Column

Writer

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Language

Typography

This article discusses Swiss writer Robert Walser’s microscripts and his move towards writing with antiquated short-hand in pencil. His interest in pencil over pen is fundamental in his writing process, and Mieke Chew argues that it allowed him to writer more freely, more loosely, in a way that approaches drawing.

On Writing: The Pencil Method: a minor genre

Publisher

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Publishing

Design

This primer features an image of the cover of WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing from November / December 1981.

Primer: WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing

Anna Kovler is an artist and writer living in Toronto. She is currently interested in DIY art galleries as engines of empowerment and community building, and their invaluable role in creating opportunities for artists and curators.

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Music

Nature

Politics

This section presents a selection of note-worthy items and events related to the issue’s theme of WET that includes: the Toronto duo Sebutt and Ranman’s Jacuzzi DJ set, which set performance to music; Sebastian Koever’s exhibition at VSVSVS Gallery involving his aquarium collection; the amendments to made by the Navigation Protection Act of 2014 to the Navigable Waters Protection Act of 1882; and Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn/Library of Water.

Inventory: WET

**Peter Morin** is a Tahltan Nation performance artist and writer. His work focuses on decolonization through the centering of Tahltan knowledges and practice.

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Body

Environment

In this article artist, curator and writer Peter Morin presents three stories reflecting on his experiences with cold water baths and how they affect the body and mind.

Cold Water: Three Short Stories about Cold Water Baths

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Editorial

The concept of a _WET_ issue emerged as a way to elicit both artwork and criticism that deviates from a tendency in contemporary art towards practices that are intellectually abstract, often highly frenetic, and detached from physical places and bodily experiences. Particularly in press releases and artist statements, work is often described as taking on social, economic or ideological forces at a global scale, with artists or curators citing a myriad of textual and theoretical references that may not be apparent in the work itself. Many of us might only encounter art in a pristine gallery setting, or primarily through writing and documentation; thus the ways in which an artwork translates into information and the specific ways it is institutionally legitimated are highly dependent on the work’s settings and descriptions. This, of course, excludes a vast range of practices that are more tactile, sensory and experiential. _C Magazine_ has often been concerned with critiquing and countering dominant tendencies in contemporary art, and we continue this critique through the _WET_ issue, using the concept of “wetness” to describe aesthetic experiences that are fluid, immersive and bodily, and which invoke a sense of the porous relationships we have with the spaces around us.

The _WET_ issue is also an exercise in shifting how we understand the parameters of contemporary art and criticism. In the past, I’ve emphasized that _C Magazine_ is not about art personalities or “art news,” but about critically understanding the _contexts_ of contemporary art, such as language, culture, ideas, institutions, communities and economies. But a context doesn’t have to be so abstract. It can also be an ecosystem, the atmosphere, or the space of a sauna or cold pool. Shifting our understanding of context in such a seemingly direct manner, requires an entirely different mode of presence and receptivity that is attuned to the body and its engagement with other people and the spaces around it.

The concept for this issue also arose from the immediate experience of visiting saunas, baths and swimming places with artists, and seeing these as sites of aesthetic experience and public life, spaces of both relaxation and conviviality. Interestingly, there is a history of conceptualizing bathing as an aesthetic practice, and numerous contemporary artists have incorporated it into their work. Exploring this at length was _Wet Magazine_, published in California during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by Leonard Koren. Self-described as “The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing,” _Wet_ offered much more than its title suggests, providing a vivid reflection of artist and punk cultures and becoming a vanguard of New Wave design. Koren, who also wrote books including _Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers_ (Imperfect Publishing, 2008), and _Undesigning the Bath_ (Stone Bridge, 1998), eschewed architect-designed spaces in favour of simple, elemental bathing environments such as springs, tidal pools and mud baths. While _Wet Magazine_ was more hedonistic and heterosexual than _C Magazine_, these magazines have definite similarities in that they both reflect a style and vision that has often been risk-taking, idiosyncratic, and socially promiscuous, demonstrating their characteristic roles as cultural and countercultural intermediaries.

I’d like to also argue that _WET_ is a directive to use the body as a vehicle or instrument for the investigation of sensory experience, a process during which we recognize and engage the proximity and porosity of skin and atmosphere. This directive can involve the application of various materials and conditions to the body: heat, steam, leaves, stones, cold water, or an alteration of gravity, thereby constituting a form of inductive research that helps us understand what these forces and actions might do to us. 

_WET_ is also a practice of cultural inquiry. For more than a decade, I’ve been informally investigating sauna cultures and rituals, visiting traditional Russian saunas in places from Moscow to Mississauga, where people go to conduct business or to sweat out hangovers, as well as German, Korean and Finnish saunas, hidden away in sleepy industrial plazas or in people’s backyards. Learning about the global diversity of bathing practices, and the existence of a literature on bathing culture, I became attuned to places along back roads in the country–side where one might have a quick bath before arriving at a party, or to refuges alongside rivers that teenagers inhabit, building fires or constructing rope swings over the water. The acts of finding respite in a cold brook or taking a sauna among friends or strangers are openings into the ecology and social life of a place, a way of getting to know it through one’s senses, of engaging in and inventing ritual and community. 

While some of the pieces in this issue are distinctly about bathing, such as Christie Pearson’s interview with Leonard Koren, Noa Bronstein’s essay about Olivia Boudreau’s translation of the contemplative space of the bath into video installation, or artist Peter Morin’s three stories about taking cold water baths, other pieces explore the issue’s theme in more oblique ways. Jen Hutton revisits Ed Ruscha’s _liquid paintings_ from the ‘60s, exploring the fluid quality of this series as she moves back and forth between physical enunciation and painted depiction. Wetness can also imply leakage, either from arousal or because something is uncontained and possibly dangerous. Invoking this latter definition, Allyson Mitchell addresses the complicated, often messy debates around queer identity and feminist politics, writing a public response to a letter by an arts reporter who took her installation _Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House_  a little too literally. Also pressing the boundaries of social acceptability — but instead playing on stereotypes of straight female desire — the artist Dayna McLeod dressed entirely in animal print fabrics for a year as part of her _Cougar for a Year_ project, observing people’s reactions to her presence as a queer, not yet middle–aged woman. In this issue, the critic RM Vaughan writes about this playful and critical artwork in his essay “Women Who Run (Off to the side of) the Wolves.”

We also invited readers and contributors to send us photographs of “wet places,” which we have published as a feature project. These include everything from mud spas to wading pools and places where one might cruise for sex, as well as a tiny Icelandic hot pool where people have been baptized since the 10th century. One can still bathe in this ancient geothermal pool. If there’s an image you’d like to share with C’s readers, send it along. We’ll be publishing more photographs of wet places on our Tumblr site after this issue goes to press.

I hope that this issue might give you some ideas for appreciating the relationship between the body and its surroundings, for making art that is physically engaged and multi-sensory, critical and playful, and not strictly detached, abstract and cerebral. Or, that it might simply give you more ideas for living in this way.

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

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Location

Editor Amish Morrell discusses the aim of the WET issue to counter dominant trends in contemporary art toward the theoretical and textual by instead eliciting aesthetic creations and experiences that are fluid, immersive and bodily. He proposes thinking about concrete environments like the space of a sauna or cold pool as a different way of thinking about “context” within contemporary art, bringing attention to art-making that is multi-sensory and playful. Morrell also discusses the history of conceptualizing bathing as an aesthetic experience and how this relation between bathing and artist cultures were taken up in Leonard Koren’s Wet Magazine, published out of California during the late 1970s and 80s.

Editorial: Wet

Feature

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Food

International

Painting

This article discusses Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha’s “liquid” paintings, in which words are painted using food such as ketchup, beer, chocolate syrup, and water.

Ed Ruscha The Liquid Paintings

Noa Bronstein is a researcher and curator based in Toronto. Recent curatorial projects include _THE ANNUAL_ (2012) at the Gladstone Hotel, where she was the Director of Exhibitions and Cultural Promotions, and _Out of Sorts_ (2011) at the Design Exchange, where she was the Director of Public Programs and an Acting Curator. Upcoming curatorial projects include _Memories of the Future_, co–curated with Katherine Dennis, at Gibson House Museum and _Data Mine_ in Gallery 44’s vitrines, both opening September 2014\. Noa is currently the Head of Exhibitions and Publications at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography. 

Turning to the intimate encounters that occur in private spaces, such as the steam room, the bath, and the bedroom, Montreal-based artist Olivia Boudreau’s video and performance works offer a meditation on duration and silence. These intimate encounters occur not only in space, as Bernard Schütze notes, but also in time.[^1] In Boudreau’s 16 mm film _Le Bain_, which was exhibited in 2011 at Néon contemporary art in Lyon, France, prolonging is a prevailing leitmotif. The slow action of the two bathers materializes the body politic within a protracted, sedated unfolding and offers, as Schütze notes, “a waiting that becomes the matter of the work…and the mode whereby the viewer accesses and enters the piece.”[^2] The film introduces little by way of action. A female body leans into the male and they endure in a state of idleness. A somewhat concealed male hand periodically drips and splashes water onto the more visible female frame. He touches her ear, her breasts, rests a hand on her head, she re–adjusts her position. In other moments the only movement is that of his breath slightly elevating and dropping her head. 

Duration is Boudreau’s syntax: an axis along which viewer, artist and image meet. Yielding the body, of both the viewer and bathers, to a slowing down adjoins these two corporeal entities. Halfway through _Le Bain_, around 10 minutes into the 23 minute film, the screen turns to white, then to black. The sound is not muted, however, as the delicate resonances of water being permeated by the two bathers remain audible. This is a startling break made even more jarring by the overlaid audio of what sounds like tinkering with, presumably, the camera equipment. The moment lasts for only a minute, but is long enough for the viewer to form an awareness of Boudreau’s steady cadence; her gesture has held us in reverie. 

Duration and slowness are taken up by Boudreau in several works. In the video installation _Intérieur_ (2012), exhibited at the Darling Foundry (Montreal), two draped windows are blown open by wind and subsequently closed by a figure whose sole purpose seems to be the completion of this task. Persistently, the action cycles through these moments as if on repeat. Sharing in the framework of gradual recurrence, _Salle C_, a 2007 performance at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal), positioned Boudreau as both performer and spectator. Seated in the gallery for every hour of the exhibition, a total of 150 hours, the artist passively gazes at a projection of a specific section of her own body — her lower back on the gallery bench. Behind Boudreau is her collaborator, the video camera, while fixed to the wall of the gallery a horizontal shelf holds the archive of this sit–in, 150 videotapes, one for each hour in the gallery. The serial proposition of long moments magnifies each small action and injects significance into the seemingly inconsequential through the display of this heroic, mundane undertaking. 

Slow–moving time is also an accomplice in _L’Étuve_ (2011). In this immersive life–sized projection (exhibited at NO Foundation in Toronto in 2013), a group of women slowly appear and disappear like a mirage. Unhurriedly moving between presence and absence, silence and noise, nudity and dress, Boudreau makes visible the hidden moments of this contained space. Young and old bodies (or, one older body to be precise) in various states of undress occupy green and white tiled tabular planes, while steam renders the body as a mythic figure, available for passing moments. The reveal is redacted, exposing skin only as much as the vapour allows. Choreographed through a series of unfoldings, _L’Étuve_ tempts. The first frame exposes a copious haze that pours over the lens. As the mist dissipates, a single figure is revealed. Rhythmically the sequence is revisited; haze conceals visibility, then ebbs to uncover two more figures, then a fourth, and a fifth. Finally the steam lifts to disclose that the container has been emptied of its visitors. The room is filled and cleared. In this way, the steam room becomes palimpsestic, formed by a series of returning occupations and vacancies. The piece’s slowed pacing and inactivity suggests that the shifting of the bather’s bodies is an indication that something is about to happen. In the end not much happens, yet it is this masterful ability to dramatize listlessness that makes Boudreau’s work so compelling.

When first encountering _L’Étuve_ at NO Foundation, I was compelled by how these listless moments appeared to be at once ethereal and substantial. I was also struck by a seemingly unlikely parallel to Gerhard Richter’s _Eisbergim Nebel_ (_Iceberg in Mist_, 1982), in which a swathe of fog obscures an iceberg levitating in water. Both of these works share in limiting access to the principal figure, which is restrained by the artist and by physical elements. This gesture foregrounds the weight of concealment. It is worth noting that Boudreau and Richter part ways in regards to media use. Richter has said that it was Caspar David Friedrich’s _The Sea of Ice_ that led him to visit Greenland, but since his camera was not able to sublimate the gravitas of the landscape he turned instead to paint.[^3] Nonetheless, in both Richter’s and Boudreau’s works the veiling of the iceberg and the bathers extends an invitation to look harder. Fog allows us to linger, to spend a little longer than we might ordinarily. That the mist obscures, landing everywhere and nowhere in particular, makes the subject all the more seductive. 

_L’Étuve_ offers a gentle introduction to the artist’s techniques for framing intimacy. Sidestepping sentimentality, Boudreau invites a more nuanced approach to intimacy, one that is realized through restraint. While her staged encounters are heavily constructed, her ability to present stillness grounds the intimacy presented in reality. The steam room is a set; outside the frame of the camera is the fog machine and a skeleton of lumber parts. In preparing for the project, Boudreau spent six months visiting different steam baths in various places — Montreal, Rawdon, Bromont, Mont–Tremblant and others. Through this process she realized that the visual symmetry she had envisioned for the room did not exist, or at least not that she could find. So, rather than filming in situ, the artist constructed a steam room within her studio. The set provided the opportunity to live with the bath over a longer period and to rehearse in the space. Building the steam room was an important shift in Boudreau’s practice. Initially, she was concerned that the sense of authenticity that she was interested in exploring through a naturalistic and minimal approach to performance would not be possible within this fabricated environment. Her apprehension faded when exacting the right space and scale for the work allowed for the conditions of control and accessibility needed for the project. The consideration for assembling a space has now found its way into Boudreau’s process for developing a project.[^4]

This fabricated space is hidden from the viewer but the constructed tableau is betrayed by the actors themselves, by the women who at one definitive moment in the video briefly look out to meet their audience’s gaze. These bathers appear to be lucidly making eye contact with some future spectator, acknowledging the performance for the camera and for a public. The intimate encounter could certainly be eclipsed by the props — the camera, the set, the actors, the fog machine. While the performance is, of course, composed, the intimacy retains an aura of genuineness and it is the prop that is ultimately collapsed within the intimacy of bodies and place. This is perhaps because Boudreau’s austere gestures eschew cinematic and literary tropes of intimacy. The steam room is stripped bare, excavated from emotional excess and the indulgence of mawkishness. It is also the banality of the compositions that makes the intimacy seem near. Boudreau is able to focus in on ordinary moments and to resist the impulse to over–narrativize. It is almost as if the intimacy is distilled to its essence. _L’Étuve_ is what remains when the window dressing of the overly romantic or erotic is cleared away. 

If time is the syntax of these works, then sound is the metatext. The sonic space of the bath and the steam room is pervaded by the splashing of water and recurrent steam blasts. While a discernible soundtrack exists, the audio lacks any dialogue. Nevertheless, this form of non–verbal silence is not silencing. Silence is often framed as a negation of noise, as the negative space.[^5] Conceivably, however, silence is equally the positive force, while sound is the negation of quiet.[^6] In this way Boudreau’s reticence is a linguistic form whereby time and intimacy are revealed. It would be easy to lose track of time in these sleepy spaces, if not for the intervention of periodic sounds. The almost inconspicuous sounds of the water and steam metronomically indicate that time is continuing. Exactly how much is lost is unknown, as are any numeric values. Sound offers an aide–mémoire to the stillness, indicating that these moments, while transitory, remain temporal. In this context the conversational silence does not serve to flatten, rather it grants access to the intimacy of non–dialogue, the spaces between words. 

The bath is architecturally, ritualistically and allegorically significant accompanied by a host of actions: by serial de–robings and cleanliness routines, by religious immersions. These same apparatuses are folded into constructs of femininity and exoticism, which have in turn been folded into the tomes of art history; see, for example, Jean–Léon Gérôme’s _Le Marabout: in the Harem bath_ (1889) and François Clouet’s _A Lady in Her Bath_ (1571), amongst innumerable others. And it is here that Boudreau’s work sits, albeit uneasily. In both _Le Bain_ and _L’Étuve_, a very limited view of the vessel of the encounter is revealed, its edifice exposed only in part. The architectural details of the floors and ceiling are marginally discernible in _L’Étuve_, while in _Le Bain_ the tub is obscured from full view. The interior details that would signal place are not visible. Access is not visually granted to the towel rack, the sink, the bath mat, the mirrors, or the soaps. Similarly, the rituals of bathing are obscured. The procedures of undress, the performative formalities of entering into spaces of undress, do not appear. While _Le Bain_ does hint at entry and exit with the woman bather partially shown entering and leaving the space, this remains the only gesture pointing to something outside of the bath itself. The routines of bathing are done off–camera and the viewer is left to determine if there are subtexts to these scenes. The lack of narrative and interior details results in the image hovering at the margins of meaning, but recreating at the invocation of absolutes. In this way Boudreau’s compositions are distanced from the canon of representations of the bath as an agent of architecture, ritual and allegory. 

We are led into these seductive spaces and are left without a guide. Boudreau permits entry by leaving room for intuited meaning, by offering an understated intimacy and by reframing stillness and silence. Nothing happens and yet we are compelled to stay. 

[^1]: Bernard Schütze, _Matters of Waitings_, excerpt from catalogue for the Quebec Triennial, 2011\. Accessible at [www.oliviaboudreau.com](http://www.oliviaboudreau.com/lebain%5Feng.html)
[^2]: _Ibid_. 
[^3]: Robert Storr, _Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting_ (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 66\. 
[^4]: This paragraph is formed from an email conversation with the artist on May 14, 2014 and July 7, 2014\. 
[^5]: Stacie Withers, “Silence and communication in art,” in _Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives_, edited by Adam Jaworski (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), p. 351\. 
[^6]: _Ibid_.

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Video

Stillness, silence and the body are explored in this feature, as found in the work of Olivia Boudreau. Noa Bronstein focuses on Boudreau’s videos Le Bain and L‘étuve, which consist of slow-moving, intimate shots of bathers and sauna attendees, respectively. This slow duration is considered for its relation to the intimate, ritualistic practice of bathing and the depiction of these everyday environments.

Taking it Slow: Duration and Intimacy in Olivia Boudreau's Le Bain and L'Étuve

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This section features a compilation of images and descriptions documenting places where people bath, wade or soak, drawn from submissions from C Magazine readers. From hot springs near Taipei, Taiwan to a wood-fired horse trough hot-tub in Reddickville, Ontario, a wide range of water-related activities and environments are featured. The section is an hommage to WET Magazine’s annual competition for images of “Wetplaces”, where bathing was explored as both an aesthetic and social project.

Wet Places

Interview

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Christie Pearson begins with an account of the social and cultural significance of the shift from public bathhouses to private bathrooms. The article then moves to an interview with Leonard Koren, writer, architect and founder of WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. They discuss Koren’s work with WET, his views on Los Angeles and New York in the 70’s and 80’s, and his sustained interest in bathing and bathing environments.

WET 2014: An Interview with Leonard Koren

Letter

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Criticism

Identity

Sexuality

Feminism

Gender

Canadian

This section features a letter by Allyson Mitchell in response to an open letter addressed to Mitchell written by Jess Carroll previously published in Carbon Paper. Mitchell responds to Carroll’s criticism of her art installation project Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House that ran from October 16 to October 30, 2013\. Mitchell responds that the intention of the project was not to be friendly but to be critically engaged with the complexities of feminism and queerness. To Carroll’s charge that the installation was “not listening or teaching,” Mitchell responds that a processing room for listening, talking, and thinking was built into the work, in addition to which Mitchell contributed hours to responding to comments on Facebook.

Dear Jess Carrol from Allyson Mitchell

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Designer

Artist Project

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This artist project features a text by writer RM Vaughan, which explores Danya McLeod’s Cougar project. The project involved her wearing only animal prints for one year, and was intended to address perceptions of sexuality as expressed by older women, as well as gender constructs more generally.

Women Who Run (off to the side of) the Wolves

Artist

Photography

This artist project features a centrefold of a photograph by Danya McLeod entitled “Summer,” taken from her Cougar For A Year series from 2012.

Cougar Centrefold

Review

Rhys Edwards is an artist, writer, and curator. His writing has appeared in _Canadian Art_, _C Magazine_, _Whitehot_, _The Capilano Review_, and _ReIssue_. He holds a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC, and lives and works on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo Nations. 

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Sculpture

Representation

This article presents a review of an exhibition of works by Glenn Brown and Rebecca Warren at the Reenie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver, from October 26, 2013 to March 29, 2014\. The review was written by the 2014 winner of the magazine’s C New Critics Competition, Rhys Edwards.

Glenn Brown/Rebecca Warren: Collected Works

Henry Adam Svec is a writer and scholar who is moving to Jackson, Mississippi.

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Animals

Installation

This article presents a review of D’Arcy Wilson’s exhibition Tuck, held at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario from May 23 to June 20, 2014.

D’Arcy Wilson: Tuck

**Aryen Hoekstra** is an artist based in Toronto, where he currently serves as the Director of G Gallery.

In the 1950s, it seemed increasingly likely that we were only a generation or two away from a fully functioning robot workforce. Over the first half of the 20th century, early science fiction’s prophecies of submarines, planes and rockets were materializing as real, operational technologies. The apparent ease with which these formerly fantastic novelties were being realized spurred further speculation about how humanity’s future condition might better be shaped. It was at this time while automation was in its infancy, with its promise of increased efficiency and decreased expenditure, that forward–looking groups such as the Situationists and Yippies concluded that we would soon wholly abandon the obligation of labour once and for all.

There was a fleeting moment when it seemed that this was a collective desire, but it didn’t last. This utopian enthusiasm was soon re–routed to embrace the ends of productivity and the conversation around work dramatically shifted to view labour as an inherently moral quality that required unwavering valorization.

Ever since then, those who have advocated for a decreased workday or extended weekend have been vilified as unproductive and unpatriotic. However, in _Is there anything left to be done at all?_ Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens take up this now–resistant stance of a nearly lost era, wherein large–scale poetic projects were dreamable and a more egalitarian society seemed just on the horizon.

Arranged across the lobby and rear exhibition spaces within Trinity Square Video, Ibghy and Lemmens’ exhibit presents the detritus of unproductivity, revealing the artists’ radical laze. _Is there anything left to be done at all?_ follows a month–long production residency at TSV in which Ibghy & Lemmens invited artists Justine Chambers, Kevin Rodgers, Rodrigo Marti and Ryan Tong to aid them in removing the expectation of quantifiable results from their work processes. This proposition is a difficult undertaking and the danger in attempting to show the abstract dis–order of the creative process is that, if successful, its actualization risks shedding the allure of its obscurity. The exhibition takes the form of a struggle with that question. How does an artist exhibit their creative process without formalizing it?

Within TSV the vestiges of this purposive purposelessness are made manifest as _ad hoc_ sculptural assemblages combining simple materials found around the gallery or purchased nearby. In the lobby, a neatly folded moving blanket is discreetly placed at the base of a plinth around which wooden fragments from previous installations, renovations and strikes have been arranged. Its vague composition resists the label of ‘sculpture’ and could easily be mistaken for refuse from an artist’s studio, though to describe what is exhibited as unfinished is to once again fall into the trap of having expectations. Instead, what is shown lacks finish precisely because it is aimed toward no end. In its indeterminacy it attempts to remain in the sphere of pure means, unveiling the immanent potentiality that lies within the process of creation.

On the floor, propped against a wall and adjacent to the lobby plinth, leans a flat screen monitor that shows a video of the artists and their collaborators sitting on the same floor, absorbed in an extended break before returning to motion. In the rear gallery too, audio and video documentation show the hosts and their invitees gathered around similar sculptural assemblages that maintain a suspended state of flux, continually being re–edited, re–arranged and re–considered. Treated as objects themselves, the monitors and screens upon which these acts play out form a constellation of documentation — not staged, but simply recording the imprecise goings–on of a willing group of collaborators. Little of what is shown in the videos remains in the gallery; only the least recognizable items are still present. Instead, the attendant technologies are replacement props, their arrangement enduring as provisional and already predisposed to future manoeuvring and reimagining. At the show’s end much will be packed away, discarded, or wrapped in blankets to be taken elsewhere; the elements will be returned to their pre–action state and once again open to subsequent meandering explorations.

The commercial art world has long favoured the practices of artists who are productive enough to satisfy the demands of the marketplace. This propensity has seemingly increased since the global financial meltdown as the purchasing of emerging artists’ work has on occasion been shown to yield potentially greater returns on investments than nearly any other speculative strategy. This pressure on younger artists to produce recognizably saleable work encumbers the space necessary for exploration through which generative discoveries might occur. The project within Trinity Square Video delineates a territory in which these aimless investigations may again emerge, revisiting and expanding upon a conversation to which Ibghy & Lemmens have remained committed throughout their career. The suspension of any decisive conclusion in _Is there anything left to be done at all?_ assumes the utopian stance of those early science fiction writers, and in so doing undermines the privileging of resolution in relation to labour, instead proposing a low–resolution alternative to a high–definition global economy.

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Work

Found

Residencies

Technology

This article presents a review of Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’ exhibition Is there anything left to be done art all?, held at Trinity Square Video in Toronto from April 12 to May 12, 2014.

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens: Is there anything left to be done at all?

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Performance

Participation

This article presents a review of Raimundas Malasauskas and Marcos Lutyens’ exhibition The Hypnotic Show, which took place at Gallery TPW in Toronto on January 12 and January 13, 2014\. These sessions involved contributions by artists Maryse Larivire, Tamara Henderson, and Angie Keefer.

The Hypnotic Show: Raimundas Malašauskas and Marcos Lutyens

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Landscape

This article presents a review of No Foreign Lands, a retrospective of Peter Doig’s work held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from January 24 to May 4, 2014.

Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands

**Rose Bouthillier** is Curator (Exhibitions) at Remai Modern in Saskatoon. Previously, she was Associate Curator & Publications Manager at MOCA Cleveland.

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This article presents a review of Sara Cwynar’s exhibition Flat Death held at Foxy Production in New York from April 4 to may 3, 2014.

Sara Cwynar: Flat Death

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Mapping

This article presents a review of the exhibition Chronovisor: Archive, presented at South Kiosk in London, England from May 15 to June 20, 2014. The exhibition featured works by Mirko Smerdel, Rowena Harris, Johann Arens, Cathy Haynes, Verity Birt, and Patrick Hough.

Chronovisor: Archive (Mirko Smerdel, Rowena Harris, Johann Arens, Cathy Haynes, Verity Birt, Patrick Hough)

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This article presents a review of Moyra Davey’s exhbition Burn the Diaries held at Museum moderner Kunst in Vienna from February 21 to May 25, 2014.

Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries

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Architecture

This article presents a review of the Kuwait Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, which took place between June 7 and November 23, 2014.

Acquiring Modernity: Kuwait Pavilion

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This article presents a review of the project Erring on the Mount, and initiative of Peterborough’s Public Energy that presented 53 art projects in the de-consecrated convent St. Joseph’s on the Mount between May 30 and June 1, 2014.

Erring on the Mount

Cameron Hu lives in Chicago and plays in a band called Minor Life. His unfinished projects include a doctoral dissertation about a North Dakota oilfield, a translation of an Indonesian spy novel from the interwar period and a detective novella set at LACMA’s original Art + Technology program.

issue-123-p67-69.pdf

Conceptual

This article presents a review of the book Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn by Eve Meltzer (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Artists discussed in the book include Vito Acconci, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson.

Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn, by Eve Meltzer

issue-123-p69-71.pdf

Exhibitions

This article presents a review of the book Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art by Jens Hoffmann.

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