Column

Writer

Attention

issue-125-p8-10.pdf

Women

Internet

Feminism

In this column, Sarah Butterill, Amy Furness, Ella Dawn McGeough and Zeesy Powers document their process of staging Art + Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thons at various venues in Toronto, through which they address the under-representation of women artists on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia talk: Meetup/Toronto/ArtAndFeminism 2015

Kitty Scott is curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Previously  
she was Director of Visual Arts at The Banff Centre, Chief Curator of the Serpentine Gallery,  
London, and Curator, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Scott has curated exhibitions of artists such as Francis Alÿs, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Paul Chan, Peter Doig, Ragnar Kjartansson, Silke Otto-Knapp, Ken Lum, and Ron Terada, and was an agent for dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), Kassel. Here Scott reflects on her recent sources of inspiration, both local and otherwise. Fittingly, she begins with “Artists”

##### Artists

I have been living in Toronto for over two years now, but the city continues to feel new each day. My work gives me a focus: I am constantly amazed by the intensity of activity around contemporary art and by the ways that our artists have forged connections to international networks. The art world ecology here fascinates me and makes my life – and I hope that of many others – rewarding.

##### Architecture

Coming to Toronto has provided me with a chance to renew my love of  
architecture. It was part of my formation and is still important to me. I think about space all the time. I love Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s TD Centre and the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant that overlooks the lake. I vividly remember seeing Nancy Spero’s huge mural and installation – her first – there in 1988\. Last year I went to an event at the Hearn Generating Station – what amazing potential this site has! I wrote my MA thesis on the transformation of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern and worked on an exhibition for London’s Battersea Power Station, so the possibilities of such gigantic industrial structures for museums or exhibition spaces is often in my thoughts.

##### Joyce Wieland

It’s the people that make life here in Toronto so rich. Last fall I attended one of the most wonderful small dinners. The guests might be described as a secret society of women who are devoted to remembering the pioneering life of Joyce Wieland. For me, the gathering opened up a window to thinking more about the life of this multidisciplinary artist and her city. Adelina Vlas, my new colleague in contemporary art at the AGO, reminded me shortly after her arrival at the museum that we have great drawings by Wieland in the collection. In many ways it’s hard to believe that almost 17, years have gone by since her passing. It still seems so recent, but as it drifts further away in time, the question for me is how Toronto will remember a unique artist like Joyce Wieland.

##### Mandolin and Shaving Mug

I’ve also been exploring Ontario. I recently went to Owen Sound’s Tom Thomson Art Gallery for research purposes. They have a great, if somewhat homely, display of all things to do with the painter. Most unexpected was Thomson’s mandolin – I had no idea he played. We know the paintings, but I guess we will never know the music or the songs. Equally important, and just next door, out of viewers’ reach in another Plexiglas case, you will find his handsome grey shaving mug.

##### Roxy Miéville

Dogs, too, are o“en on my mind. If you know me, you know I love dogs. Over the holidays I learned that Jean-Luc Godard loves them, too. Roxy Miéville, his dog, “acts” her way through his disorderly new film, _Goodbye to Language_. At one point the narrator intones that the dog is the one animal that loves you more than it loves itself. I can only concur.

##### Splitting

Finally, I suppose it is old news by now, but I am taken by Theaster Gates’s response to winning the Artes Mundi 6 Prize in 2015, splitting the prize money amongst the shortlisted artists. The gesture “gives” in so many ways and perhaps speaks mostly loudly in a world where competition among artists can be so overwhelming. It’s nice to kick off 2015 with a gesture of such generosity.

issue-125-p73-75.pdf

Canadian

Curatorial practice

In this Inventory, Kitty Scott, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, reflects on her recent sources of inspiration, including artists, architecture, Joyce Wieland, and more.

Inventory: Attention

Artist

issue-125-p75-78.pdf

Dialogue

This section presents a project by artist Duane Linklater, including a photograph of the sunrise at Cape Spear, Newfoundland on March 10, 2011, and the discussion that ensued on the editing page in response to his contribution to the Cape Spear Wikipedia entry.

Artefact: Sunrise at Cape Spear Newfoundland

thumbnail_NSCAD_Web1_Sep15-Oct15_300x250.png

NSCAD_Web1_Sep15-Oct15_300x250.png

md_NSCAD_Web1_Sep15-Oct15_970x180.png

sm_NSCAD_Web1_Sep15-Oct15_970x180.png

thumbnail_NSCAD_Web1_Sep15-Oct15_970x180.png

NSCAD_Web1_Sep15-Oct15_970x180.png

NSCAD

thumbnail_WPG_Web1_Sep 15-Dec 15_300x250.jpeg

WPG_Web1_Sep 15-Dec 15_300x250.jpeg

md_WPG_Web1_Sep 15-Dec 15_970x180.jpeg

sm_WPG_Web1_Sep 15-Dec 15_970x180.jpeg

thumbnail_WPG_Web1_Sep 15-Dec 15_970x180.jpeg

WPG_Web1_Sep 15-Dec 15_970x180.jpeg

Walter Phillips

thumbnail_CaseyHouse_Sep2023_webbanner1_sizeB.jpg

CaseyHouse_Sep2023_webbanner1_sizeB.jpg

md_CaseyHouse_Sep2023_webbanner1_sizeA.jpg

sm_CaseyHouse_Sep2023_webbanner1_sizeA.jpg

thumbnail_CaseyHouse_Sep2023_webbanner1_sizeA.jpg

CaseyHouse_Sep2023_webbanner1_sizeA.jpg

Casey House 1

lg_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

md_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

sm_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

thumbnail_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

Editorial

Over the past few months, there have been a number of exciting changes at _C Magazine_. We created a new Assistant Editor position, filled by Kari Cwynar, and initiated a new Editorial Advisory Committee. Together we’ve begun planning forthcoming issues on themes including the idea of art world elders or “predecessors” and poetry within visual art, as well as on citizenship, documentation, feminism and materialism, and hospitality. Not every article in an issue, however, needs to focus on a given theme. And themes typically evolve in dialogue with our writers and artist contributors, meaning that we are open to other ideas and that you’ll continue to see a range of different kinds of content in each issue. 

This particular issue addresses a number of different emergent practices within contemporary art, from new forms of still life to performance art that employs the conventions of stand-up comedy. Among the ideas that appear within these pages is that of attention, which functions as an imperative or directive, and is the topic of one of the feature essays. Writing about the video and performance art of Jeremy Shaw, Godfre Leung looks at attention as a quantifiable commodity in contemporary economic life, where work and leisure often become indistinct. As a magazine targeted largely at arts professionals, who also participate in the art world outside their regular workdays, this collapsing of leisure and labour is particularly pronounced for us, mirroring the conditions of many other people within today’s society. 

Practices of erasure and insertion also form a meta-theme for this issue, which is employed by a number of our artists and writers. For our regular On Writing column, Sarah Butterill, Amy Furness, Ella Dawn McGeough and Zeesy Powers document their process of staging Art + Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thons at various venues in Toronto, through which they address the under-representation of women artists on Wikipedia. Also employing Wikipedia, Duane Linklater inserted himself into the entry for Cape Spear, Newfoundland, North America’s most easterly point, editing the page to indicate that he was the first person on the continent to see the sun rise on March 10, 2011\. A photograph of the sunrise on that day, and the discussion that ensued on the editing page for Cape Spear appear in the Artefact section. And dealing with ideas of erasure and transformation, Raymond Boisjoly’s artist project, titled _From age to age, as its shape slowly unraveled…_ involved taking a scan of a video of the 1953 film Statues Also Die. Here, he foregrounds the translation of form and content; the film print is digitized and redigitized, such that it is almost unrecognizable, its meaning shifted and destabilized. 

Literally erasing comedy from how we think about performance art that employs the conventions of stand-up, Kari Cwynar writes about Ieva Misevičiūtė and Michael Portnoy’s Experimental Comedy Training Camp residency held at The Banff Center for the Arts in 2012, as well as _Doored_, a performance series in Toronto. Cwynar argues that this work borrows the structure of comedy without producing humour for its own sake, as a practice of formal experimentation that engages and develops the performer-audience relationship. While it might be funny, it’s less about comedy than it appears on the surface. 

Both of the artist projects in this issue provide an apt metaphor for an art magazine’s task of reflecting the current state of contemporary art. Both Raymond Boisjoly and Duane Linklater attempt to capture something that unfolds in time: a film being screened and a sunrise. By representing their processes they reveal the impermanence and mutability of the objects they capture. Similarly, publishing an art magazine means trying to capture ideas and practices that are always in flux. This issue seeks to expose and intervene within that process, finding an elusive moment of pause and reflection on an ever-shifting horizon. 

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

Editor

issue-125-p6-7.pdf

Publishing

In this editorial Amish Morrell provides a brief description of the feature articles and artist projects in Issue 125, centering them on the issue’s theme of attention, as well as practices of erasure and insertion. He also discusses recent and upcoming changes at _C Magazine_.

Editorial: Attention

Feature

Mark Clintberg is an artist who works in art history and curates exhibitions. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. His doctoral research project compared the contemporary phenomenon of artists’ restaurants with the historical genre of still life. He completed a portion of this project while at the University of Oxford (St Peter’s College) under the host supervision of Hanneke Grootenboer. In 2013, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award. His 2015 project at Centre Space (Toronto) investigates a key pictorial element connected to still life: the vitrine.

lg_125

md_125

sm_125

thumbnail_125

issue-125-p10-15.pdf

Economy

Photography

Performance

Food

This feature article considers the still life genre, outlining its historical legacy and arguing that it remains a resonant force in contemporary art practices today. The circulation and consumption of commodities is discussed in relation to the photographic work of Celia Perrin Sidarous and the performance work of Peter Morin.

Still Alive: Celia Perrin Sidarous, Peter Morin and the Still Life Genre

Godfre Leung is a critic and curator.

His writing has recently appeared in _ArtAsiaPacific_ and _ReIssue_, and his recent exhibitions include “Offsite: Christopher K. Ho” (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2022) and “TJ Shin: The Vegetarian” (The Bows, 2022). He is the Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəyə̓ m, Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

issue-125-p16-23.pdf

Video

Drugs

This feature article discusses the video and performance art of Jeremy Shaw. The author proposes attention as a quantifiable commodity in contemporary economic life, where labour and leisure are often indistinguishable.

Jeremy Shaw: Attention, Oblivion, Jubilation

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

issue-125-p24-31.pdf

Humour

This article discusses Ieva Misevičiūtė and Michael Portnoy’s Experimental Comedy Training Camp residency held at The Banff Center for the Arts in 2012, and Doored, a performance series in Toronto. The author argues that this experimental practice employs the formal structure and conventions of stand-up comedy to engage and develop the performer-audience relationship, without producing humour for its own sake. 

Experimental Comedy Training Camp

Shannon Anderson is an independent writer, curator and editor based in Oakville, Ontario.

_But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show._  
– T.S. Eliot

An Te Liu’s sculptural practice is heavily rooted in an awareness of art history’s past. His most recent body of work makes simultaneous reference to multiple time periods, culling from the distant past, the recent past, the present and the future (not to mention past conceptions of the future). Created in ceramics or “traditional” materials such as bronze, concrete or plaster, his sculptures are based in broad cultural research that teases out recurring essential forms.

The series _Eidolon_ (2014) consists of small, stocky figures that Liu calls “Janus-like” in reference to their two faces (tellingly, one face of Janus looked to the past, the other to the future).[^1] While their fronts are clearly figural, their backs contain hollow impressions that echo the indentations seen in Styrofoam packaging inserts. The series conjures the stylized figures of ancient Polynesian sculpture, while the hand-held scale lends them a playful innocence since the crude shapes also resemble toy robots or early arcade game characters. They also embody Liu’s distinctive “polyglot” approach: he describes his sculptures as “assimilating and expressing multiple identities,” and wanting to speak “different languages at the same time and to be chameleon-like in character.”[^2]

Liu’s titles are always telling, enfolding various clues for deciphering his particular references. _Eidolon_ derives from the Greek root for “idol” and also references spirits of the dead. Liu’s contemporary animas reflect a basic anthropological form that manifests itself again and again throughout history. This iteration holds true for other pieces from his current work, which are rich in associative potential and circuitously reference a multitude of eras through a single form.

Liu’s sculptures contain an uncanny aspect: they seem like something already known, something seen before. But they don’t escape this unsettling condition, as their appearances continually suggest other objects without ever focusing on any one thing in particular. They are always both _this_ and _that_, occupying the past, present and future simultaneously. “All the pieces want to have a chimeric quality about them,” Liu says, “something recognizable you can just start to put your finger on, then slipping into something else at the same time.”[^3] He deliberately morphs together various associations at once, sometimes in a vague sense, sometimes quite specifically. _Hard Edge Kawaii Subtraction no. 2_ (2014) is one such specific instance. The smooth, curved exterior derives from what Liu calls a “liberal interpretation” of a Chinese porcelain garden stool, while the void is cast from his own Hello Kitty humidifier. This is the _kawaii_ element of the sculpture, which is the Japanese term for the kind of “cuteness” that envelopes Hello Kitty culture. That said, save for the clue of a graphic flower at its centre, most of the humidifier’s original form is difficult to ascertain, due to Liu’s choice to present the form as its absence, as a void. The sculpture brings together two distinctively different references to Asian culture: a conservative object from the traditional past and a commercial object from the pop-culture present. But the unification of these objects has birthed an entirely other set of appearances. Sharp edges and a bronzed surface lend the sculpture a futuristic aura; its austere helmet-like shape is suggestive of some kind of prop from a 1970s sci-fi film set (Liu says it reminds him of a Cylon Raider from the _Battlestar Galactica_ television series). Additionally, Liu’s sculpture enacts a formal play between positive and negative space in a manner that evokes the traditions of modernist sculpture, such as Henry Moore’s _Nuclear Energy_ (1964-66).

Liu’s cast sculptures originated in a 2012 artist intervention commission at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto: the museum’s collection of funereal ware inspired him with its burnished surfaces and ambiguous functions. In turn, he became interested in exploring the resemblances between archaic forms and modernist sculpture, particularly in the works of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Constantin Brâncuși. He decided to work in ceramic slip casting (while the preeminent medium showcased by the museum is ceramics, its commission program has no requirement to work in this medium) and spent many hours apprenticing and experimenting in Angelo di Petta’s ceramics studio in Millbrook, Ontario. As a decidedly contemporary contrast to the traditional medium and references, Liu used Styrofoam packaging as a source material. It was largely sourced from the remains of shipped domestic electronics and appliances, including a flat-screen television, a blender and an iMac. Working intuitively, in terms of selecting Styrofoam pieces that had evocative potential, he sliced, shaped and merged pieces together to sculpt the end results.

Some of these sculptures reveal their origins quite specifically, such as _Obsolete Figure in Space_ (2013), where the viewer can detect the distinctive hollow where an iMac would have once been nestled. The piece is also a direct nod to Brâncuși’s _Bird in Space_ (1923). Other pieces come about this from a different direction: _Brutalist Rice Cooker_ (2013) has a boxy shape and jutting, cubed extensions, suggestive of the form that might result if one cast the negative space of a rice cooker’s original packaging. But Liu based the form on an image of foam packaging he saw online, disconnected from any known source. And so the focus lies on the foam’s expressive potential. The finished object’s harsh density is underscored through the use of grey, crackled stoneware, and it could easily be mistaken, in another context, for a piece of genuine Brutalist sculpture.

Formally, a key connection in the Gardiner pieces lies between Styrofoam packaging as an object embodying negative space and the slip-casting process that involves working through negative and positive space. This, in turn, reflects a conceptual dialogue about use value and obsolescence. On the one hand, the usefulness of Styrofoam’s shape-specific forms disappears once the packaged item is opened; on the other hand, the objects these forms temporarily house have highly limited lifespans. Such lifespans are shortchanged on many fronts – from the rapid proliferation of the next “generation” of an electronic device, to planned obsolescence, to the lack of affordable repair options – all of which tend to send domestic gadgets to the dump long before a more ecologically conscious economy would deem acceptable.

Liu’s Styrofoam-derived sculptures not only generate a new kind of usefulness for these materials, but they also draw attention to their curious forms, allowing them to be viewed as objects in their own right. Repurposing the material gives it a second life, incorporating it into something of relative permanence with physical, conceptual and cultural weight and substance.

Throughout Liu’s practice, he has played with the notion of functionality, creating works that occupy a charged zone between useful and useless. _Cloud_ (2008) is one of a series of works the artist has generated from discarded domestic appliances. The sculpture incorporates air purifiers, conditioners and humidifiers, all hung together in a cloud-like configuration from the ceiling and allowed to run continuously. They may operate, but their functionality is made redundant. Each object is pure white, metaphorically referencing people’s need to control their surrounding environment by constantly purifying the air, an obsessive attempt to create sanitized spaces that only further contaminates the atmosphere.

And although his recent works are less concerned with a dialogue about obsolescence, the type of objects that make up a piece such as _Cloud_ still have a place in his work, as the presence of a Hello Kitty humidifier in _Hard Edge Kawaii Subtraction no. 2_ attests. As his work has shifted away from a reliance on negative forms for casting, Liu plans to return to his collection of domestic appliances in future works, exploring their potential use for these cast sculptures. His use of Styrofoam has also evolved it into a material that is used partially and non-specifically. While he has always “assisted” the material to suit his formal needs, the works currently in progress in his studio graft together all manner of residual materials, including remnants from demolition sites. This key shift reflects a focus on what his materials suggest as “stuff” and its associative potential. _Formation V_ (2014), for instance, merges a geologically inspired foundation with blocky towers, alluding to a vision of architectural remains, buildings swallowed by erosion and decay. The piece intentionally evokes the ruins commonly depicted by Romanticists, especially Arnold Böcklin’s moody landscape paintings. But it also echoes aspects of prototypical science-fiction architecture, where elaborate towers tend to arise from rocky outcroppings, leading one to wonder if Liu’s buildings are falling to ruin or rising up from the rock. It’s difficult to say. Rather than referencing any single image, _Formation V_ reveals a more general pull towards these kinds of scenes. “There’s something in our basic human nature that has an affinity for ruins,” Liu says.

Liu’s most recent sculptures expand his source material and his repertoire to include the full expanse of art history and museum studies, dipping into archeology, anthropology and geology along the way. It’s wide terrain, so one has to ask how he makes his choices and reins in the impulse to get lost in the research of forms. He describes the evolution of these forms as works that are “more about a proliferation of evidence and anthropological artifacts in general.”[^4] And so, his process begins in sifting through a huge body of cultural production and honing in on the forms that return again and again, adopting a method of looking that cultural historian Michael Prokopow calls his “curatorial mindset.”[^4]

That modus operandi often involves time and patience.“It takes me a while to decide to make something,” Liu says. “I need to keep looking at something until my eyes get fooled into seeing something else or morphing into something that suggests something from another genre or another time or another classification of objects.” As a matter of course, Liu’s objects examine multiple typologies at once, referencing various moments across time, including the future, so that time’s cyclical nature comes to the fore.

_Aphros_ (2014) concentrates on the object’s associative potential in this fashion. The sculpture’s single wing-like form rises from an angled pedestal, as though a remnant from ancient Greek sculpture. _Aphros_ is clearly connected to the Greek goddess Aphrodite; indeed, one can’t help but look at this object and think of the _Winged Victory of Samothrace_ (190 BC). But the term, in Liu’s characteristic wordplay, also derives from the Greek root for “foam,” referencing both the material from which the goddess Aphrodite was birthed, and the work’s packaging-based origins. While the sculpture’s colourless patina recalls the surfaces of ancient Greek sculpture, the most recent iteration of this piece is actually cast using concrete, another clue to its embrace of present-day materiality. The pedestal, in particular, is a nod to Brâncuși’s sculptural methods. In a key contribution to modernist sculpture, Brâncuși recognized the pedestal’s potential, lending it equal consideration to the object it supported. In _Aphros_, the object’s pedestal is quite literally part of the sculpture, consisting of a piece removed from the mold, which Liu must then recast to complete the mold for future castings. In doing so, he creates not only a formal reciprocity between sculpture and base, but also a wider reciprocity with art history in this homage to modernist traditions.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot addresses an artist’s “historical sense,” stating that it “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” He notes that this perceptual quality is “what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.”[^5] An Te Liu embodies this historical sense in that, regardless of whether he is drawing from the past or the future in his work, he always does so from a consciously contemporary position. For instance, _Gnomon_ (2013) has a totemic form that evokes associations with so-called “primitive” sculpture, but it is also a clear reference to Brâncuși’s _Endless Column_ (1938). Further, the root origin of _gnomon_ translates as “one who knows or examines,” acknowledging the conscious level of historical research embodied within the work. Liu maps the connections between various associations, acknowledging both the influence of primitive art forms on Western art history, and the critical discourse surrounding the appropriation of such tribal cultural artifacts.

While acts of homage are not uncommon to Liu’s oeuvre, they tend to be complex tributes, ones that are made through a contemporary, self-conscious lens. His series _Tropos_ (2014) embodies specific tributes, through his selection of four female figures from the modern age as the inspiration behind each piece in the series: Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Mina Loy. Each of these four women was renowned, in their time, for their outspoken attitudes and avant-garde postures: Stein, today the most well-known of the four, was an innovative American novelist; Barnes was also a modernist American writer and prominent bohemian; Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born Dadaist poet and artist; and Loy was a British futurist artist and writer.

Using a similar totemic configuration as _Gnomon_, each of _Tropos_’ stacking forms twists and turns. The repetition and mirroring of the same elements speaks to the playful and experimental approach to art adopted by these four women, and also to their vivid personalities. Freytag-Loringhoven’s totem, according to Liu, is the strangest configuration of the four: stacked at a 720-degree rotation, the geometric shapes continuously rotate like a corkscrew, but the sculpture appears symmetrical when viewed face-on. This points to Freytag-Loringhoven’s provocative, unstable personality, about which tales abound. Stein, artistically, was known for working with a self-limited range of words that were repeated and manipulated in order to stretch out the possible number of meanings and associations. Liu’s playful stacking gesture echoes the experimental use of language and form found in Stein’s work, and the practices of these other like-minded modernists, Dadaists and bohemians. And so Liu’s homage embodies both the art and lives of these four women, who travelled in similar experimental artist circles as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. After their deaths, their roles were rapidly overshadowed by their male counterparts, making Liu’s homage particularly contemporary for underscoring the recent efforts of feminist art historians to reclaim the importance of these female artists.

_Tropos_ reveals how Liu’s methods not only make associative connections, but also delve into how traditions have been received and interpreted over time. His works are intentionally slippery, playing to the changes inherent in the writing and rewriting of history. Eliot notes that “for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the _whole_ existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is the conformity between the old and new.”[^6] Therefore, with each new work that enters the cannon, a shift and reordering of the chronology of the past comes into play. Liu’s hybrid objects continuously occupy this terrain: they look to the past with full consciousness of the present, but with an instability that accounts for the future. In doing so, a sense of chronological reordering seems to unfold before the viewer, as traditions are revealed, interpreted and remade anew.

[^1]: An Te Liu, studio visit with the author, November 9, 2014\. Unless otherwise cited, all other quotes from the artist in this article derive from this studio visit.
[^2]: An Te Liu in “Location3” panel discussion, Canadian Art Gallery Hop Toronto, TIFF Bell Lightbox, September 24, 2011, http://canadianart.ca/talks/2011/09/24/gallery-hop-toronto-2011-panelsarah-anne-johnson-jed-lindand-an-te-liu/.
[^3]: An Te Liu, email correspondence with the author, November 23, 2014.
[^4]: Michael J. Prokopow, “Out of the Ordinary: An Te Liu and MONO NO MA” in \_An Te Liu:  
Mono No Ma\_ (Toronto: Gardiner Museum, 2013), 12.
[^5]: T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in _The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry andCriticism_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 44.
[^6]: Eliot, 44–45.

issue-125-p32-38.pdf

History

Sculpture

Ceramics

This article explores the sculptural practice of An Te Liu, focusing on his recent series of Styrofoam-derived cast sculptures. The author discusses the work’s associative potential through form, arguing that Liu’s unified objects occupy past, present and future simultaneously.

An Te Liu: Tradition and the Historical Sense

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-125-p38-44.pdf

Politics

Representation

Collective

This article considers the role of politics in contemporary art, looking specifically at political representation in _Here and Elsewhere_, an exhibition of work from and about the Arab world held at the New Museum. The author focuses on the work of collective GCC, discussing their use of parody to address the geopolitics of appearance. Recent projects at Project Native Informant and MoMA PS1 are discussed. Francis Fukuyama’s essay _The End of History?_ is proposed as a way of understanding criticism of the collective’s work.

There and Here: GCC and Geopolitical Style

Designer

Publisher

Assistant Editor

Artist Project

issue-125-p44-50.pdf

Technology

Indigenous

Identity

This artist project by Raymond Boisjoly involves a scan of a video of the 1953 film _Statues Also Die_. The project is accompanied by a text by curator Jonah Gray.

From age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled...

Jonah Gray is an art historian, curator, and PhD candidate at UC San Diego.

Curator Jonah Gray’s critical text, accompanying the artist project by Raymond Boisjoly; a scan of a video of the 1953 film _Statues Also Die_. 

From age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled... by Raymond Boisjoly: Text

Review

Ben Portis is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

issue-125-p52-54.pdf

Collage

Painting

This article presents a review of the exhibition _A Sacred Game: Escape is Perpetual_, featuring the work of Whitehorse artist Joseph Tisiga. The exhibition was held at Diaz Contemporary in Toronto from October 16 – November 22, 2014.

Joseph Tisiga: A Sacred Game: Escape is Perpetual

Kevin Rodgers is an artist currently based in Kingston, Ontario, where he is Artistic Director of _Modern Fuel_.

issue-125-p54-56.pdf

Memory

This article presents a review of the exhibition _Is Toronto Burning?_, curated by Philip Monk and held at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto from September 17 – December 7, 2014\. Artists discussed include General Idea, Susan Britton, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, The Clichettes, Clive Robertson, Tom Sherman, Elizabeth Chitty, David Buchan, and Missing Associates.

Is Toronto Burning?

Dagmara Genda is an artist and writer currently working in Berlin.

issue-125-p55-57.pdf

Minimalism

This article presents a review of the exhibition _Why Can’t Minimal_, curated by John G. Hampton and held at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto from September 2 – October 19, 2014\. Artists discussed include John Boyle-Singfield, Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, John Wood and Paul Harrison, John Marriott, Jon Sasaki, and Tammi Campbell.

Why Can't Minimal

Matthew Brower is a lecturer in museum studies in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He is the author of _Developing Animals: Early American Wildlife Photographs_, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

issue-125-p57-59.pdf

Nature

Built environment

This article presents a review of the exhibition _Standardizing Nature: Trees, Wood, Lumber_, featuring the work of artist Susana Reisman. The exhibition was held at Gallery 44, Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto from September 12 – October 18, 2014.

Susana Reisman: Standardizing Nature: Tress, Wood, Lumber

Rosie Spooner is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Glasgow, specializing in material and visual expressions of national identity at International Exhibitions.

issue-125-p58-60.pdf

Film

Myth

This article presents a review of the exhibition _The Fruits of Our Land_, featuring the work of artist Jasmina Cibic. The exhibition was held at SAW Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario from September 12 – November 15, 2014.

Jasmina Cibic: The Fruits of Our Land

Born in Winnipeg and based in Montreal, visual artist Edwin Janzen works in digital imaging, installation and other media.

In a 1989 spoken word performance, former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra quizzed his audience: “What does the American adult fear more than terrorists?” Answer: “Teenagers!” If perhaps glib, Biafra’s joke also neatly encapsulated adult society’s efforts to define and encircle young people with regulations and institutions. The recent exhibition _Bande à part / Kids these days_ confronts and challenges this societal predisposition. The project of Montreal curator Zoë Chan, it brings together eight artists whose works examine adolescent strategies of survival and self invention amidst our capitalist, industrial society.

But before the visitor to _Bande à part_ encounters a single artwork, she is confronted by two complementary, contextualizing installations: a table where people may write their impressions of youth on paper slips and stick them on a designated wall, and a collection of books related in some way to youth. The latter range from Vladimir Nabokov’s _Lolita_ to Mary O’Hara’s _My Friend Flicka_, from J.D. Salinger’s _The Catcher in the Rye_ to _Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul_, from S.E. Hinton’s _The Outsiders_ to Margaret Mead’s _Coming of Age in Samoa_, situating the exhibition within a society-wide discourse delimited by psychology, sociology, and youth and adult fiction. With the former – the slips of paper with visitors’ impressions – Chan foregrounds the idea of youth as personal and inscribed, marking the works in the show not as representations of youth but as interlocutions by subjective adult artists.

The written slips of paper also echo certain works in the exhibition. In _Notes_ (2004), Kyla Mallett presents large-scale photographs of personal notes passed between high-school girls, which are astonishingly rich in craft and creativity. In sharp contrast to the pre-inscribed fields and formats of today’s Facebook and text messaging apps, the notes’ authors break away easily from the foolscap’s parallel lines, expressing themselves in sketches, spiral text and multiple ink colours. For _coming of age stories 2: hooking up_ (2014), Kerri Flannigan asked her peers to share stories of their early sexuality, which she then interpreted with illustrations in a diary-like format. Though appearing documentary at first glance, Flannigan’s work is in fact a hybrid representation of an array of uncomfortable but often humourous sketches of sexual exploration.

For _Le beau, le laid et la photographie_ (2011), Emmanuelle Léonard invited students at an all-girls school to share their ideas about beautiful and ugly imagery. Filmed sitting at their desks, some of the girls exhibit discomfort with verbal expression, yet their animated facial expressions and gestures acutely convey their struggles to form individualized notions of taste, aesthetics and, thus, identity.

Guillaume Simoneau’s work, _Between Grass and Steel_ (2004–11), documents high school students from Lévis, Quebec at a rural drinking party on graduation night. Shot as formal portraits, Simoneau’s images evince a tension between official social ritual (graduation) and informal youth ritual (bush party). The graduating girls appear awkward and uncertain, their shadow doubles thrown onto the foliage behind them by the camera flash.

Three works in the exhibition explore music as a means to liberation and self-invention. In _Screaming Girls_ (2005), Jo-Anne Balcaen presents a series of found black-and-white clips of screaming female fans at 1960s rock concerts. The video is presented in slow-motion, without an audio track, abstracting the girls from the musical performances they have come to witness and highlighting their ecstatic emotion and abrogation of self-control. Screaming fans like these inaugurated the post-World War II youth culture, and as such represent a break with the past, harbingers of a new reality in the history of adolescent self invention; you could now be, to quote the Velvet Underground, “saved by rock ’n’ roll.”

Sarah Febbraro and Althea Thauberger’s works tap this youth tradition of self-inscription through popular music. For _Minor Threats_ (2012), Febbraro asked six amateur musicians each to select and learn a guitar solo from YouTube. She then filmed their performances in public locations, juxtaposing each musician’s clip against the footage of her online “tutor.” Recalling the now-defunct tradition of the social “debut,” _Minor Threats_ underscores the emotionally charged threshold between being and performing in private and in public. Thauberger’s video, _Songstress_ (2002), presents a series of amateur female singer-songwriters performing their own works against lush garden backgrounds. The young performers appear earnest and vulnerable, some of them fidgeting nervously, awkwardly playing with the foliage. Staged but not edited – the singing of birds and crickets is audible throughout – the authenticity of these performances contrasts sharply with today’s intensively edited, packaged and marketed youth culture.

_Blue Moon_ (2014), a documentary-style video by Helen Reed, presents a teenage “wolf pack,” whose high school-age members adopt and perform a variety of lupine identities and rituals. Ill-served by mainstream institutions and religion, pack members draw from nature documentaries and popular conceptions of werewolves to create a new social milieu for themselves. Positioned toward the rear of the gallery, the visitor experiences Reed’s work as a kind of finale – and not inappropriately: the wolf pack is a sophisticated exercise in collective identity-making, perhaps a step beyond the individualized approaches explored in the other works. It’s not merely another youth gang, but an intentional community.

A key feature of _Bande à part_ is the absence (excepting the interlocutions of the artists) of adults. Though but one among many of the books mentioned earlier, the spirit of Margaret Mead wafts about this exhibition; indeed, Chan’s curatorial statement, while acknowledging Mead’s failings, defends her importance, in particular the insight that “industrialized societies no longer had collectively agreed-upon rituals marking the passage from childhood to adulthood.” And such rituals as we do have – key coming of-age markers entitling us to drive motor vehicles and purchase alcohol – signify an inauguration into the realms of consumerism and addiction, though surely not to maturity.

Whether experienced inside or outside of institutional frameworks – such as the nuclear family, school or religion – negotiating adolescence in the labyrinthine context of industrial capitalism demands complex wayfinding strategies. Yet, even in a culture marked by dead ends like crass consumption, social alienation, self-destructive trajectories, young people continue to develop individual and collective creative strategies for survival and identity formation. As the artists in _Bande à part_ show us, necessity is the mother of self-invention.

issue-125-p60-62.pdf

Youth

Ritual

This article presents a review of _Bande à part / Kids these days_, curated by Zoë Chan and held at Foreman Gallery at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Québec from September 10 – December 6, 2014\. Artists discussed include Kyla Mallett, Kerri Flannigan, Emmanuelle Léonard, Guillaume Simoneau, Jo-anne Balcaen, Sarah Febbraro, Althea Thauberger, and Helen Reed.

Bande a part / Kids these days

Maeve Hanna is Assistant Curator at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, BC. She has studied at York University (Toronto), the University of Leeds (UK), Université du Québec à Montréal (Montreal) and the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg) on site in Iceland.

issue-125-p61-63.pdf

This article presents a review of _Queering Citizenship_, curated by Derrick Chang and held at Satellite Gallery in Vancouver from May 16 – June 28, 2014\. Participating artists included Kevin Madill, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Alize Zorlutuna, Igor Grubić, Naufús Ramirez-Figueroa, Emily Roysdon, Pascal Lièvre and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay.

Queering Citizenship

Earl Miller is an independent critic and curator residing in Toronto.

Two shipping containers modified with viewing windows display bins of human skulls, vertebrae and other bones in Minouk Lim’s installation _Navigation ID_ (2014). They are the skeletal remains of massacre victims of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a student protest against the Chun Doo-hwan government that led to citizens taking up arms and a subsequent military response that culminated in 241 deaths. Located in the square fronting the biennale hall, _Navigation ID_ quickly set the provocative tone visitors experienced when walking the serpentine path leading them through the 2014 Gwangju Biennale.

The Gwangju Biennale is Asia’s largest biennale. With 103 artists from 38 countries included in 2014, this omnibus exhibition risks thematic dilution by its very scale. Yet the confident directorship of Jessica Morgan has in fact ensured the opposite. Manifold direct thematic references to fire, home and houses build cohesion, beginning outside the Gwangju Biennale halls.

Indeed, at the galleries’ entrance, visitors hear a blasting loop of “Burning Down the House,” the Talking Heads’ 1983 anthem to suburban ennui (“I’m an ordinary guy/burning down the house”), as remixed by Joakim, a French electronic musician and DJ. The song serves as the exhibition title and, according to Morgan, implies “pleasure and engagement,” which she stresses is “the defining spirit of the Biennale.”[^1] The song’s funky beats channel the hedonistic pleasure of its inspiration: fans at a Parliament-Funkadelic concert at Madison Square Garden chanting “Burn down the house.” The song’s lyrics imply that engagement begins with destruction – burning down the house to rebuild. This cycle of destruction and rebuilding holds resonance locally because of the Gwangju Uprising.

_Navigation ID_ aptly proposes a Phoenix-like reconstruction following this calamity by publicly correcting one lingering injustice from the uprising: the failure to recognize the massacre’s victims with a proper burial. Lim attempted to rectify this historic denial of basic dignity by building and orchestrating a tribute to those unacknowledged victims. At the biennale’s opening, the victims’ families donned mourning clothes, arrived on a hired bus and then formed a procession escorted by a helicopter and an ambulance while the shipping containers were installed _in situ_.

Visitors encounter a much different but equally evocative work upon entering the first of the five galleries of the biennale hall: _Burning Window_ (1977-2002) by the late Jack Goldstein. _Burning Window_ consists of a small inset window on the far wall of a black-walled room. Flickering red lights installed behind this window emit an intense red glow. Goldstein belies neither the destruction nor the cause of this fire; its source remains out of the picture frame. The piece, therefore, is a foil to the spectacular narrative climax of a house inferno one may expect by cinematic convention. It is less about dramatic destruction than the non-spectacular hypnotic fascination a fireplace or bonfire holds. _Burning Window_ mesmerizes and so permits a brief pause just before viewers face a barrage of fire imagery.

Take Cornelia Parker’s _Heart of Darkness_ (2004), for instance, in which the charred remains of trees razed in a Florida forest fire hang from the ceiling. Curatorial emphasis reaches an overload when such works front a theme-setting visual backdrop that runs through the whole exhibition: digitally printed wallpaper with smoke and flame imagery by the London-based multimedia design studio El Ultimo Grito (_Mise-en-Scène_, 2014).

Urs Fischer more effectively employs wallpaperas medium in _38 E. 1st_ (2014). This to-scale hyperrealistic reproduction of the contents of Fischer’s apartment, reminiscent of a _trompe l’oeil_, serves as the exhibition’s arresting centrepiece. In front of it, Morgan has astutely positioned work by other artists that veer from the exhibition theme, notably George Condo’s kitschy portrait heads, _God 1_ and _God 2_ (2014). Condo cartoonishly revises the colonialist primitivism of early 20th-century modern sculptures by Picasso and others. The mock jade bases that the portrait heads rest atop point fingers at European modernism’s simultaneous colonialist adoption of Eastern exoticism. The sculptures’ understated site-specificity provides an appreciated break from the literalness establishing the exhibition.

If Goldstein and Lim represent this exhibition’s two axes of pleasure and engagement, which (for better or worse) works such as _38 E. 1st_ and _Mise-en-Scène_ serve to link, AA Bronson’s commissioned multimedia installation _House of Shame_ (2014) is an exemplary merger of them. Housed in the Spiral Pavilion, a three-storey traditional pagoda behind the exhibition halls in Joongwoe Park, it is the last work most visitors experience. Bronson presents both solo work and his collaborations with a cadre of younger artists, including Ryan Brewer and Yeonjune Jung. Under Bronson’s mentorship, they celebrate queerness while at the same time highlighting its shaming – “addressing the homophobia of Korea,” Bronson notes bluntly.[^2] Included is a collection of international queer zines, some from Korea; wallpaper documenting violence and other adversity gays face; and pin-up style nudes.

The word “shame” puns “shaman” – significant given Bronson’s healing and magic rituals, which accompanied the installation. In one of the exhibition’s two inaugural performances, _Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Gwang ju)_, for example, Bronson channelled those Koreans who died of AIDS, who committed suicide because of homophobia and who lived invisibly. Through first rendering past wrongs visible and then honouring those who suffered because of them, the performance is a social blueprint for constructing future visibility and human rights.

Politics merges not only with ritual but also with aesthetics in Travis Meinolf and Bronson’s colourful, overlapping woven hangings, as well as in Elijah Burgher’s equally vibrant paintings. Magical references defined both series: in Bronson and Meinolf’s case, the hangings resemble a shaman’s tent; and in Burgher’s, the cryptic, slightly abstracted shapes are actually sigils (magician’s symbols). Formally, these works share enticing linear compositions and arrestingly pure or nearly pure colour.

Housed in a building commemorating the Gwangju Uprising, _House of Shame_ is a direct intervention, simultaneously offering a pleasurable as well as a paganistic religious experience. With a message of restorative healing from past trauma – similar to that of _Navigation ID_ – _House of Shame_ completes the framing of the biennale with a spirit of optimistic activism. This framing highlights the 2014 Gwangju Biennale’s overarching call for a political aesthetic that can propose if not elicit social change.

[^1]: Helen Sumpter and Louise Darblay, “The Biennial Questionnaire: Jessica Morgan on the Gwangju Biennale,” _Art Review_, Nov. 14, 2014\. http://artreview.com/previews/the\_biennial\_questionnaire\_jessica\_morgan/
[^2]: Stuart Comer, “AA Bronson on Queer Collaborations, Shamanism, and Korean History,” in _Hyperallergic_, Oct. 9, 2014, Nov. 12, 2014\. hyperallergichttp://hyperallergic.com/154311/aa-bronson-on-queer-collaborations-shamanism-and-korean-history/

issue-125-p65-67.pdf

International

Social

This article presents a review of _Burning Down the House_, the 2014 Gwangju Biennial held in Gwangju, South Korea from September 5 – November 9, 2014\. Artists discussed include Minouk Lim, Jack Goldstein, Cornelia Parker, Urs Fischer, George Condo, and AA Bronson.

Burning Down the House: 2014 Gwangju Biennale

_“Excavations are scientifically controlled destruction”_

– Hansgerd Hellenkemper[^1]

Can storage units, part of one of the fastest growing markets in America, also be an artist’s materials Brooklyn-based artist Mira Friedlaender certainly thinks so. Captivated by their aura of mystery and the way they mirror the subconscious and the hidden, she began an early iteration of _Half of What’s There_ in 2011, when she decided to turn the contents of her deceased mother’s storage unit into a performance piece. Bilgé Civelekoglu Friedlaender, a Turkish-born artist active in New York during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, packed away her life’s work just before returning to her native southern Istanbul in the ’80s. She filled a storage unit with the carefully selected highlights of her career, as well as tools and references that happened to be in the studio at that time. That certain artworks were included but not others proves that she was aware of the image she’d leave behind, and perhaps wished for the inclusions to act as an archive of her legacy as an artist. But a“er the unit was filled, it lay dormant in a Philadelphia building for decades – long past her death in 2000 – until her daughter, also an artist, decided to create performance art out of it.

As apart of her residency with Recess Sessions, Mira Friedlaender’s _Half of What’s There_ was twofold: she first moved the entire contents of her mother’s unit into Recess’s downtown Manhattan storefront gallery. Then, over the next seven and a half weeks, she opened the parcels, photographed them, attempted to archive them and hung them on the walls – all during gallery hours and in public. Out came Bilgé Freidlaender’s stunning geometric drawings and subdued, earth-toned paper collages, conveying a long and robust career of an artist who fit confidently within her epoch. Unexpected treasures were uncovered, among them an original Agnes Martin drawing hidden among the flat files, whose very existence seemed to share a kindred tenacity with Bilgé Friedlaender’s work – both achieved a deep impact after years in hiding. Once a week, works were taken down from the walls and new ones opened and hung in their place. Besides the art, other objects were unwrapped – labels, catalogues, books, listings and tools – accoutrements that transported one to the New York art world of the ’70s. In congruence with all this, Friedlaender and her assistant used slides and old-fashioned archiving materials to record the process.

If the contents of her mother’s storage unit were ever meant to be an archive, turning it into a performance rendered it ineffective – at least to the degree that an archive is meant to directly transmit information from the past. Because Friedlaender chose to unwrap the endless boxes, tubes, and folders in haste and in public, the archival integrity of the objects was forsaken and the preservation impulse behind this storage unit undermined. The information one could gather about the past was obfuscated: on one hand, her mother’s memory was resurrected – albeit without a hint of ceremony or nostalgia. On the other hand, the personal history her mother hoped to crystallize by saving the works was debunked as her daughter picked them apart and interpreted them with an interactive audience. Rather than express Bilgé Friedlaender’s idea of herself, the meaning of the objects was dictated by the particular environment of the present: their placement in the storefront gallery, the constant stream of visitors and the artist’s personal closeness to the subject.

In this sense, the performance was more destructive than constructive with regard to a pristine archive. In reality, the process was very urgent and works were hung and removed in haste. Additionally, the movers who placed the work back into the storage unit after the performance ended disrupted the original order of the archive, making it all but impossible to locate items. Given the timing and extreme conditions of unpacking and repacking in _Half of What’s There_, it was futile to properly document each and every piece they pulled out. In the practical sense, a functioning archive was never created.

And yet, the work held a vivid grip on the present. During the process of installation, the artist chatted with a continuous stream of visitors. Interestingly, this direct path between viewer and artist incited feelings of loss and mourning within viewers, as they imagined Friedlaender’s grief or pain at the loss of her mother – though she had long moved past these feelings over the preceding decade. Just as Friedlaender had likely wondered about the contents of the various containers before they were opened, public viewers projected their own ideas of trauma and loss onto the artist – trauma and loss that no longer existed for the artist, but only in the viewers’ imagination.

The boxes, now moved back into the static netherworld of the storage unit, will not be opened again until the next performance, underscoring their new life as artist’s materials. The future significance of these boxes will be articulated with the next performance, rather than by their treatment in this one, asserting that an object’s life is ever changing and cannot necessarily be preserved.

Friedlaender is herself intimate with the fastidious processes of art handling and archiving that happens behind gallery walls, and this performance brought such acts into the gallery, but without the requisite ritual and reverence. Paintings and drawings were hastily opened, hung, removed and replaced by other works – with the original hooks and holes left uncovered – while engaging, rather than excluding, the public.

It is clear that Friedlaender was very interested in – perhaps more so than the performance itself – the strenuousness of art handling and its accoutrements. However, the repeated gestures of art handling do little to comment on art handling. Rather, these gestures are used to articulate the artist’s underlying, existential questioning of the archive: why save what we save? What purpose does it serve? Can an archive accurately convey the past, and if so, how much of our understanding of the past is informed by context of the present?

By questioning the purpose and efficacy of an archive, Friedlaender draws attention to the artist’s most primal compulsion: to leave something behind for after they’re gone. Still, beneath all the layers to this work – the brandishing of invisible practices of art handling and archiving in a gallery space, the transference of her own history onto an anonymous public audience, and the arresting minimalist drawings and collages of her mother – the artist makes an acute philosophical reflection on the act of archiving, and most interestingly, a successful query into the life cycle of an art object.

[^1]: This is a quote that hung on the wall of the exhibition.

issue-125-p67-69.pdf

Family

This article presents a review of the exhibition _Half of What’s There_, featuring Brooklyn-based artist Mira Friedlaender and held at Recess in New York from September 2 – October 25, 2014.

Mira Friedlander: Half of What's There

issue-125-p70-72.pdf

Language

Translation

This article presents a review of Daniel Albright’s book _Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts_ (Yale University Press, 2014).

Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts by Daniel Albright

David Balzer’s _Curationism_ (2014) offers a historical account of exhibition-making and makers since the 16th century – a trajectory, the author proposes, that has landed the Western world in this “curationist moment.” His text documents an “acceleration of the curatorial impulse” since the 1990s, wherein curating as both a phrase and an activity now extends beyond the art world into the lives of the general consuming public. The phenomenon of “curationism,” a term coined by the author, refers to the popularization of the term “curating,” which draws on the pedigree and expertise of the once-exclusive and professional position of the curator to imbue democratized acts of cultural activity with an air of selectiveness and tastemaking.

The influx of information and cultural commodities circulating in the digital world has led to the pervasive activity of “unpaid digital curation,” which is often motivated by a desire to distinguish oneself as a discerning consumer expertly wading through the chaos of the Internet. In doing so, content is parsed out as a means of self-expression, manifesting itself on an individual level through iTunes playlists, Tumblr accounts and social media identities.

The author exhibits a palpable cynicism, which is lodged against professional and popular iterations of curation in equal parts. He articulates a fervent skepticism both of the privileged position of the curator in the art world and the debased popularization of curation in mass culture. The authority of the institutional curator, graduate programs dedicated to the practice of curation, and critical theory are all dismissively dealt with and categorized primarily as privileged activities of the bourgeois. Equally, however, Balzer discusses the trivializing use of the term in relation to capitalist consumption, where retail displays and online photo albums are superficially imbued with the aura of curating to increase their cultural currency.

To illustrate how it is that we have arrived at this moment, Balzer uses the text’s introduction to describe the emergence of the star curator. This description is then followed by an account of the etymology of the term “curator” and a discussion of 19th- and 20th century avant-gardes in the first section, “Value.” In the second and final section, “Work,” the author describes the contemporary art world’s obsession with the curator and the way in which the veneer of curation has come to inform all cultural activity. Together, these elements – discussed with strategic brevity – constitute _Curationism_, a self-professed “biography of the curator, the curated, the curatorial and curation – a story of our times,” ultimately an ambitious rhetorical pursuit given that the text is only 137 pages long.

In this “curationist moment,” the star curator reigns. Hans Ulrich Obrist epitomizes this trend and is portrayed as an eccentric, megalomaniacal workaholic. Obrist is also cited as a major contributor to the contemporary conception of curator as “an employed, salaried entity”[^1] and is described as “the typification of the curationtionist moment”[^2]. Throughout the text, Balzer repeatedly questions the legitimacy of curatorial work executed by marquee-name cultural practitioners like Obrist. After dedicating most of his introduction to star curators like Obrist and his frenzied labour in the arts, Balzer backtracks and poses some hyperbolic questions. For instance, “What exactly do they do? Are they distant mandarins who force-feed us super-theoretical art? Hyper-professionalized agents – electively business consultants – working for high-powered international cultural organizations?”[^3] Such questioning informs the portrait of the curator that emerges, one that over-emphasizes the star curator as the domi-nant form of curating in the art world.

Balzer’s commodification of the celebrity identity of the curator facilitates a discussion of the relationship between cultural production and capitalism. All forms of curation, whether popular or professional, are according to the author, related to the avant-garde’s fetishization of the new – a quality he says has been commodified for most of history, latched onto by institutions and curators for its marketability. However, the author’s rapid summation of avant-garde history results in some unfortunate omissions. For example, Balzer describes the avant-garde as “formal-experimentation-for-the-sake-of-formal-experimentation”[^4], disavowing the distinctly political intentions of radical artists like Édouard Manet, the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists, who were all responding to the political contexts in which their works were produced (the alienation of French society; the poverty, malnutrition and illiteracy of early 20th-century Italy; and the horrors of technology following World War I, respectively). In fact, much of the text is predicated on Balzer’s truncated history of the avant-garde, which facilitates broad under-interrogated claims, including the argument that the fixation of curators on the new has single-handedly ended the possibility of the avant-garde in the 21st-century.

Only in the second section of the text does the author acknowledge the real-world demands of curatorial labour, an abrupt change in tone given that the majority of the book is dedicated to the description (and critique) of internationally renowned and egregiously paid curators like Obrist and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. At this point in the text, Balzer cites Vancouver-based curator Karen Love’s free online curatorial toolkit, which offers a step-by-step account of the less glamourous logistical dimensions of executing an exhibition independently. Here, the author proposes that – due to funding pressures and logistical challenges – the independent curator may be “nearing extinction”[^5], a point that appears contradictory given the perva-siveness of “curating” in the wider culture and the central position of the star curator in the art world.

Near the book’s end, Balzer cites an article written by independent curator Vanessa Castro titled, “People who definitely shouldn’t have the title ‘curator’ in their Twitter bios,” offering one of the text’s only examples of an art world practitioner being directly critical of the metastasized form the term curator has taken in contemporary discourse. Balzer responds to Castro’s objection by noting that the job of curating is too difficult to define for her criticism to stand, undermining the detailed accounts of curatorial work offered in _Curationism_.

In closing, Balzer sardonically asks, “How much curatorial work did you do today?”[^6], and provides a verbose list of activities related to cultural consumption and personal presentation. This cynical provocation satisfies the author’s opening claim that “This book is not anti-art world or anti-curator. It is strongly critical, but also merely an account…of curation’s close alliance with capitalism and its cultures.”[^7] In the end, Balzer succeeds in observing the popular traction the term curating has garnered, though his description of the impact the democratization of the term has had on non-star professional curators could offer a more nuanced interpretation of this cultural phenomenon.

[^1]: David Balzer, _Curationism_ (Toronto: Coach House, 2014), 99.
[^2]: Ibid., 27.
[^3]: Ibid., 60.
[^4]: Ibid., 112.
[^5]: Ibid., 110.
[^6]: Ibid., 116.
[^7]: Ibid., 9.

issue-125-p71-73.pdf

This article presents a review of David Balzer’s book _Curationism_ (Coach House Books, 2014).

Header

C Mag

Issue 125