner - desktop (970 x 180) px.jpg

Plural

lg_C159_Cover.jpg

md_C159_Cover.jpg

sm_C159_Cover.jpg

thumbnail_C159_Cover.jpg

C159_Cover.jpg

Review

**John Nyman** is a poet, critic and scholar from Toronto.

Things—whether extracted, manufactured or discarded—are a defining part of modern life. They are also a defining problem for modern art, one which Katie Bethune-Leamen’s most recent show at Susan Hobbs Gallery addresses with generous helpings of drollery, pleasure and play. Her approach is exemplified by her cornucopian list of works, in which the exhibition’s series of formally similar porcelain, bronze and mother-of-pearl sculptures are titled with reference to an evocative array of objects—an Aztec knife, a teething clamp, a honeydew Melona bar—as well as to their real or imagined relationships with human subjects, as in the group of 2019 works collectively titled _Sculptures people might want to be friends with or put in their butts_. As an artist, Bethune-Leamen uses her impressions of things—what they look like, how they feel, how they make her feel—as prompts to make new things that remind her of them, or of other things. You might say she has a thing for things, with both the sensual connotations and the ironic redundancy of that phrasing very much intended. Where too many artists have sought to rescue modern objects from a world they believe merely consumes them, Bethune-Leamen finds new pleasures in that consumption, further enfolding it in the flow of _stuff_ and _us_ that makes up an embodied modernity.

Figuratively, the French expression _la douche écossaise_ refers to a rapid alternation of contrasting behaviours or tones, much like the homonymous mixed programs of comedy, romance and horror that played at Paris’s Théâtre du Grand-Guignol during the first half of the 1900s. In this sense, it offers an ingenious lens through which to encounter Bethune-Leamen’s artworks, which often pull their viewers through ambivalent pairings of familiar and outlandish, placid and discomfiting, or charming and grotesque. Surprisingly, though, the show seems even more indebted to its title’s literal meaning of “the Scottish shower,” a 19th-century process of bathing limbs in hot and then suddenly cold water that was said to have originated in Scotland. Many of Bethune-Leamen’s sculptural objects are perched on pastel- and skin-coloured rods anchored by slabs of smooth, veiny marble, reproducing the distinct look of a bathroom countertop or spa. This ambience is reinforced by gallery-spanning installations of grooved porcelain tiles—burgundy on the first floor and viridian on the second—that segment the space’s walls into soft-cornered rectangles, narrow channels and arched niches in the exact manner of decorative architectural moulding. 

But all of this is only set-up for an exhibition that makes a point of being bodily, even a little gross. On the whole, _La douche écossaise_ cultivates an exceptional kind of ickiness, one just un-cloying enough to take pleasure in—but where does it come from? Sure, the show’s ubiquitous bronze sculptures—shiny spud- and sausage-shaped lumps with palpably kneaded rumples—look a little like turds (with beautifully crunchy bits of mother of pearl sticking out for extra cringe). And okay, the close-up photographs of delicate, dewy pink flowers on the second floor suggest something from one’s nether regions—an association further corroborated by the images’ title: _The accumulation of pictures of your tattered asshole on your phone 01, 02, 03_ (2019). But the thing is, even these pieces would just look like more modern art if not for their being situated in a space that borrows its predominant aesthetic from a Victorian lavatory. The result is a viscerality that is neither representational nor expressive, but euphemistic: objects that might be gross in surroundings meant to distract from our bodies’ inherent grossness by being as polite as possible. 

Euphemism, humour and irony are often seen as means of keeping one’s distance. Yet Bethune-Leamen’s insistence on folding the ends of such distances together, and dwelling in their kinks and crinkles, evokes an intimacy with modern life. I’m reminded of a musing from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s _Winter_ (2015): “\[W\]hat is the pipe that leads to the water tap other than an extension of the gullet, the pipe that leads out from the toilet bowl an extension of the colon and the urethra … ?” But where Knausgaard speaks of human extension—the way we send our insides out, like satellites into orbit—Bethune-Leamen illustrates how we bring our outsides in. The print of a trampled and then pearl-and-tassel-spangled can of Crush titled _Shrimp study—squished cream soda can 02: Billboard_ (2019)—a kind of cryptic centrepiece of the exhibition—phases between imagination and trash. Even the grid-folded paper it rests on evokes both cheap advertising material and a plush, quilted mattress. In bizarrely analogous fashion, the face-like, partially pearl-studded wads of white clay pictured in _Pearl blob face / Green Man 01 (no pearls) x mascarpone, 02 (2 pearls) x gardenia_ and _03 (lotsa pearls) x frostine_ (all 2019) also push out and in, bubbling recognizable forms out of their bulbous masses while simultaneously absorbing us in the false interiority of the face. 

Just below the surface, almost everything in _La douche écossaise_ bears reference to water; like in Knausgaard’s vision, it’s water in the pipes behind the walls, water under the skin. The pearls invoke a direct connection to water, while the porcelain tiles dialogue with water by demarcating and enclosing its proper space. Water is in full bloom in the dewdrops of _The accumulation of pictures…_, but only behind thick, fleshy frames, which make it seem as if the flowers are being viewed through the portholes of a submarine. 

Much lip service is paid to the idea of sidestepping the linear (read: capitalistic, imperialistic, environmentally destructive) notion of progress implied by modernity’s objects and aesthetics, but embodying its alternatives is both a more difficult and a subtler affair. In fact, easy contrasts between the modern technologies of hierarchization and a supposedly ancient feeling of oneness have been around since modernity’s beginnings. For those more deeply concerned with the problem, Bethune-Leamen addresses it on a level that is not dismissive but integrative; her modernity is both spiritually embodied and viscerally dismembered, refreshingly novel and _same old, same old_ at once. 

Writer

Criticism, Again

lg_145-NYMAN

md_145-NYMAN

sm_145-NYMAN

thumbnail_145-NYMAN

145-NYMAN

issue-145-p55-57.pdf

John Nyman reviews Toronto-based artist Katie Bethune-Leamen’s exhibition _La douche écossaise_, at Susan Hobbes Gallery in Toronto (November 28, 2019–January 25, 2020).

La douche écossaise: Katie Bethune-Leamen

Reading the first issue of _Civilization_ (2018), I felt something like relief after telling myself it didn’t want to be read. Newspaper is already uncomfortable—an extreme medium, with its walls of text on pages proportionate to none. It is impossible to hold, let alone finish: a confusion of stories, recklessly arranged, with a 24-hour shelf life. Filled to the margins with interviews, infographics, listicles, statistics, cartoons and more, _Civilization_’s 16 broadsheet pages are too much, though I suspect it loves its impossibility as the joke of its soul. Co-editor Richard Turley, a New York City- based designer, says the impetus to start _Civilization_ came from “looking at the few \[print\] magazines and newspapers that remain,” and concluding that they all “look the same.” He expressed wanting _Civilization_ to give its readers a total experience of New York City—“scattered moments in the city, what people are talking about, what they experience”—but the end result is a publication that seems more intent on winning circulation as a fashion object than as a text. Its impossible readability lies less in its unruly form or ambitious scope than in its insularity and self-commodification. 

Visually, _Civilization_ is as strong as it is exhausting: a black, white and yellow cacophony of content. The issue is a marvel for its sheer abundance, beautiful in its oppression. Its pages are so filled with variably arranged text and illustration as to intimidate the reader. The totality feels cynical, as if rendering the absurdity of a newspaper’s mission to represent a defined local, national or global moment, day after day. How could any cipher honour the indecipherable muchness of the world? _Civilization_ exhausts its own resources in trying. In places, the borders around articles break apart and the text overflows, as though _Civilization_ cannot contain its own ambition while sustaining coherence. The sole relief from the paper’s visual assault is in its centrefold: an advertisement for NYC\-based fashion brand Telfar, the only time I have ever experienced advertising as a space to breathe. On all other pages, “information,” such as a count of someone’s macro-nutrient intake on a given day, a list of “Types of Hats on the M Train 11.25 AM Friday,” or in one case, just “Human-/itarian/Crisis” in a large font, splashed across the page, fill any and all space between meatier articles, like interviews with NYC professionals or friends of the editors and long-form prose contributions. These spontaneous parts subvert the medium’s established seriousness and, in their sheer volume, are endowed with uncanny authority.

Newspaper is an appropriately capacious choice for a publication wanting to communicate a city’s myriad subjectivities, and _Civilization_ is in a position to showcase its expressive potential as a collaborative medium. Yet it is impossible to finish without feeling like, in all its maximalism, and for all its stated aims of multiplicity, an editorial voice has keenly gathered contributions that support its own hypothesis. In an interview between “Civilization” and “Psychologist,” the former wants to ascertain “whether or not living in New York makes people crazy.” This question answers why the visions of the city appear so consistent across so many contributions; pieces of data about the city and its “Drinking Water Contaminants,” “Crime Statistics” and “Hygiene, Vermin, & Filth” assert a coolly nihilistic picture of NYC, as if the only thing that can be quantified is the city’s depravity, its psychic burden. These are stories of dissatisfied consumerism, “Adrenal Exhaustion,” good pills at bad parties, shoplifting at Dean & DeLuca. The struggles of the creative class to survive in an impossibly expensive city are painted with the greyscale of hip apathy. Here, there is only one New York City, with little room for contradiction. The effect is a sort of filibuster—too ironic to be polemic, but wearying in its insistent detachment and unrelenting ennui. In this sense, the newspaper feels closer in spirit to a newsletter, a dispatch from an echo chamber, intended for circulation only among a particular set of New Yorkers who love to hate their city. I am often left wondering what is meant to be of interest in _Civilization_ to anyone but them. 

So, I am suspicious when _Civilization_ reminds me on every page that I can pay to have any crop of it printed on a premium cotton T-shirt for $50\. The paper is keen to circulate beyond the social network generating it, but as what? The designers behind the publication seem as (if not more) invested in it being seen as being read, in it achieving a status closer to the _New Yorker_ tote bag than the magazine. The first issue’s rapid endorsement from the fashion industry (the cover page was a featured print in Junya Watanabe’s Spring/Summer 2020 menswear show) deepens my suspicion, as though the publication could be a status symbol from its debut, as though it was already a “cool” commodity before its contents had ever been read. Interesting, then, that its most lucid (and entertaining) contributions are its more explicit engagements with consumer experience: reviews of a Zara, spa or supermarket that approach facets of capitalism as aesthetic objects. These seem to be flickers of _Civilization_’s self-reflexivity with regards to its own consumerist entanglements, but ultimately, in exploiting its circulation to achieve commodity power as an object, _Civilization_ diminishes the effect, neutralizing the contributions under its own will for marketability. If its status is ultimately its success, then the inherent joke of _Civilization_ is on me, for trying to read something with no text. 

md_145-PACE

sm_145-PACE

thumbnail_145-PACE

145-PACE

issue-145-p54-56.pdf

Michael Pace reviews New York-based, self-published magazine, _Civilization_, edited by Richard Turley, Lucas Mascatello and Mia Kerin (Issue 1, Vol. 1, 2018).

Civilization #1

Header

C Mag