Column

**Richard William Hill** is an independent writer and curator, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. First debted in _FUSE_ Magazine, Close Readings aims to offer honest assessments of exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art.

_There’s this power trip of being an art critic, they think you should bow down to them. But fuck them.[^1]_   
— Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

_In Lawrence’s work there’s the bold statement, but there’s also the possibility of, or the opportunity for, change.[^2]_  
— Tania Willard

There are many things about Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s paintings that rub me the wrong way and they are all present in this marvellous career retrospective. The compositions are often awkward and unsettling, populated with human and supernatural figures that at times appear more mechanical or insectile than anthro-or zoomorphic. Painting styles shift jarringly within a single canvas. Colour combinations are often so garish they hurt the eyes. The allegory tends to range from merely heavy-handed to outright assaultive. And if all of this is too subtle for you, there will be what one critic described as an “up-yours”[^3] title to deliver the final blow.

That said, after weeks of close looking and careful reading, I have become convinced, like many people, that despite this – no, in part because of this – Yuxweluptun is an important artist. Your eyes may often be hurting, but you can’t look away from the worlds he creates.

What is so wonderfully confounding about Yuxweluptun’s art – it makes it almost invincible– is the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to so many key dichotomies that surround (you might say, compose) Indigenous art and culture as we currently understand it. He is: a modernist or perhaps a satirist of modernism; a surrealist, but no, he has his own term: “visionist;” he is a reviver of tradition and a modern transgressor of tradition; he is rooted in his Salish heritage and he is a rebellious individualist; he is an important painter, whose “technique is rudimentary”[^4] or evidences “skill and style;”[^5] when asked about his painting, he will lecture you on colonial politics. Here are the facts everyone agrees on. Yuxweluptun is of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) heritage on his father’s side and Okanagan (Sylix) heritage on his mother’s. He identifies particularly with his Salish heritage and has been involved in longhouse ceremonial culture since his youth. After graduating in 1983 from Emily Carr – then still an art college – he went on to create a body of work that initially brought together Northwest Coast imagery with pop art and the realist strain of surrealism. In these paintings, human and non-human persons populate a contested colonial landscape that is typically ravaged by resource extraction and other forms of environmental destruction.

Adding additional complication, the Northwest Coast graphic tradition that Yuxweluptun draws on – the characteristic formlines, ovoids and u-shapes – are derived from Northern Northwest Coast traditions that would not have been part of the artist’s traditional culture[^6] In the mid-1990s, Yuxweluptun began a series of abstract paintings based on the ovoid shape (an oval that swells out at the top and sides and curves in across the bottom) that is a fundamental design element of Northern two-dimensional art. He sent this work out into the world in modernist high style: as a movement complete with a manifesto and a neologism ending in “ism” – ovoidism.[^7] Most recently he has added a series of glossy three-quarter-length caricature portraits of the rich and powerful, his “Super-Predator” series.

_Unceded Territories_ is not organized chronologically or according to any other comprehensive series of themes. There is a room dealing with residential schools and another that includes a wall of ink drawings, many of which were made before the paintings. Otherwise work from the various series is interspersed throughout. The strategy echoes the art, which is what you discover by mixing things up. The paucity of work from the 1980s is the only thing that throws the complete picture a little off-balance.[^8]

On the surface, Yuxweluptun’s art and language is declarative. As Charlotte Townsend-Gault writes, “Free interpretation is deflected. In uncompromising terms you are told what to make of it.”[^9] It is often argued that he answers questions about the form of his work with political declarations because they are one and the same. As Robin Laurence writes, “When he talks politics to me, he’s talking art to me.”[^10]

But this assertion has two sides to it. If the art and politics are inseparable, then not only can we not dispense with the politics in favour of aesthetic appreciation, but, necessarily, the aesthetic choices in the work must have political consequences. In this case, the artist’s deflection of discussions about the form of his work for a literal discussion of his political subject matter is not necessarily a triumph of politics over formalism, but potentially an evasion of the political implications of his form.

As Townsend-Gault notes, there is tension between the “determinate meanings,” and the simultaneous tendency to “participate gleefully in an interweaving of multiple codes and fragments of codes more commonly associated with open-ended or ambivalent readings.”[^11] This distinction does not break down entirely into a tidy schism between determinate subject matter and restless formal traffic, but I think that attention to form tends to illicit more complex, slipperier meanings. 

This partly comes down to a distinction between capital and small “p” politics that is constantly elided in discussion of Indigenous art. On the big political issues – land claims, political sovereignty, environmental destruction, racism – we want to make unequivocal statements and take sides. But when it comes to the politics of art and culture, things are messier and the traffic between cultures is constant, even as it so often remains vexed. The more we try to purify our cultural space, the more the contradictions with actual experience multiply. Scott Watson sees Yuxweluptun’s art opening up this conversation. In the past, he writes, “discussion … in aesthetic terms served to jam the signals that might have come from such contradictions. That is, until Yuxweluptun’s paintings gave these contradictions visual form.”[^12]

Cathy Mattes recognized that we might productively map this traffic through a consideration of the politics of translation.[^13] She wrote: “his art is a translation of modernism, created from the perspective of an artist who is Aboriginal.”[^14] According to Christina Ritchie, Yuxweluptun has also since referred to his practice as “simultaneous translation between one culture and another.”[^15] I want to take this idea seriously and see how it holds up from various perspectives. From the outset, Yuxweluptun’s phrase “simultaneous translation” suggests that more is occurring than a translation of modernism into an Indigenous visual language. If we look at a few artworks we can put that to the test.

The brilliant early painting _Haida Hot Dog_ (1984) is a good place to start. Here the artist runs together a glossy pop art style with Northern Northwest Coast graphic conventions and classic pop subject matter. The title gives us a clue to an element of “translation” that is sometimes over-looked in his work. It is, after all, a “Haida” hotdog painted by a Salish artist. In this instance, we can accept the oft made claim that the artist is parodying Northern Northwest Coast style – as manifest in the arts and crafts tradition – to show how it must be transgressed and travestied somewhat in order to address his own experiences of colonialism and contemporary life, including popular culture. As he put it: “You can’t carve a beer bottle on a totem pole.”[^16] It should be stressed that therefore both visual languages used in the work are “native” to the artist – he learned each growing up – yet neither is a legacy of his Salish heritage.

_Haida Hot Dog_ also suggests that there are differences between visual and linguistic languages that need to be accounted for. In fact it is evident that we need to think again about the phrase “simultaneous translation.” What is simultaneous with what? When translating languages this means the translation is occurring in real time. Here I think it means two visual languages are being spoken simultaneously in the same work; but which is the original and which the translation? The question does not even seem to make sense. They have been layered together surprisingly seamlessly. Indeed, what distinguishes _Haida Hot Dog_ from so many other Yuxweluptun works is the way in which the artist finds so many visual “cognates” between the two traditions. This simultaneous doubleness is not captured in how the artist describes the significance of a hotdog. He says, “a wiener in an Indian hand is an Indian hot dog. Hot dogs are food on the reserves.”[^17] This makes it sound as though hot dog eating is a subversive act of appropriation, but the work suggests only that these worlds do already overlap, like it or not.

Stylistic tension is amped up in the figure-in-the-landscape works, such as _Red Man Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in the Sky_ (1990). Here, and in all these works, the two visual languages– Northern Northwest Coast and figures-in-a-landscape surrealism – are not usually in translation, but “spoken” simultaneously. Sometimes they blend into or make space for each other, but often they clash mightily.

Consider the way he brings the flatness of Northwest Coast graphics into illusionistic space. The head of the “Red Man” is an almost flat ovoid. But that flat ovoid then curves back away from the scientists (possibly in disgust or to avoid exposure to ultra violet radiation coming through the hole in the ozone layer). We see both one side of it and part of the other, which has curved around. This means that although the ovoid remains flat, it is being treated as a flat object that can move and be seen from different perspectives within an illusionistic space. The choice to retain this flatness is clearly deliberate, since the canon of Northwest Coast carving is replete with models for bringing ovoid designs fully into three dimensions. But then he would not have been able to stage such a witty, jarring clash of visual conventions.

Townsend-Gault suggests that Yuxweluptun is not merely putting us into a “futile state of discomfort,” but creating “a spiritual shock,” that can recover and put to use Salish ideas of a union of nature and culture in which humans might recognize its animation by spirit and behave in less destructive ways.[^18] As we have seen, this shock often arises from the awkward culture clashes that occur at the level of form. Robert Linsley claims, “It is not possible to know how far his work is spontaneously derived style, and how far it is conscious travesty,” but nevertheless, “if Yuxweluptun’s pictures met already existing standards of beauty, they would have nothing to say.”[^19]

Townsend-Gault’s reading reminds us that in these paintings there is a dynamic of translation that we did not see in _Haida Hot Dog_, in which the artist’s Salish heritage was not a subject of the work. Here we see the artist translating Salish cosmology, which is traditionally not shared outside the culture, into the widely recognized Northern style. This is the most audacious move of his career and raises real questions about how the Northwest Coast style functions as a visual language. If Northwest Coast art is a visual language in the full sense then its visual signifiers will be tied by conventional use to signified content held in common by native “speakers.” If it is set free as a “style” to be applied to a variety of situations (as, to be fair, it often seems to be in the Northwest Coast tradition itself, hence the common difficulty of even master artists definitively identifying iconography) then we are in quite a remarkable space of invention and appropriation.

But perhaps, as curator Karen Duffek implies, we are all “speaking” a modern version of North-west Coast visual languages. The main terms we use to describe the style were all coined by Bill Holm (who was not Indigenous) in the mid-20th century as the art was being revived after a period of social and legal repression. “Maybe,” Duffek writes, “two-dimensional painted images, which were meant to be interpreted within ceremony and oratory, were able to convey spatial relationships beyond their surface in ways entirely foreign to contemporary eyes.”[^20] Perhaps it is the very detachment of these signifiers from direct reference that made them ideal for Yuxweluptun’s project of translation. They allow him to render Salish cosmology both visible and opaque; we must take him at his word that he is even representing it, how would we know? He has turned the Northern style into a private language, which, as Wittgenstein said, is no language at all. So we are foiled again in pinning him down.

I love the way this all collides with artists’ assertions of modernism. Indigenous artists of Yuxweluptun’s generation had to defend their right to be contemporary. He says, “My hands are not tied \[by tradition\]. Artists’ should challenge everything.”[^21] And: “I’m a modernist. I’m not making Native art, and I don’t claim to.”[^22] These assertions were tricky to articulate because of the conflation of modernity with Western culture and the implication that embracing modernity was embracing the assimilationist agenda of the state. I suspect this is why these claims so often arrive double-sided, with seeming contradictions attached: “Like those contemporary artists before me, I felt the need to break from traditional forms, and have been at the forefront of amalgamating the past with the present.”[^23] The implication is, as Townsend-Gault suggested, that traditional form – the “Native art” he claims not to be making is that of the Northwest Coast tourist market, which must be transgressed in order both to express the violent realities of colonialism, but also to, in some form, use these radical tools to reconnect with traditional Salish culture and values.

But his appropriation of the Northern Northwest Coast graphic tradition surely extends beyond a strategic travestying of its conventions. If it was simply that, he could have moved on, his task long ago completed. Instead, with “Ovoidism,” he has lovingly doubled down on this appropriation, using the signature shape as the basis for his own movement. “I am the originator of the contemporary art form of ovoidism,”[^24] he tells us, which becomes a means “to simplify a way to discuss my mind and how I feel,”[^25] and to “intellectualize place, space and Native reason.” Is Ovoidism ironic satire or does the artist actually believe he has found his personal and cultural essence in this double appropriation of modernism and the ovoid? The very gesture, given who he is and what he intends, surely nudges the act from its declared modernity to postmodern critique. Yet he seems sincere in claiming modernist freedom and his heritage and his right to disavow aspects of both as necessary. This is what I mean when I say the work is invincible. I guess he needed it to be.

I understand that. My most personal entry into many of these works is through my experiences writing and drawing my own comics as a teenager. This taught me how powerful immersing yourself in a world of your own devising could be. For me it was a world in which the traumas of adolescence could be worked through. (Needless to say my comic book super hero had a girlfriend before I did.) Contemplating the psychological underpinnings of world building in Yuxweluptun’s work does not blunt its political impact or suggest his approach is juvenile. The trauma his work addresses is real, as, surely, was the need to find an Indigenous body to represent it and a landscape for those bodies to claim. It had to be a form that could encompass his political outrage and also read as both defiantly and subversively “Indigenous” as necessary. I am not surprised that the acts of appropriation necessary to visualize that world led to a kind of a promiscuity without bounds, in which the visual languages of the other – Haida or Daliesque – are entered and made one’s own. Whomever else the ovoid belongs to, Yuxweluptun has, after all these years, his own deeply personal and idiosyncratic claim to it. Likewise his (post)modernity.

[^1]: Reid Shier & Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, “Native Son: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Interviewed by Reid Shier,” _Mix Magazine_, Vol. 24, No. 1, Summer 1998, 53.
[^2]: Tania Willard & Karen Duffek, “Sovereign Rainbows and Unceded Territories: A Curatorial Dialogue,” _Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories_ (Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing; UC Museum of Anthropology, 2016), 36
[^3]: Michael Scott, “Reshaping Modern Art,” _Vancouver Sun_, September 19, 1998, D1.
[^4]: Robert Linsley, “Yuxweluptun and the West Coast Landscape,” _Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations_ (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1995), 27.
[^5]: Christina Ritchie, “On a Good Day,” _Canadian Art_, Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter 2014, 120.
[^6]: As his official website puts it, he is “using Coast Salish cosmology, Northwest Coast formal design elements, and the Western landscape tradition.” “http://lawrencepaulyuxweluptun.com/“:http://lawrencepaulyuxweluptun.com Accessed July 01, 2016.
[^7]: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, “The Manifesto of Ovoidism,” _Colour Zone: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun_, ed. Petra Rigby Watson (Winnipeg: Plug in Editions, 2003), 4–8.
[^8]: According to co-curator Tania Willard, this was based on budgetary and logistical challenges, combined with the knowledge that many of the works had been seen in Vancouver at his first retrospective a few blocks away at the Belkin in 1995\. Having worked as a curator myself, I understand all too well that any exhibition is a compromise between the ideal version and what can be achieved by working hard with- in what is inevitably a multitude of constraints. (Source: Tania Willard, two emails to author, July 11, 2016).
[^9]: Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “The Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun,” _Born to Live and Die_, 12
[^10]: Robin Laurence, “Man of Masks,” _Canadian Art_ Vol. 12, Spring 1995\. 50\. (Others make the same point: Ritchie, 120; Michael Turner, “Social Forms of Engagement: Coffee with Yuxweluptun on the Main Street Side of Gene,” _Unceded Territories_. 101-102.)
[^11]: Townsend-Gault, “The Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun,” 13–14.
[^12]: Scott Watson, “The Modernist Past of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s Landscape Allegories,” Born to Live and Die, 68.
[^13]: Cathy Mattes, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Translating Modernism—the Trickster Way,” Colour Zone, 35.
[^14]: Ibid.
[^15]: Ritchie, 122.
[^16]: Quoted in Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Hot Dogs, A Ball Gown, Adobe, and Words,” Native American Art in the Twentieth Century, W. Jackson Rushing III, ed. (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), 114\. (Her essay includes a telling account of the origin of this work on pages 113–115.)
[^17]: Quoted in Ibid.,115.
[^18]: Townsend-Gault, “The Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun,” 18.
[^19]: Linsley, 28.
[^20]: Willard & Duóek,
[^21]: As quoted in _Ian Thom, Challenging Traditions: Contemporary First Nations Art of the Northwest Coast_ (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009), 184.
[^22]: Yuxweluptun, “Artist’s Statement,” _Unceded Territories_. 8.
[^23]: Ibid. 11.
[^24]: Ibid. 11.
[^25]: Yuxweluptun, “The Manifesto of Ovoidism.” 4.

Writer

Experimental Pedagogies

issue-131-p48-53.pdf

Yuxweluptun’s controversial relationship with modernism and Indigenous art, on the occasion of a career retrospective at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology.

Close Readings: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories at University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver May 10 – October 16, 2016

Candice Hopkins is a Canadian writer and curator from Whitehorse, Yukon. She lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has held positions at The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery, Western Front in Vancouver and the National Gallery of Canada. At present, she is Curatorial Advisor for documenta 14, which opens in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017.

I have to admit that I don’t much like the word “pedagogy.” It can sound like a way to make something that is simple unnecessarily complex. Instead of the theory of teaching, I am more often drawn to the practice of learning. At the core of my learning lately is opening my ears to hear what is sounding at the margins. Some of these resonances are collected here.

**The echo of history**

Richard Rath notes in his forthcoming book on the history of hearing that the term used to describe the beginning of the universe some 13 billion years ago is a misnomer. The “big bang” was not a bang at all, but completely silent: “Sound requires the disturbance of a medium, and in this case, everything \[…\] was expanding away from everything else at the same rate, so no disturbances formed that could make up anything like sound waves.” His observation is a useful analogy for how much our reliance on visual perception—or in this case, our imaginings of what this moment _looked_ like—often results in a blindness towards the other senses. In this case, what this moment truly _sounded_ like. The big bang is perhaps more aptly described as a silent hyperinflation.

When I finally met Rath in person, we started talking about archaeoacoustics— the study of sonic frequencies at archaeological sites. I first encountered this practice two years ago at Chaco Canyon during a tour led by Taft Blackhorse and John Stein. There, in the rock amphitheatre between Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, they sounded a conch shell. A small mound located some 400 feet behind us, positioned directly across from the centre of the amphitheatre, amplified the sound of the conch, sending it back to us. It had another effect as well. Blackhorse and Stein explained that if we were to gather near the mound, we would hear speech or song from the amphitheatre as though it were right beside us. Useful sound engineering if you consider that most people at Chaco didn’t live in the large pueblos that have made the site famous, but rather in more modest dwellings built behind the mound.

The deliberate creation of specialized sonic effects is found in many ancient architectural sites across the Americas. Among the most compelling are the “chirps” emitted at the temple on the Yucatan Peninsula built to honor the Mayan god Kulkulkan– the plumed serpent who is adorned with feathers from the Quetzal bird. Rath explains that:

\\  
bq. Clapping before the temple produces a sharp descending chirp instead of the expected echo. The chirp is actually many echoes, one from each step, that blend together. \[…\] Because the steps are so close together, the listener perceives the echoes connected to each other rather than separately, much like we perceive the individual sample points on a compact disc as music rather than individual blips. \[…\] In effect, the Mayas built a giant digital synthesizer to recreate the sound of the Quetzal.[^1]

**The teaching of the blue whale**

In mid-June, I was on a ship in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of the Svalbard archipelago as part of a gathering of scientists, artists and writers called “Thinking at the Edge of the World.” There, we witnessed the changing Arctic firsthand. By 2040, the permanent sea ice will be gone. With this, the Arctic will no longer be the Arctic.

The scientists were not the only ones we learned from on that boat. Mid-way through our journey we were joined by two others, also teachers with a great deal at stake if we will only pay attention. A scientist spotted them first – off the ship’s bow emerged the massive, slick back of a blue whale, the largest mammal on the planet. Soon joined by another, each time the whales breached, they blew a huge arc of water into the air. They continued this way– swimming, blowing, diving– for the better part of 45 minutes. Near the end of our encounter, one rolled onto its side, revealing its left flipper. Whales have no reason to trust humans: we have proved particularly murderous towards their kind. Hunted to near extinction for their blubber – their rendered oil being one of the most precious commodities in the pre-and early-industrial world – a ban was placed on hunting blue whales in the 1960s. Despite the ban, their population growth is incredibly slow. A blue whale was last seen near Svalbard in 2009.

Part of the reason blue whales survived at all is because of how deep they dive to communicate with one another. Hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface, they call out along a highly resonant sound channel. This channel is highly effective, enabling the few that survive to find each other by sounding into the void, a call that was answered _on the other side of the Atlantic_. Our futures are contingent. The chorus of minor voices is not only human, but also animal and insect, particularly those who sing a different tune.

**Sami pedagogies**

“Pedagogy” stems from the Greek, _paidagōgos_, which denotes “a slave who accompanied a child to school.” Perhaps _paidagōgos_ implies learning from the dispossessed (although clearly those doing the teaching had little choice in the matter). Dominant society rarely turns an ear to the voices speaking on the peripheries – that is, unless they begin to talk back.

In 1982, a Sami man, Niillas (Nils) Somby sought refuge with First Nations communities — including the Nuxalk, Chilcotin, Haisla, Mowachaht/Muchalaht and the Kainai. His self-exile was infamous in his home and in his newfound territory in Native America. Niillas had escaped prison in Norway and temporarily assumed a new identity after being charged with the attempted bombing of a bridge in 1979 during mass protests against the building of a massive hydro-electric dam near Alta, which is on Sápmi (Sami traditional territory). This charge would have had him spend much of his life behind bars. The protests sparked a collective consciousness raising in Norwegian society. The government temporarily halted construction while they considered the concerns, and later proceeded anyway. This moment had other consequences as well. In Norway, it marked the first time that Sami perspectives were given serious coverage in mainstream media. The Sami Rights Commission — a first — was initiated in 1980\. Sami Parliament, a parallel governance system, later formed out of this collective dissent.

His exile in Canada was also a consciousness-raising. Niillas’ adoption into seven First Nations communities was initiated by the late Grand Chief George Manuel of the Secwepemc Nation (one of the initiators of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples). For the Nuxalk, hosting Niillas reinforced their sovereignty: the right to determine who is a citizen of their community and who is not, and the right to communicate with the federal government on a nation to nation basis. When Niillas was detained, along with his wife and daughters by RCMP in Alberta, the Nuxalk chief responded with a strongly worded declaration:

> It is the position of the Nuxalk Nation’s Traditional Chief that Nils Somby was arrested and is being detained illegally. The Nuxalk Nation maintains it’s right to self-determination and to it’s own laws on matters concerning citizenship. \[…\] Outstanding issues now under negotiation include self-government and Indian Government jurisdiction over membership \[…\] The application of Canadian colonial laws in this case demonstrates the lack of good faith on the part of the Government of Canada in its negotiations with the Indian Nations.[^2]

Niillas has been back in Sápmi since 1984\. During his absence, his charges were reduced, but this didn’t stop him from holding the government and his own people accountable. Niillas’ is one of many voices that continues to speak back, even at the risk of not being heard. Revolutions are often imperfect. He relayed that even in Sami Parliament, which emerged out of an exceptional moment of Sami resistance and agency, complicity seeps in. In the fissures that this creates, deals have been made with resource extraction companies, and agreements are struck that undermine Sami rights to their traditional territories and practices.

I recently came across Niillas’ YouTube channel. His most recent video, _Soagis Sallenii_, is centred on a series of teachings, where his colleagues share knowledge regarding fishing, wood carving, instrument making, weather patterns, seasonal changes and spirituality. The video is interspersed with yoiking—a practice banned during the “Norwegianization” (read: forced assimilation) of Sami. A particular pedagogy is mobilized in these videos, one that is equal parts theory and practice. It is a way to resist acculturation, to decolonize and pass this knowledge onto future generations.  
View _Soagis Sallenii_ at:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnKGVrgARrs ](http://)

**Glacier harmonics**

While on the ship off Svalbard, I witnessed another otherworldly sound. With the boat moored at the base of a massive glacier wall, we were asked to listen. Once everyone was silent, other sounds took hold: the water was filled with soft popping, the pops coming in quick succession, as though millions of tiny bubbles were surfacing at the same time.

The pops, we learned, are the sound of air compressed in 400-year old ice as it is released when chunks of the glacier fall off and melt in the warming Arctic waters. This is one of the tracks on the record that is global warming.

**Room tunings**

Zachary Watkins and Marshall Trammell perform as the duo Black Spirituals. Their practice is extra-musical: through improvisation, they sound difficult histories and activate sites of struggle and liberation. The best description of what they do is written by another musician, composer Raven Chacon, who on behalf of the collective Postcommodity, invited them to play in 2015 in a former church now run by the Guelph Black Heritage Society. There, with a multitude of players, they “tuned” their voices to the resonant frequencies of the interior of the building by collectively reciting a poem by Sun Ra. Their voices were recorded, and played back on repeat until the right frequency was found. The building is a former stop along the Underground Railroad, built by fugitive slaves so that others like them could have safe haven in the transit to freedom. Chacon describes the duo’s live performance as a kind of witnessing:

Seeing a Black Spirituals performance is witnessing a unique and powerful music being made in real-time. The two musicians blast tones and beats at each other but those sounds find their way into the spaces between, encompassing the full range of human hearing \[…\]. Listeners become conscious of the resonance of the space as it becomes another instrument for the duo to amplify, filter, spatialize, and tune \[and\] relay the story of the buildings of the invaluable Underground Railroad stations that exist across North America. Their music retells history via the physical science that results from vibration of strings and the contact of wood to membrane, reminding you of all that is hidden in plain view.[^3]

**Deep Listening**

The phrase “sounding the margins” comes from a book of the same name by composer Pauline Oliveros.[^4] “Deep listening,” for Oliveros and her collaborators, is a means of tuning our ears to listen to the sounds of our environment and feel its vibrations with our bodies.

This score is also a listening aid; it expands the capacity of our ears so we can better understand where “music” resides:

> _Dissolving your ear plugs: For classically trained musicians and anyone else interested._

1\. Take some time – no matter where you are – sit down and close your eyes for a while and just listen – When you open your eyes consider what you heard as the “music”. Later try to remember what you heard and express it with your instrument or voice.

Do this practice often until you begin to hear the world as music.

2\. Another time – sit down with your instrument and just listen with your eyes closed. As you realize that whatever you are hearing IS “music” allow your instrument or voice to enter this musical stream. Stop when the music is over. This is supported improvisation.

3\. Listen to a favorite machine and play or sing along with it.

4\. Listen to a favorite natural soundscape and play or sing along with it.

Pauline Oliveros © Copyright Deep Listening Publications 2006

[^1]: Richard Cullen Rath, quote from “Beginnings” in _Hearing History / History of Hearing_ (Champaign, IL., University of Illinois Press.), n.p.
[^2]: Full citation available online at: “http://gsdl.ubcic.bc.ca/collect/ubcicupd/import/1984-11-update/ TXT/1984-11-update%20-%200004.txt”:http://gsdl.ubcic.bc.ca/collect/ubcicupd/import/1984-11-update/ TXT/1984-11-update%20-%200004.txt
[^3]: The entry, “Why Black Spirituals Rule,” written by Raven Chacon, was previously published on “http://kazookazoo.ca/category/why-this-rules/“:http://kazookazoo.ca/category/why-this-rules/ for 2015 Kazoo Fest in Guelph, Ontario.
[^4]: Pauline Oliveros, _Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992- 2009_ (Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Institute, 2010).

issue-131-p76-79.pdf

Sound

Education

In this issue of Inventory, Candice Hopkins advocates opening our ears to what is “sounding at the margins”. Here, she collects together a few of her auditory and pedagogical findings. 

Inventory

David Senior is Senior Bibliographer at the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York.

I stumbled across this item in the booth of a great, long-time bookseller named Laurence McGilvery when I was at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair this past February. It’s an example of a printed item that suggests something, even though at the time I wasn’t yet sure what that something was, and which has since led to surprising associations; following a path from the founding of CalArts to the origins of the Woman’s Building in LA, inspiring feminist work and beautiful minds, and reflecting the design and organizing activities of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville.

This poster was part of the promotional materials for a new arts school in Los Angeles, the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). In 1970, when the poster was produced, the school was still an abstract idea. About to open its doors to its first students, CalArts aimed to be an experiment that would frame art education within a wider context of different political and social movements, and embrace the heady impact of the counterculture and the student movements that sought to interfere with the status quo of existing institutions of higher learning.

The text for this poster was written by Richard Farson, the founding Dean of the School of Design at CalArts. The language he uses refers to an overarching pedagogical philosophy that theorized CalArts as a hub for rigorous experimentation in music, theatre, dance, film, art and design that could reshape a vision of society. Sheila de Bretteville designed this poster and conceived of the material elements that make it a curious object. She has since commented that while the text appealed to her, the use of the masculine pronoun was something that was unfortunate and off-putting.[^1] The last line was the precise message of import for her, evoking how this changing pedagogical emphasis could specifically affect design education to engage with discourses and fields of activity that would stretch designers’ interests beyond conventional commercial design work, beyond Madison Avenue, and towards concerns with social responsibility.

De Bretteville had come to Los Angeles from New York City in part to design and produce the graphic identity and promotional materials for this new institution that was attempting to remedy institutional methods of arts education. The proposal that appears on this poster created a compelling design challenge; what forms and messages could transfer a sentiment of deschooling for this new school? In a recent interview, she recalled that the process of making the poster was consistent with a kind of modernist trope that considered “how the thing is made as part of what the thing is about.”[^2] It was shrink-wrapped, much like commercial merchandise that one might encounter in a store, using a cheap, commercial method to contain the objects attached to the poster. The process of physically assembling more than 50,000 posters was part of the spirit of work. Each example of the poster that I have since encountered varies slightly in where the objects are set in the package. The toy jack conjures a sense of play, the pinecone evokes the natural world and its regenerative qualities and the printed circuit affirms a dialogue with new forms of communication and information processing. These elements present a vivid encapsulation of the key concerns of ecology, new technology and politicized ethics that were shaping new thinking in design, architecture and media studies in 1970.

Aside from being the beginning statement for the CalArts Design Program, de Bretteville describes this work as a beginning for herself as a thinker of design education through elements of radical pedagogy. She often cites reading Paulo Freire’s _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ (1968) as a transformative experience and incorporates the strategies and language given voice by the women’s movement and other protest movements. In recollecting this period, de Bretteville comments that “my mind was completely captivated by participatory democracy and (I sought) to look for design, art-making or image-making that could represent that idea.”[^4]

While her first experience as an educator came during this beginning moment at CalArts, she has since become a prominent figure in American design education, namely as Director of the Yale Graduate School of Design, a position she has held since 1990\. In another recent interview, she reflects that because the administrators at CalArts were so busy creating a school, she had substantial space and freedom to create her own content for the graphic materials and her own curriculum.[^5] She began teaching her first students once the school commenced in the fall of 1970, and, as the only woman on the design faculty initiated a Woman’s Design Program in 1971, aligned with the Feminist Art Program founded that same year by Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago within the studio art program. Both women-only programs coupled an introduction to art and design processes with discussion of the theory and practice of feminism, radical women’s history and exploration of personal experience. These programs only lasted a year or so, but were absolutely singular in their attempts to create a space and a context for women to produce their own work and to make room for each other within CalArts.

While CalArts purged many of the more radical voices among the administration and faculty, just a couple of years after opening, de Bretteville and Chicago, along with art historian Arlene Raven, left the school and started the Feminist Studio Workshop in 1973\. Part of this project involved creating the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in November of 1973, a community centre that could house their program. De Bretteville, Chicago and Raven envisioned the building as a central hub for feminist organizations working in LA at the time. By 1974, through the organizing of the founders, the Woman’s Building housed an impressive list of spaces: Womanspace, a community gallery; the Feminist Studio Workshop; the Center for Art-Historical Studies; Gallery 707, a private gallery; Grandview Galleries 1 and 2, cooperative galleries; Sisterhood Bookstore, a branch of a feminist store in Westwood; The Performance Project; Women’s Improvisation, a theater workshop; Associated Women’s Press, publisher of five magazines (_Sister, Momma, Womanspace Journal_, _Lesbian Tide_ and _Women and Film_); the LA chapter of NOW; The Women’s Liberation Union; the Women’s Graphic Center for printing and printmaking; and a restaurant.[^6]

Curator, writer and activist Lucy Lippard described first visit to the building in 1974 as “immensely moving.” She noted “a sense of responsive life and community pervades the place.” There’s plenty to discuss about the Woman’s Building and the truly exceptional labour of the women who helped create it, and sustain it until it closed in 1991\. In those founding years, de Bretteville’s labor within the collective group surrounding the building, the Feminist Studio Workshop, the Women’s Graphic Center and later, her design and editorial contributions to _Chrysalis_ (1976–1980), a magazine for women’s culture, reminds us of the language of the flyer she designed for Cal Arts. In order to make a deliberate contribution as a feminist designer, she involved herself in a project of learning together with a community of women about behaviour and resources, ecology and women’s needs.

[^1]: “Decade of Dissent.”
[^2]: Sheila de Bretteville, Otis College, Woman’s Building History, May 19, 2010\. “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGJUbY- c5O98)”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGJUbY- c5O98)
[^3]: Lucy Lippard, “More Alternate Spaces: The LA Woman’s Building,” _Art in America_, May/June 1974, p. 85-86
[^4]: Ibid.,

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Design

Feminism

David Senior writes on the career of designer Sheila de Bretteville and the impact she had on introducing feminist design and radical women’s history into curriculums. 

Artefact

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Art Museum Sep 1

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MOCA Toronto Sept

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Modern Fuel Sept

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152 Cover

Editorial

This issue arose out of several recent trends in art education. First, the emergence of alternative, tuition-free, DIY\-style art schools, reading groups and skill-sharing workshops. Second, the embrace of “discursive practices” within art production and curating, often engaging methods of education as forms of production and presentation. And third, a sense of crisis within art schools themselves as budgets are slashed and departments are forced to rely increasingly on poorly paid sessional instructors, and, in some cases, restructure their programs. The impact of this has been a questioning of the value and relevance of the graduate art degree, and increased engagement with methods of learning as forms that have critical social and aesthetic potential by artists, educators and curators alike.

In these pages, we explore the relationships among these trends, looking closely at sites and practices of pedagogical experimentation. Vesna Krstich revisits the work of Fluxus in the context of curriculum reform in the 1960s, while Christopher Dingwall outlines artist Theaster Gates’ current work on Chicago’s South Side and Gates’ newly declared philosophy for an art school. In the _MFA Questionnaire_, faculty and students from art schools in Canada, the United States and Europe describe some of the forces shaping MFA education today, and envision what an ideal art school might look like. Also, in a special section for the issue, Art School Supplement, we present a partial inventory of alternative art schools, which gives a sense of some of the ways learning is taking place outside of major institutions. Many of these projects offer much-needed tuition-free options for art education and vital platforms through which communities can speak directly to each other. 

While the _Art School Supplement_ describes the educational work of present-day artist communities, the Artist Project looks to artist communities of the past, republishing a review of the Toronto-based collective ChromaZone’s iconic 1983 exhibition _Chromaliving,_ which appeared in the very first issue of _C._ Paired with documentation of _Chroma Lives,_ a contemporary restaging and translation of the original exhibition by curators Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston-Herterich, and an essay by ChromaZone member Andy Fabo, this project evokes the role of artists as a critical countercultural force, and the historical specificity of such movements. Produced in partnership with the organization _If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution,_ _Chroma Lives_ included a reading group and oral history interviews, working as both an exhibition and a platform for research and education.

We further address the “educational turn” in curatorial practice and the rise of curated public programming in an interview with curators Gabrielle Moser and Kim Simon, looking to Gallery TPW’s ongoing interrogation of the image. At a time when education in the gallery often means artist talks — a one-way flow of information — they describe the practice of doing research in public, asking what it means to be present for one another while working through difficult knowledge, sometimes across fraught social differences.

In our regular columns, Richard William Hill discusses Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s current exhibition at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, deftly negotiating the complex politics of visual form in Yuxweluptun’s work; Candice Hopkins elaborates on “listening,” focusing on what she calls “the practice of learning,” and the imperative to listen beyond dominant voices; and David Senior revisits a poster from 1970 promoting the future California Institute of the Arts as a radical experiment in art education, tracing the important role of feminist designer and organizer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville in this history.

Throughout the issue, we look at how artists create their own worlds – whether it’s within art schools, among small groups of people meeting outside of these spaces to work through ideas together, or strictly within the realm of imagination and representation. In almost all instances, these projects aim to address structural exclusions, centering education and learning in practices that explore different ways of attenuating ourselves to one another and to the world around us.

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

Editor

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_.

Assistant Editor

issue-131-p6-7.pdf

Pedagogy

Interpretation

Work

Editors Kari Cwynar and Amish Morrell introduce the issue’s “Experimental Pedagogies” theme, with relation to curatorial practice, art education and creative and educational experimentation.

Editorial: Experimental Pedagogies

Feature

For the annual Rapp Lecture in Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2013, artist Theaster Gates spoke at a lectern and presented a slide show, _To Dig Constantly, Mining Myself_. Making use of the glass lantern slide collection he had acquired from the University of Chicago – which had deemed it obsolete – Gates performed an art history of blackness, excavating the sediment layers of racial value upon which contemporary art history had been built. As he advanced the slides, he dug deeper within himself, all the while withholding the treasured, authentic black object that his audience might have hoped he would finally uncover. He chanted. He recited folklore. He showed black-and-white slides of Brâncuși sculptures, Japanese landscapes and African artifacts. He read a text by German ethnographer Leo Frobenius about buying art on the West African coast: “the Negro will never really understand why an ancient broken object is more valuable to me than one that was made recently and shows no traces of wear.” While anthropologists collected ancient, broken African arts for ethnographic museums, and while white modernists re-presented those objects for fine art museums, Gates excavated the systems of power that had deemed broken objects valuable and useful ones not, fetishizing an abstract blackness while devaluing black life. At least some in the audience were vexed by Gates’ lesson. During the Q&A, when a white woman asked him to “sing again,” Gates solicited and heeded the advice of the black members of the audience, who told him to “feel your boundaries.” Graciously, but promptly, he offered his thanks and left the stage.[^1]

Gates wields the apparatus of teaching – the slideshows, the podium, the classroom, the archive – no less masterfully than the museum, the school, the library and the state use these tools. Art critics and journalists have devoted their praise and censure to the magic of Gates’ one-man economy: if black art has been valued by markets and museums for seeming to be old and broken, he will sell you that broken object, and use the profit to make something useful and beautiful for actual black communities. Yet the money he makes and distributes has entangled his practice in educational institutions, whether the ones that employ him (the University of Chicago) or the ones he is building – most recently the Stony Island Arts Bank, an abandoned bank whose renovation into an art centre he funded by selling porcelain shards from the urinals as bonds at Art Basel (“In ART we trust”). He raised $500,000.[^2]

When both public funding and private investment are abandoning black communities, there is something unmistakably redemptive about turning a bank into an art centre, and white wealth (and desire) into spaces for “anti-racist, common, communist meditation.”[^3] Yet these spaces have proliferated into a complex of interlocking educational institutions that span the Greater Grand Crossing, South Shore and Washington Park neighbourhoods of Chicago’s South Side. Through the nonprofit Rebuild Foundation, Gates has built the Dorchester Projects (Archive House, Listening House), Black Cinema House, the Stony Island Arts Bank and the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, which provides subsidized housing and common meeting space for artists and community members. As director of Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, he has built the Arts Incubator, which hosts residencies and exhibitions, and now Place Lab, an administrative collaboration with the Harris School of Public Policy that has absorbed the old Cultural Policy Center under the motto “Arts + Culture Build Cities.” Under the auspices of art, and his own growing reputation in the art world, Gates has developed a formula for renewing not only black community spaces but also communal autonomy. As he told Romi Crawford in 2014: 

> The state and the market had use for some of the things that I believed in and not so much use for other things. Fine. What that meant was that we could just have more fun more of the time and that we could ask hard problems and then solve them within our own ways of being.[^4]

Call it the Chicago School of Theaster Gates, a principled approach to engaging the market and the state in order to build the libraries and archives and galleries where the market and state don’t want to. 

In many respects, Gates is joining a tradition of black educators that includes Booker T. Wash¬ington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Margaret Taylor-Burroughs who have engaged resources of the market and state to uplift black people. But to see Gates and his school clearly as a “system of power,” as he puts it, means placing him specifically within a history of progressive social reform deeply embedded in Chicago’s institutional landscape, one that has been successful not for its radicalism but for its pragmatism.

> \* \* \* \*

In a recent interview published in _Artforum_, Gates began to outline his philosophy of art education. It starts with the “metaphysics” of sketching. “I didn’t learn how to sketch; I didn’t learn how to draw,” says Gates, whose formal art training was in pottery, though he never received an MFA. (He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in ceramics, urban planning, and religious studies.) Nevertheless, in the blank pages of the sketchbook, Gates can begin to redesign seemingly intractable physical structures. “Working it out on paper first makes me believe that I can do it.” From the metaphysics of sketching, however, Gates telescopes quickly to the metaphysics of teaching, and the future of art school. “When I build my school,” he declares, “I’m going to teach people that whatever is taught at the MFA level is akin to elementary school”: 

In elementary school students will learn replica, mise-en-scène, and representation. In middle school, they will learn about reflexivity, reproducibility, reaction, and reflection. In high school, students will learn to see the invisible, to understand the philosophies of the invisible, will learn physics and religion. As undergraduates, my future pupils will learn transgression, systems of power, how to be a system of power, and how to harness systems of power. They will learn how to mine for gold, dig for diamonds. They learn how to fish. In graduate school, students will learn how to levitate.[^5] 

“How to be a system of power.” You might say that this is a rather gnomic way to describe a course for a career that is already well established in the art school curriculum: arts administration. Gates began his career as a public arts administrator, first at the Chicago Transit Authority and then at the University at Chicago. But as a potter and arts administrator, Gates was stymied in his ambitions. The art world didn’t value pottery highly; schools wouldn’t hire him to teach without an MFA; and, moreover, the city didn’t see the value in investing in black artists. Instead he taught himself “how to make systems.” In his debut at the Hyde Park Art Center, he presented himself as the protégé of an imaginary Japanese pottery master Shoji Yamaguchi, whose work was an unexpected fusion of Japanese and African American dinnerware. This project pushed back against Chicago’s established systems of art and education: Gates welcomed gallery goers to embrace a system of his own invention based on an invented artistic genealogy, which became a hospitable space to talk about race and art.[^6] 

In his proposed art school curriculum, Gates will teach his students less about how to administer the arts than how to administer society with art. They will learn to translate their sketches into cities, turning metaphysics into a hard physics of money and power. “I would never make a mural to solve a social problem,” Gates continues, likely alluding to Chicago’s own tradition of community mural painting as a form of vernacular art and protest. “It takes money to solve social problems; it takes hard conversations and political power – artists should also sculpt those things.”[^7] Behind his metaphysics, then, is a philosophy of social change and an ethics of social engagement. As Fred Moten puts it, Gates’ art practice is an “anti-foundational assertion of an ante-foundational reality,” one premised on the ongoing, dynamic and thus malleable reproduction of social reality, where “we mess and make each other up as we go along.”[^8] Artists are ideally suited to intervene in this reality and solve its problems, according to Gates, because they have a “vision beyond a kind of practical response.”[^9] 

Gates’ metaphysics of art education as a principle of social reform hearkens back to an earlier experiment in progressive education in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Inspired by the pragmatic philosophy of William James and John Dewey, Jane Addams built the Hull House social settlement on the city’s west side in 1889, and Dewey himself built an experimental “Laboratory School” at the University of Chicago in 1896\. For Addams and Dewey, industrial capitalism provoked alarming so¬cial problems, particularly in Chicago. The violent suppression of labour protests in the Haymarket massacre in 1886 and the Pullman Strike in 1894 made visible an untenable social divide between the white bourgeoisie and the (increasingly foreign-born) working class. But rather than begin with an ideal theory of social order and progress, Addams and Dewey sough to teach their middle-class students to learn from their working-class neighbours, and thus generate collaborative and practical ideas of order and progress. Not unlike Gates’ art school, Dewey’s Lab School had “absolutely no separation…between the ‘social’ side of the work, its concern with people’s activities and their mu¬tual dependencies, and the ‘science,’ \[the\] regard for physical facts and forces,” a mode of experience he would later liken to art.[^10] For Addams, the settlement worker was a kind of artist, her medium the social relations of the community. Rather than “painting, writing and singing,” the settlement resident “is constantly transmitting by means of \[her\] human activity, \[her\] notion of life to others,” throwing away her preconceived notions just as “the artist throws away \[her\] tools” when they fail to solve the problems at hand. In this way, resident and neighbour alike might turn “the economic relation into an ethical relation.” Addams, no less than Gates, built her school so that “religion itself \[would\] embrace all relations, including the ungodly industrial relation.”[^11]

Addams and Dewey are not the only antecedents for Gates’s pedagogical project: he draws as well from Du Bois’s ideas of cultural leadership, Washington’s harnessing of capitalist donors to fund his Tuskegee Institute, and Burroughs’s cultivation of state funding to consolidate the cultural energy of mid-century black Chicago in the South Side Community Art Center. But pragmatism provides a guide not only to Gates’s model of social engagement but also to its political limitations. The problem with the pragmatic approach to social reform – as its more radical critics argue – is that it can only beautify rather than protest or challenge the ungodly relations of capitalism that create social inequality in the first place. Although Addams’ Hull House and Dewey’s Lab School live on – and in no small way live up to their founders’ ideals of community engagement and experiential learning – they have been thoroughly absorbed by larger host institutions. Now a museum within the University of Illinois in Chicago, Hull House presents its often-daring exhibits in the middle of a once working-class neighbourhood that the university has almost completely gentrified. The Lab School remains part of the University of Chicago as a private school attended mainly by the children of faculty and the city’s (progressive) elite. (Malia and Sasha Obama were both students there.) In different ways, the institutions Addams and Dewey founded accommodated their systems of power to the powers that be, with their socially progressive agendas delivered as cultural programming. 

Gates arguably turns this flaw into a feature: he sells his radical agenda to Chicago’s elite under the guise of harmless culture. The ambiguity might be necessary to maintain his hold on the greater systems of power he harnesses. But the political consequences of this ambiguity are difficult toread, especially as the principles of his social art practice become institutionalized as principles of wider-scale community development. In its nine principles of “ethical redevelopment,” drawn from Gates’s “artist-led, neighborhood-based development work,” Place Lab echoes the pragmatic philosophy taken by Hull House and the Lab School toward the future: “Suspend knowing. Em¬brace uncertainty. Accept ambiguity. Allow the work to offer solutions; ask questions in response to ‘problems’ facing a neighborhood or city. Resource inequity can be reduced with imagination.” As it is unclear whether the authorship of the document belongs to Gates or the Lab, so too is it unclear whether the intended audience is the Harris School Board or community members. Indeed the “pedagogical moments” that will be engendered by the artist-led urban development can be read as a means to reinvigorate public life or compensate for the loss of publically funded artistic and vocational education. Whereas Gates hired unemployed workers and teenagers to help build the Dorchester Projects, Place Lab’s redevelopment projects will formalize these mentor-apprentice relationships to effect a “knowledge transfer” that will endow workers with new skills, cultivate an ethic of social responsibility and build “networks of relationships within a community, its ecosys¬tem, and the larger social economy.” The language could have come from Addams or Dewey, or from a PR consultant for a corporate charter school: “Experience is the teacher; exposure is the lab.”[^12] 

> \* \* \* \* 

Gates returned to the AGO this summer to mount his largest exhibition yet, marking how much the scope of his artistic practice and pedagogical thinking has expanded since the Rapp Lecture nearly three years ago – from lectures and objects and houses to schools and museums. In _How to Build a House Museum_, Gates will show W. E. B. Du Bois’s statistical reports on “Negro Progress,” along with bricks from a rebuilt Chicago foundry, recording equipment from Frankie Knuckles’ collection, and an extended meditation on how a modest house museum can serve the cause of black liberation. As a display of archives and objects, the exhibit cannily positions Gates within black traditions of uplift, activist collecting and vernacular mass culture, while unsettling the boundaries between them. As a proposition for a future museum, however, How to Build a House Museum shows Gates as a builder of institutions, a sculptor of money and power. Here, the utopian possibilities fostered by this space – its recalibration of black value against white desires, its communion between downtown Toronto and South Side Chicago – must be read as extensions of Gates’ more mundane social practice, where his museums and libraries and archives are taking their places among – and perhaps displacing – the institutionalized Hull House and Lab School, the struggling South Side Community Art Center, Chicago public libraries and Chicago public schools. 

As Gates envisions his future art school, his experiments in social practice art have already become significant fixtures in Chicago’s cultural landscape. The Stony Island Arts Bank, for one, is remarkable for how modestly it makes its contribution. Busy staff welcome you and guide you inside the Arts Bank. On the main floor, a gallery with white walls, exposed brick and hardwood floors hosts an exhibit by Ghanaian photographer James Barnor. Upstairs, a librarian teaches high school interns how to find books and care for the glass slides. Every week, there are workshops, readings, and tea ceremonies set to house music. It’s a working educational institution, free and open to the public, somehow surmounting the material limitations faced by any nonprofit with a small staff. Beneath Gates’ often soaring metaphysics of education, the Arts Bank provides space to preserve and reproduce local traditions of creativity and protest. Around the corner from the heralded Johnson Publishing Archive + Collections, a long reading room houses deaccessioned books from DuSable High School, whose students recently protested the dismissal of the school librarian due to budget cuts and persuaded an anonymous donor to provide the funds needed to reinstate her. Gates fa¬mously declared that his labour was his protest; he also accommodates that labour for others for whom protest itself is the more urgent work – or art. 

Chris Dingwall is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, where he is working on a book about race and the American culture industry, and helping to plan an exhibition about African American commercial designers for the Chicago Cultural Center set to open in 2018

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Race

Activism

Cultural Studies

Museums

Chris Dingwall examines the work of artist Theaster Gates, who utilizes the apparatus of teaching as a medium through which to excavate existing systems of power. Advocating for pragmatism in protest, Gates’ work encourages artists to sculpt their own systems of money and power, engaging the resources of the market and state in order to uplift oppressed and underserved communities. Gates declares that labour is his protest, and Dingwall examines the way in which this protest functions as art. 

The Chicago School of Theaster Gates

Vesna Krstich is Toronto-based critic, curator and educator.

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Academia

Art movements

In this historical overview, Vesna Krstich examines the progressive education movement of the 1960s. Noting work by artists, sociologists and educators including Allan Kaprow, Robert Filliou, George Maciunas, Maurice R. Stein, Roy Ascott, and more, Krstich presents a comprehensive timeline of how the concept of play entered the classroom, attempting to transform authoritative institutions into a performative laboratories.

The Pedagogy of Play: Fluxus, Happenings, and Curriculum Reform in the 1960s

Participant

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Eleanor King MFA Questionnaire

issue-131-p21-34.pdf

This questionnaire presents a dialogue through which various educators and former students discuss their experiences, expectations, and grievances with existing MFA programs across Canada and the United States.

MFA Questionnaire

Esmé Hogeveen is a writer based between Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

_At its best, education forms collectivities – many fleeting collectivities that ebb and flow, converge and fall apart. These are small ontological communities propelled by desire and curiosity, cemented together by the kind of empowerment that comes from intellectual challenge.[^1]_  
The progressing education movement was driven by hope that broader access to liberal arts education would create a more just society. Originated in the ate 1800s by a group of thinkers that included John Dewey and Cecil Reddie, the movement gained momentum in the early 20th century and crested in the late 1960s. It was thought that a curriculum that encouraged students to move freely between disciplines, and use their ideas to critique the established social order, would produce thoughtful, well-rounded and engaged citizens. But the ‘80s and ‘90s reversed that narrative, making higher education the mark of the élite and career-oriented. The dream of social progress was replaced with one of economic growth. 

Today’s prospective students are told that post-secondary degree will reward them with a good job and good pay. Yet, for many, university is still prohibitively expensive. The majority of students are required to take out loans, which are seen as “investments” in their future employability. But, over the last decade and a half, there has been a decline in gainfully employed grabs, and a comparative drop in their average wages: a growing number find it impossible to make good on their investments.[^2] In the USA, where tuitions are exorbitantly high (and rising), “the payoff from many \[university\] programs – as much as one in four – is actually _negative_. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students.”[^3]

The expectation that schools should add “market value” to their students puts a dangerous pressure on liberal arts universities. Instead of cultivating students’ critical faculties and social awareness, as was the ideal of the 1960s, recent curriculum changes have favoured marketable skillsets and predictable outcomes. In the context of art schools, this shift is especially problematic; no art school was founded to create high-paying jobs; no critical theory department was intended to produce “skilled workers” for a “high-tech economy.” But as arts programs increasingly remodel themselves to that end, the space for rigourous inquiry and collective imagining gets cut.

As a result, artists and educators are taking it upon themselves to recreate that space, by forming “collectivities” of the sort that professor and curator Irit Rogoff describes. Here, we’ve compiled a partial list of such experiments operating today. In our selections, we favoured the “low-key, uncategorizable, \[and\] unheroic.”[^4] These projects are nomadic and unfixed; they shift and evolve. Most are free, or operate through alternative currencies. They don’t aspire to grant degrees, and eschew student–teacher hierarchies. Indeed, these roles become interchangeable, as both traverse common speculative grounds in the shared pursuit of knowledge not yet defined.  
\- _Rupert Nuttle_  
**Listings**  
**Big Rock Candy Mountain**   
Location: Queen Alexandra Elementary School, Vancouver   
Founded: 2015   
Tuition: free   
Eligibility: students, teachers and staff of Queen Alexandra Elementary School  
Borrowing its name from the comic-utopian folk song about peppermint trees, lemonade springs and soda-water fountains, Big Rock Candy Mountain creates a “post-proportionate”world where adult rationality doesn’t define the limits of what is possible. It was initiated by artists Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed as an artistic intervention in the bizarre environment of the public school. In the words of its founders, “BRCM inhabits camp sensibility, loses control and skirts a direct relationship to education.” They regard the elementary school as an available (factory) form, and work with students to produce edible editions, strange conversations and installations on school grounds. An aesthetic and pedagogical exchange across the adult–kid divide, BRCM encourages schoolkids to consider questions of economy, labour and taste-as-power by “riding the coattails of candy.” BRCM is curated by Vanessa Kwan and produced by Other Sights for Artists’ Projects.  
**Vancouver Institute for Social Research**   
Location: Or Gallery, Vancouver   
Founded: 2013   
Tuition: free   
Eligibility: open  
“We started VISR with a view to making a roughly graduate-level critical theory education available and accessible to the general public in a city where non-corporate space is quickly evaporating,” say Dan Adleman and Am Johal, the founders of the Vancouver Institute for Social Research. They call it a “para-academic” free school, staking out a distinct model that’s on par with the “corporate universities” from which they stand apart. Students meet every Monday night to hear lectures by local and visiting experts and professors on topics such as “The Neo Liberal Personality and the Politics of Disgust” and “Rage Against Empire: Resentment, Reconciliation and Indigenous Decolonization in Canada.” Classes are divided into themed terms of 7–9 weeks and are open to anyone who wishes to attend.  
**Radical Imagination Gymnasium**   
Location: Port City Gallery, Portland   
Founded: 2014   
Tuition: free   
Eligibility: open  
“The radical imagination is not merely about thinking differently, but rather the unorthodox process of thinking together,” suggest the founders of the Radical Imagination Gymnasium. Their project started with research into the contemporary politics of imagination, and grew from a belief that the imagination should be used to envision better ways of living together, not as an instrument of capitalism. A riff on the word “gymnasium” – which can refer to both a place of learning and a place for exercise – the goal of the Radical Imagination Gymnasium is “to strengthen, flex and stretch the muscles of the radical imagination” through workshops, readings, interviews and art-making. Imagination “workouts” have included public workshops about the connection between science fiction and social justice, theatre exercises that demechanize the body and yoga classes that embody balance and collective change.  
**Your Own Grad School**   
Location: Canadian artist-run centres   
Founded: 2008   
Tuition: varied   
Eligibility: artists  
“A PhD in studio practice is a highly questionable program …even its existence provokes fundamental issues about art education,” say Cliff Eyland and Jeanne Randolph, the facilitators of Your Own Grad School. Their project began as a series of performances at the University of Manitoba School of Art that analyzed the pragmatic and ethical dimensions of post-graduate studio programs. It now exists through partnerships with Canadian artist-run centres, which select local artists to use their galleries as shared studio space for a month. At the end of each session, participants “drink beer and sit around in the gallery focusing on what it means to evolve as an artist, and what factors hinder or enhance that evolution.” The artists are each awarded a failing grade and granted a diploma emblazoned with the school’s motto: “Your Own Grad School – Art is a Life and Death Hobby.” Past sessions have been hosted by Modern Fuel in Kingston, Ontario and Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The next session will be held in 2017 at Library Gallery, Winnipeg.  
**Wood Land School**   
Location: unfixed   
Founded: 2011   
Tuition: free/varied   
Eligibility: open  
The Wood Land School emerged from founder Duane Linklater’s interest in the Indigenous artists of Northern Ontario from the 1970s, whose work engaged both contemporary and ancient Indigenous art forms. The school began as a small art exhibition on the Nipissing First Nation, in a studio space above the Necessities convenience store just off Highway 17\. It has since grown to include residencies, seminars, film screenings, readings and discursive happenings in numerous spaces across Canada. “Each iteration of Wood Land School carries forth with it a commitment to address the lack of structural inclusion \[of Indigenous people\], both historically and in the now, in a multiplicity of institutional spaces,” says Linklater. “This activation and investigation of space is an ongoing and never-ending task that must be portable, because walls should not obstruct the circulation or behaviour of ideas.” The school’s most recent iteration, Wood Land School: Thunderbird Woman, took place in Winnipeg this summer. A book of Indigenous art criticism is forthcoming, titled Wood Land School: Critical Anthology.  
**River School**   
Location: Kagawong River, Manitoulin Island   
Founded: 2015   
Tuition: $20–$75   
Eligibility: open  
River School is a site-specific, “river-based” program that investigates the relationship between art-making and the natural environment. A response to the institutional separations of art and science, body and place, it teaches participants about river ecology through a range of land-based, sensory and relational methodologies. The program includes half-day, full-day and week-long programs, with separate activities for adults and children. Kids plant trees, examine invertebrates with microscopes and build clay sculptures, while adults go on canoe trips, medicine walks and engage with local histories. The school is affiliated with the Northern Ontario Institute for Land and Landscape Studies, a group of researchers and artists who explore the connections between land-based art and the cultural, environmental and economic sustainability of the region.  
**School**  
Location: various locations in Toronto   
Founded: 2014   
Tuition: free   
Eligibility: open   
SCHOOL was founded on the idea that people in the arts rely heavily on theory, both as a vocabulary base and for generating ideas. Initiated by Jonathan Adjemian and Xenia Benivolski, the project seeks to provide Toronto-area artists with the kind of rigourous, doctoral-level study that they might otherwise not be able to access. The four-week sessions are oriented thematically and accompanied by assigned reading lists. Past sessions have included: “We Are a Knot of Relations: Embodiment and Ethics,” a course on phenomenology taught by the dancer Niomi Anna Cherney; and “Eating Bodies: Towards a Consummate Consumption,” a course led by Leila Timmins and cheyanne turions, which examined the political, historical and social dimensions of food. SCHOOL moves nomadically between cultural spaces in Toronto. Classes have been held at Videofag, 8-11, Erin Stump Projects and the Museum of Contemporary Art\_ Toronto \_Canada (formerly MOCCA). Upcoming sessions will delve into automation, ethnomusicology and memory aesthetics.  
**Hamilton Perambulatory Unit**   
Location: unfixed   
Founded: 2014   
Tuition: free   
Eligibility: open   
The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit explores the pedagogical properties of walking. It is directed by a group of artists, writers and educators based in Hamilton, Ontario, whose perambulations are guided by texts, artistic notions and philosophical ideas. Their participatory workshops hybridize public pedagogy and relational art, placing an emphasis on the inter-relationships of people and environments. The HPU has developed a technique called the “Strata-Walk,” which uses stratigraphy as a metaphor for the layers of meaning that exist in the external world. Observable strata are divided into categories such as: Architectural Strata, Non-human Animals Strata, Shiny Strata, Olfactory Strata, Pre-urban Strata and Speculative Strata, among others. The HPU has led walks all over Southern Ontario, in Quebec and internationally. They have partnered with the Articule artist-run centre in Montreal, and were residents at WalkingLab in Toronto this summer.  
**School of Making Thinking**  
Location: Catskill Mountains and New York City, New York   
Founded: 2010   
Tuition: $175–$600 (depending on program)   
Eligibility: Anyone over the age of 18   
“Creating alternative learning spaces is, for us, a form of activism,” reads the website of the School of Making Thinking. Founded on a 10-acre farm in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, the school attracts a diversity of students, including dancers, filmmakers, poets and botanists. Its founding philosophy emphasizes the value of bringing creative minds together in a secluded natural environment, with the purpose of fostering not only social critique and pedagogical experiment, but also experiments in communal living. The School of Making Thinking has offered summer residencies at its Catskills location, and week-long hikes through the surrounding wilderness. Last spring, the school instituted several courses at the Abrons Arts Center in New York City, which focused on topics like “Sci-Art: The Art–Science Continuum,” and “Experimental Nonfiction: The Self as Writing and Performance.” These classes cost $200 and last just under two months.  
**Trade School**   
Location: worldwide network   
Founded: 2010   
Tuition: barter-based   
Eligibility: open  
Trade School began as a small group of friends living in New York City who gave each other things they needed in exchange for hands-on learning. It has since become a global phenomenon, with over 20,000 students attending more than 50 Trade Schools worldwide. Chapters are as far-flung as Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Pietermaritzburg (South Africa) and San Juan Del Sur (Nicaragua), with courses in each locale covering a dynamic array of local, global, and personal expertise. In Quito, Ecuador, for instance, you can trade one kilogram of beans for a class in experimental photography. Other classes include: “The Body’s Ability to Heal Itself Through the Skull” (Athens), “Creating a Power Work Wardrobe on a Budget” (Port of Spain), and “Cupcake Icing – Basics” (York). A local Trade School can be formed by anyone, anywhere, using the step-by-step guide found at tradeschool.coop.  
**Anhoek School**   
Location: unfixed   
Founded: 2009   
Tuition: barter-based   
Eligibility: woman-identified participants  
Until 2013, Anhoek school was a nomadic school for woman-identified students. Courses triangulated aesthetics, politics and theory, Students interfaced directly with the public, circulating their coursework in the form of pamphlets, zines, broadsheets, podcasts and park-side manifestos. Early classes and tutorials included: “The Mutinous Classroom: Outlaws with Books” (New York, 2009); “Stealing Horses: The Invention of Possession” (Marfa, 2009); and “Radical Citizenship: The Tutorials” (San Francisco and New York, 2010). Beginning in 2011, Anhoek shifted away from the classroom, forming offshoots such as feminist pirate radio station, and Scantron exams administered on subjects such as “Beautiful Economy” and “The Feminine Mark.” Recently, the project (Doggy) Mouth of (Doggy) Truth: Language Lab, installed in Brooklyn, explored human/canine interfaces in “a generative commentary on the impossibility of radical education under oppressive, racist, or sexist circumstances.”  
**The Gonzago Institute**  
Location: The Khyber Centre for the Art, Halifax  
Founded: 2016  
Tuition: free  
Eligibility: Residents of the Halifax area aged 19-35  
Developed by NSCAD professor Craig Leonard, The Gonzago Institute operates entirely outside of the university, offering a three-month, tuition-free certificate program in which students explore concepts of “Practice, Theory and Community.” The Institute’s first iteration was held between January and March of this year, and was housed in The Khyber Centre for the Arts, an artist-run centre in Halifax. A handful of participants, including artists, writers and musicians, met on a weekly basis for group discussion, action and critique. The Gonzago Institute will return to the Khyber Centre in 2017 and its activities and conversations will be documented in a forthcoming publication.  
**The Silent University**   
Locations: London, Stockholm, Athens, Hamburg, Mülheim/Ruhr, Amman   
Founded: 2012   
Tuition: exchange of knowledge and skills   
Eligibility: open  
The Silent University is a knowledge-exchange platform for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who have had academic training in their home countries but who cannot share their knowledge due to their residency status in their adopted countries. Its members advocate for a “transversal pedagogy” that exists outside established academia, and defies the restrictions of border politics, migration laws and other juridical obstacles. The university was first founded in London by the Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt, in collaboration with the Tate Modern and the Delfina Foundation. Subsequent branches have been established internationally, through partnerships with local organizations. Lectures include: “A comparison of Sharia laws and the Swedish political system,” and “What children (in migrant families) need for their psychosocial development.” A comprehensive survey of The Silent University’s activities was published by Sternberg Press in June, 2016.  
**Michelle Bigold, Esme Hogeveen** and **Rupert Nuttle** are Editorial Interns at _C Magazine_. 

[^1]: Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” _e-flux journal_ 
[^2]: John Cassidy, “College Calculus,” _The New Yorker_, September 7, 2015\. 
[^3]: Peter Cappelli, _Will College Pay Off?_ (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015). Quoted in Cassidy. 
[^4]: Rogoff, np.

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A short and partial compilation of existing experiments in alternative learning.

Art School Supplement

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Exhibitions

Curatorial practice

Artist-run centres

From September 2012 to October 2013, Gabrielle Moser was curator-in-residence at TPW R&D, a project developed by Gallery TPW Curator Kim Simon, when the gallery inhabited a temporary space on Dundas Street West in Toronto. In this conversation, Simon and Moser reflect and expand upon some of the ideas and questions that arose during the residency. 

The Pedagogies of Looking: An Interview with Kim Simon and Gabrielle Moser

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Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

To paraphrase Tim Jocelyn’s opening sentence of his 1983 piece for the premiere issue of _C Magazine_, in which he reflects on the exhibition staged by Toronto collective ChromaZone, of which he and I were both members: We knew _Chromaliving_ would be memorable but we didn’t realize how memorable until we saw the decades pass, our extravaganza in the Colonnade continuing to make cyclical, spectral reappearances, haunting the collective memories of our friends and associates in the Toronto art world.

Thirty years later, Erin Freedman and Lili Huston-Herterich approached me, Rae Johnson and Oliver Girling about the possibility of mounting Chroma Lives, an exhibition that would revisit the original _Chromaliving_ show and its aesthetic arc while illuminating crucial differences between the two shows’ respective decades. _Chroma Lives_ mutated as a concept frequently over the months it took to develop – at one point it would have been a twinned mega-exhibition in the soon-to-be-vacant Honest Ed’s discount department store. Its owner, David Mirvish, generously met with Erin and Lili but the space had been promised out before its final demolition. _Quel dommage!_

Freedman and Huston-Herterich’s _Chroma Lives_ eventually became a condensed display of artworks ensconced in one of the showrooms for the posh Yorkville Plaza condominiums currently in development, creating a skewed symmetry between the venues of the two exhibitions. _Chromaliving_ was created in the depths of a recession that had decimated the carriage trade along Bloor Street. Creeds, a swank competitor of Holt Renfrew, had closed, as had the “junior miss” department store, Harridge’s, in the space that would host our show. Most of the stores in the complex were empty and I don’t think the owners could have imagined that one day Cartier and Prada would grace their edifice. Because of the recession of the early ’80s, space was expansive rather than expensive. Relatively poor artists could afford relatively large spaces for studios in this era and the 10,000 square feet that we installed in was reflective of the economic conditions of the time. Erin and Lili mounted _Chroma Lives_ in a real estate boom, when condos are popping up like mushrooms, scores of artists are losing their studios in the overheated market and Torontonians are living in ever-smaller spaces. Squeezing an exhibition with a large vision into a confined space seemed appropriate in the marking of current conditions and inhabiting an operational condo showroom on Avenue Road seemed as unexpected and subversive as our appropriating a gigantic retail space on Bloor Street in 1983\. Both sites evoked the multi-faceted ironies of their socio-economic contexts.

Similarly, it seemed right that the only artist from the original show in this reimagined mutant of an exhibition was Tim himself, with 35 young artists in various stages of emergence. Tim would have been excited to be in their company and I think he would have felt deeply connected to almost all of their work. When Erin and Lili first described their intentions, one possibility they cited was to rhyme Will Munro’s work, life and career with Tim’s and that interested me greatly. Beyond the connections between the two sweet, charming men – the foundation of textiles in their works, their intuitive and deeply ingrained understanding of the semiotics of apparel, their overt sociability that made them catalysts of their generations – it gave me a revelation about the crucial role that queer artists had played in Toronto as hosts/hostesses, impresarios, catalysts and nurturers of new and often misunderstood talent. Besides Tim and Will, I’m also thinking of David Buchan, Andrew Harwood, Keith Cole, Allyson Mitchell, Kim Fullerton, and General Idea – almost all of whom have or did have distinctly social practices that were relational long before Bourriaud came along to coin the term.

_Chromaliving_ created such a stir in Toronto that autumn of 1983 that there seemed to be immediate aftereffects. Esther Shipman, who had attended the Ontario College of Art with a number of the artists who participated in the exhibition, was inspired to leave a career in retail and become an architecture and design curator, initiating VIRTU, an annual exhibition of the best of Canadian design that ran from 1985 to 2000\. Loris Calzolari, a designer in our show who had studied with Ettore Sottsass in Milan, mounted an international exhibition at Queen’s Quay Terminal called _Phoenix_ (1984), citing the DIY spirit of _Chromaliving_ as his inspiration. The accompanying book that he published with curator Christina Ritchie remains a collector’s item and an important record of design during the Memphis era.

Beyond these confirmed examples, I believe there were numerous less tangible influences of _Chromaliving_. Greenbergian modernism was invested in maintaining the gap between life and art. Robert Rauschenberg famously spoke of working in the gap between the two, which he believed to be the locus of adventure and creativity in artmaking. ChromaZone wanted it all: to work on both sides of the gap _and_ in the space between them. This was characterized as being punk and anarchistic by some, and lacking rigour and intellect by others. ChromaZone had already made a declaration for all the unclaimed, outré territories, and _Chromaliving_ was a further granting of permission to ourselves to defy categories, let loose, and indulge in affect, transgression and fun.

In Toronto, there were three megashows initiated by artist collectives in the early ’80s: _YYZ Monumenta_ (1982), _Chromaliving_ (1983) and _The New City of Sculpture_ (1984), a collaboration between Mercer Union and YYZ. In several accounts of the ’80s in the immediate aftermath of that decade, _Chromaliving_ went unmentioned. Perhaps because it was so unclassifiable as an event and exhibition, I was quite prepared for it to evaporate into the ether of the past. Sybil Goldstein, however, was not so prepared for it to go gently into that mist and doggedly archived it as best she could for the CCCA Canadian Art database.

I still encounter strangers who tell me how mind-blowing _Chromaliving_ was to them at the time, and how it made them re-envision the possibilities of public art. Vera Frenkel once recounted to me that when she worked with the Artangel Trust in London to mount _This is Your Messiah Speaking_ on the Piccadilly Circus Spectacolor Board in 1990–91, founder Roger Took told her that seeing _Chromaliving_ is what gave him the impetus to create Artangel, which continues to produce the most extraordinary public artworks in Britain and internationally. Tim, one of the dearest loves of my life, would be gratified to know that all the blood, sweat and tears that we put into _Chromaliving_ was well worth it because it lives on in so many unexpected ways.

Artist

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Installation

Art History

Collective

Thirty years after art collective ChromaZone exhibited ChromaLiving, an installation that challenged the hierarchies of fine art and applied design, artists Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston have re-opened the dialogue by mounting a commemorative exhibit entitled Chroma Lives. Original member Andy Fabo reflects on the influence ChromaLiving continues to have on the Toronto art scene. 

The Days of Living Chroma

Thirty years after art collective ChromaZone exhibited ChromaLiving, an installation that challenged the hierarchies of fine art and applied design, artists Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston have re-opened the dialogue by mounting a commemorative exhibit entitled Chroma Lives. Original member Andy Fabo reflects on the influence ChromaLiving continues to have on the Toronto art scene.

The Days of Living Chroma by Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston-Heterich: Essay   

Review

**Justina Bohach** facilitates various modes of cultural production within contemporary art. She is interested in experimental approaches to writing, including ficto-criticism. She received her BFA in Critical and Cultural Studies in 2016 from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. In 2015 she curated the exhibition _Matter-Trace_ at CSA Space in Vancouver. She has published with _Blonde Art Books Blog_ in Brooklyn, NY, and _The Mainlander_ in Vancouver. From 2012 to 2015 she was Geoffrey Farmer’s studio manager and worked as production assistant for Luminato’s 2016 Arts Partners at the Hearn in Toronto.

**C New Critics Competition 2016**  
_The winner of this year’s New Critics Competition is Justina Bohach, for her review of Katie Lyle and Shelby Wright’s performance Movements for a Room._

_Movements for a Room_ (2016), a live art performance hosted at artist Jenine Marsh’s studio, begins with a shift: the audience is told to move back to make space for the performer-collaborators Katie Lyle (painter) and Shelby Wright (dance artist/choreographer). The 20 viewers sitting on the floor shuffle back, movement rippling through the crowd. The audience members look around – at the kitchen, bathroom, rod of clothing hanging on the back wall, couch full of coats, stacked artwork, supplies and shelves – and at each other. This moment reminds me that I am enclosed by walls in this private space made public and, sitting on the floor, I am struck by the mutability of space. Through choreography, collaboration and the contemplation of a room, Lyle and Wright actualize a meditation on what space is and can be within the context of live art.

A recording begins, and, in unison, Lyle and Wright step into the middle of the room. Their heads turn back sharply towards a partitioned wall centred in the middle of the stage. It is positioned close to the foundational wall and centred between two windows that overlook the city. This is the only prop, and it acts as a communication device between the women: they move around it, falling in and out of unison. Over the speakers, a light hum reverberates: feminine, casual and untroubled. The two wear loose, white sleeveless tops, slinky, silver men’s basketball shorts, white socks and white tennis shoes. Together, they evoke Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s historic work _Fase_ (1982): simple costumes that flow with movement, deadpan facial expressions, unconcerned sensuality, syncopated movements, isolation of various body parts, angular extensions and rotations, and patterns and repetitions. Despite this similarity, _Movements for a Room_ is its own composition – with the artists interacting with the walls as if they were another dance partner or collaborator, the walls are not just a frame: they are a character within the performance.

This work has been performed three times, and was originally created for and influenced by the garden space that hosted the exhibition _What she is not, what she is, what she can be_ (2015), which referenced Virginia Woolf’s _A Room of One’s Own_. At Garden Avenue (Toronto), the performance was called _Movements for the Neighbouring Room_, and it kept this title for its presentation at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario. At Marsh’s studio, the title has changed in response to the new space.

Each iteration has remained firmly grounded in collaboration and choreography, both of which were new to Lyle. Her painting practice focuses on female portraits and depictions situated in historical and contemporary culture: personalities, stereotypes, and the recognition of these characters. In correspondence, she specified that the “dance/ performance feels like a physical manifestation of those faces and bodies that are in the paintings.” In her recent exhibition _The End of Vandalism_ (2015) at Erin Stump Projects, Lyle used a freestanding wall conceptually comparable to this performance’s prop wall. She emphasizes the relationship of the painter to the wall, and questions what it is, outside of a support for her paintings, a place where femininity is elusively represented and acutely considered through the layering of meanings. By rethinking the walls and pronouncing them collaborators, she allows them to be more than just a foundation: they become an extension of corporeality, a respondent.

Wright’s current work, minimalistic and non-narrative, focuses on the body as an archive, and explores how memory plays a role within choreography. The barrier between the audience and performer is acknowledged only at the beginning and end of the performance. Together, the pair approach choreography with a “looseness to timing and sequencing” with the “possibility for recognition, related to how \[they\] move outside in the world.”

The women wear their historical posturing in and on their bodies: Wright is visibly trained; Lyle moves more naturally. Through a language of movement, each integrates her training and subjectivity. Their collaborative process unfolds through the observation of each other: a combination of mimicry, molding of formal relationships between the movements, and consideration of site specificity. It is not just a collaboration between Lyle and Wright, but also with the space itself: it too becomes a participant. The work morphs to fit each individual context where it is shown: the shape and characteristics of the space inform the movements and choreography. Definitions of space are individually authored: at times, we are aware of this; at others, we forget about the walls.

In a recent press release for a performance at MoMA PS1, dance artist Mårten Spångberg’s work was framed as: “choreography as medium… considering the potentiality of dance as an object.”[^1] Doing so situates _character vs. author_, a theme Lyle explores in her work. In conversation about this performative dialogue, Lyle and Wright tease out the interfaces of choreography, performance and self, asking: “What is a performance of femininity? How do we naturally move? What is calculated or rehearsed?” Though they see this work as non-emotive and non-narrative, wondering: “Are we in character? Are we playing a role in a story? Is this performance?”

As enunciated through the work’s changing titles, the artists dedicate the performance for each room, rather just performing in each one. Through these dedications, the spaces become eponymously part of the performance. The room is personified and becomes a character, performer, collaborator, participant, respondent and specimen: it is a living organism. And through choreography, Lyle and Wright make viewers aware of the space they inhabit – the use of it, the ways to be in it and the mutability of what it can be. Their performance underscores the changing definitions of locus, the forms and functions of private and public space, and the interplay between them. By changing the quotidian – moving a painting, or working with the body instead of a paintbrush – our thoughts about the way we inhabit space can be distilled, whether within a physical room or an artistic practice.

[^1]: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/ marten-spangberg/

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This article reviews Katie Lyle and Shelby Wright’s exhibition Movements for a Room at Jenine Marsh’s Studio in Toronto, presented on March 14, 2016.

Katie Lyle and Shelby Wright: Movements for a Room

sophia bartholomew (they/them) is a non-binary femme and interdisciplinary artist, currently based in suburban Vancouver. Their forthcoming publication—“Solutions for the Problem of Staying Alive” (M:ST festival, 2020)—is part of an ongoing conversation and collaboration with Calgary-based artist Hannah Doerksen.

Emitting a diffused scent from its place on the floor, Aleesa Cohene’s _You, Dear_ (2014), initiates entry into Artspeak’s space on Carrall Street and presents a quiet reminder that entering this space constitutes crossing a threshold. Every morning, the gallery attendant performs a small rite, releasing scent into the room, and activating the exhibition as a slow and sacred space. Cognitively, reality is held together by the performance of small rituals, and the use of smell in particular keeps visitors rooted inside their bodies, as they enter the gallery. The smell of Cohene’s work is strange and somewhat earthy: it is a compound of aluminum, cumin, cyprus, frankincense, and the Smell of Real AssTM , which dissipates throughout the afternoon.

Caught in the overcast light angling in from the storefront windows, a small pile of publications is stacked on the hardwood floor. The black ink on their cardstock covers is mottled and glossy. The eight non-chronological pages of Marina Roy’s curatorial essay are creased, but unbound. This printed format is standard for Artspeak, but when placed in conversation with the exhibition, its loose tactility supports Roy’s essay as an artwork in and of itself: one which speaks beside the other artworks, rather than speaking about them prescriptively. The writing moves playfully around ideas of excess and affect, sexuality and sacrificial offering, emphasizing the possibility of invoking altered, expanded modes of existence through the creation and presentation of art, and referencing concepts put forward by Elizabeth Grosz, Georges Bataille, and Eric Santner.

Roy has lifted the exhibition’s title from George Bataille’s _La part maudite_ (1949), three philosophical volumes (“Consumption”, “The History of Eroticism,” and “Sovereignty”) that put forward the alternate economic theory of a “general economy,” in which actors make use of a networked superabundance of energy, rather than being motivated by scarcity. According to Bataille’s thinking, “the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving,”[^1] and Roy’s essay works to align art practice with his description of the human desire to form a new world. She makes use of Eric Santner’s image of “the fleshy remainder” of ritual sacrifice to better understand the cultural function of art, and proposes that the world’s unpragmatic excesses (the accursed share), might work towards sublime experiences of abjection.

Messy intersections of mortal bodies press out of every object in the room, but in different ways. Each object moves at a different time scale, and emphasizes a different bodily sense: smell, sight and touch. Piled in a mound that mirrors the curvature of a pregnant human belly, the component parts of _You, Dear_ are also the exact size and shape of seedless grapes: they are made from small ovals of onyx, strung together with galvanized wire entwined in thread. Seen from the corner of an eye, they could be a heady share of treasure, or a pile of wild animal shit; they could be a living room decoration, or an abandoned grocery store purchase. There’s a certain discomfort in this kind of misidentification: confusing the boundaries and hierarchies that are used to organize bodies.

The onyx grapes are white and green, with veins of pale grey that refer to a pair of matte grey picture frames, hanging from the opposite wall. Inside the frames, Deborah Edmeades’ multi-panelled drawings, _Divination, Chance & Character: Tools for the Extension of Sensibility (Index)_ (2016), work to classify a set of 16 objects and actions, granting a mystical status to daily practices like reading and looking. To the right, one of the drawings is physically manifest in the back corner of the room: in _Blinking and Other Involuntary Portals_ (2016), two sparse machines are staring at each other through black viewing portals, their eyelids blinking rhythmically, mechanized by pink crystal pendulums, swinging back and forth. Both works look out inquisitively, and speak through codes of gesture and language. They diagram the unknowns of intersubjective relation, with reference to spiritual mysticism and sleek techno-scientific vocabularies. Their eyeballs’ irises are gridded like colour wheels, echoing a delineative gesture seen along the bottom edge of two of Derek Dunlop’s paintings. 

Dunlop’s _Eternal Return_ (2015) and _M_ (2015) hang across the room from each other, at a diagonal. The hard-edge character of these grids invokes television test signals, or the colour “control” bars printed on newspapers and cereal boxes, but unlike these ephemeral things, Dunlop’s stretched canvas objects have a slow physical presence and a long life. Made from oil and acrylic, canvas and pencil, their materials are pulling inward and outward, responding to each other. They sit on top of each other, or they soak in. Recurring gestures of scribbling, scratching and rubbing out are sometimes buried, other times floating at the surface. There’s a feeling of both muddy erasure and willful silence. _Bullrushes_ (2015) creates the illusion of a bright pink ground, blotted out with pale pink and maybe ochre, pointing back to the palette used in Edmeades’ work.

All together, _The Accursed Share_’s proposition is a compelling one. It proposes that by creating a constellation of unsettling, somatic experiences, an exhibition can emphasize the abject confusion of bodies, and in so doing, become a means of evading and surpassing capitalist systems of instrumental experience and accumulation. Here, a gallery’s space might transcend being a value-added-container for objects-to-be-accumulated, and instead become a quiet space for contemplation, where artworks facilitate more sensitive manipulations of human surplus, and invite tactile, introspective forms of looking and listening. The project aspires to transform the space in this way, but ultimately remains ambivalent about its ability to do so. After all, an art gallery is always performing these two opposing functions – and many other functions as well. 

[^1]: Georges Bataille, _The Accursed Share_, Volume 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 25–6.

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This article reviews the exhibition The Accursed Share featuring work by Aleesa Cohene, Derek Dunlop and Deborah Edmeades. The exhibition took place at Artspeak in Vancouver from April 2 to May 21, 2016\. 

Aleesa Cohene, Derek Dunlop and Deborah Edmeades: The Accursed Share

Jacquelyn Ross is a writer based in Toronto.

The stage is bare, save for a jacket and a shoulder bag stowed tidily in the corner. A cream-coloured Afghan hound stands stoically on a small folding table while a middle-aged man attends methodically to its coat with a small comb. Their profiles are framed by the tiny white-walled stage: the kind of stage frequently found in elementary school gymnasiums. But unlike a typical children’s Christmas play, with its colourful homemade costumes and eclectic cardboard sets, the mood here is instead that of the dusty, off-season set. Here, a diverse cast auditions for an audience of one: displaying for the camera their various skills and occupations, ranging from the quotidian, to the novel, to the strange. Someone gets a haircut. A man in drag sings opera. A guy eats a pyramid of hot dogs. Three gymnasts perform incredible collaborative balancing acts. There’s a hula hooper, a set of weight lifters, and a seriously good speed skipping team – four blonde girls with stiff double braids. A thoughtful study of human quirks and display, Allison Hrabluik’s new film takes imaginative cues from the absurd while drawing attention to the ways in which narrative is constructed in film.

Having long worked in drawing, video and animation, Hrabluik uses _The Splits_ (15 min, HD video, 2015) to combine her craft and collagist sensibilities with the more “objective” methods of documentary film. While a clear departure from her early stop-motion animations, many common threads remain. The stage sits squarely in the frame, creating the illusion of extending directly out of the gallery’s fourth wall. In this way, I am transported into the work’s mundane tableau of moving parts, a willing spectator, as the scenes unfold with the flat-planed whimsy of a Wes Anderson film. I watch empathetically as a lone hula hooper makes small circles with his hips, his arms, like a set of hinged limbs. And though, in this case, live action takes precedent over cutting and pasting, the artist’s tactility returns in the editing process. Scenes are spliced together in a spirited audio-visual montage, generating narrative through simple exercises in compare and contrast. Images alternate between close shots of a dog’s long, blonde fur coat and the trimming of a woman’s hair; meat patties slapping against a kitchen counter, and a heavy barbell hitting the ground between repetitions.

In _The Splits_, sound is key. There are whistles, pings and breaths. There is swishing, slapping, tapping, whizzing, popping, rattling, whooshing. I close my eyes and am reminded subtly of the junkyard musical _STOMP_, with its over-the-top, apocalyptic choreography and percussive metal pails, brooms and garbage cans. Meanwhile, the film’s sound pans from right to left as I try to identify the foley effects at work, or determine whether the soundtrack is instead somehow authentic. It strikes me as unusual to find foley in documentary film, but then again, it’s unclear whether that is even the genre in question. Hrabluik deconstructs the relationships between image and sound, reconstituting them in such a way as to build in new meaning amidst the surprising violence and noisiness of human activity. One scene depicts a close-up of tap dancers’ shoes as they bang out a relentless rhythm on a wooden board; I shudder with each clapping reverberation.

The longer I watch, the more absorbed I become in the cast’s peculiar feats and personal qualities. It seems that now even the camera might be sympathetic to these small, tender miracles – which, one by one, seem to defy any possibility for objectivity. In this way, the artist forms a narrative “closeness” to her subjects; a kind of filmic empathy. Profiling the idiosyncratic talents of some twenty real-life performers, the film maintains an earnestness about the act of representation, and a genuine curiosity about the lives of those represented. The cast’s tiny gestures in turn function like allegories for broader societal conditions of synchronicity, collaboration, loneliness or humour: all the while highlighting a desire to remain authentic in the face of unwilling spectacle.

I missed the exhibition opening, but the gallery assistant tells me that many of the cast members were in attendance at the reception – among them, the weight lifter, the speed skippers, the hula hooper and the haircut woman. I feel moved imagining so many plain-clothed superhumans assembled in a room together, shuffling shyly behind a cheese plate, despite their secret powers. I think, _What better way to explode spectacle, than to become friends?_ In _The Splits_, performance moves messily into non-performance, and back again. I’m reminded of French choreographer Jérôme Bel, whose works frequently revolve around the notion of the “deskilled” performer (his 1997 piece _Shirtology_ for example, involved his deadpan shedding of over thirty layers of shirts). Hrabluik draws on a similar tendency here: capturing not the deskilled, but rather, the comparable simplicity of the stripped-down gesture – actions reduced to raw movement and sound in order to better preserve their complexities. Drawing from her recent focus on dance and choreographic practices, Hrabluik’s film expresses a sensory intelligence and capacity for storytelling that leads with the body, and the ears.

As a kid, I can remember a time when life was still relatively simple. “Can you do the splits?” my friends and I would ask each other, several times a day. I was never that flexible – always stretching just short, with one knee shamefully bent – but this became a kind of ongoing competition between us, expressing our childish desire for minor betterment or accomplishment. _The Splits_ captures something of this same desire. As we grow older, “talents” become “skills” (and eventually, “hobbies,” or even “vocations”), but the idea of the rehearsal remains. It’s unclear, though, for what exactly we are rehearsing – there will be no spectacular talent show at the end of life. But the fact that these hopeful energies continue to be exerted every day, without necessary or known outcomes, speaks to the abstraction at the heart of the human project, and all those surprising things that make a person tick.

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This article reviews Allison Hrabluik’s exhibition The Splits presented at SFU Gallery in Burnaby from January 30 to April 22, 2016\. 

Allison Hrabluik: The Splits

What better place for a learner’s paradise than the secluded woods surrounding the banks of Lake Eden, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina? For 24 years, Black Mountain College was the epicentre of artistic and teaching experimentation in the United States, shaping the post-war avant-garde and serving as a model for other liberal arts colleges. Curating this exhibition was a leap into unfamiliar territory for Helen Molesworth, who confessed to not knowing much about the college’s history when she embarked on the exhibition. Appropriately, she treated the task of curating an exhibition about pedagogy as an assignment, enacting John Dewey’s belief in the value of “learning by doing” – a central tenet of Black Mountain College.

_Leap Before You Look_ brings together paintings, sculptures, weavings, furniture, ceramics, drawings, poetry, music and an impressive range of archival materials in the form of blueprints, photographs and printed ephemera. Embracing the fact that there was no dominant “style” at the college, the exhibition spaces are thematically arranged and the works on display resist strict art historical classification. In addition to works by noted faculty John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and Josef and Anni Albers, the show also includes student exercises. A slide projection showcasing the _matière_ studies executed by Josef Albers’ students (which Albers religiously documented for study purposes) are particular noteworthy, as are the didactic panels illustrating his colour interaction exercises, created by W. Pete Jennerjahn. These teaching aids may have never been intended to function as art, and yet today, such documents have a more ambiguous status as the lines between pedagogy and art diminish.

Molesworth’s survey arrives at a time when the social and political function of education is hotly contested. “Pedagogy-as-art” and “exhibition-as-school” platforms have proliferated throughout the contemporary art world and with them, a resurgence of historical exhibitions featuring innovative teaching methods and curricula. _Bauhaus: Art as Life_ (2012), at the Barbican in London was one of the largest exhibitions of the legendary school in 40 years; _Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945– 1980_ (2011–12) highlighted, among other things, the impact of the California Institute of the Arts on the local art scene; _Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980_ (2012) included works from the famous Projects Class at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 

The history of Black Mountain College is bookended between two pivotal moments of upheaval: the early avant-garde of the 1930s and the counter culture of the 1960s, a period marked by the Great Depression, World War II and racial segregation. Founder John Andrew Rice believed that an arts-centred education could forge a new kind of citizen and Molesworth invites viewers to consider how funding cuts to humanities programs and public education compromise this principle today. What makes the school an important case study for current discussions of pedagogy is its collaborative and self-sustaining structure, as well as an expanding conception of learning that could take place on the farm or in the living room – something that has become the _modus operandi_ of much art since the 1990s.

Peppered throughout the exhibition space is a selection of archival photographs that have been enlarged to mural size. They document communal daily life around the college: students sunbathing, huddling around Josef Albers or digging a ditch. They have a staged, if not propagandistic quality, some even evoking the trope of collective labour so reminiscent of socialist realist painting. The photographs’ focus on daily activities and their display bears a striking resemblance to the iconic 1955 exhibition _The Family of Man_. Circulated around the globe, the exhibition sought to document the universal experience of life – a shared humanity that Roland Barthes would criticize as a “myth” in 1957, a pronouncement that also coincides with the closing of Black Mountain College. Do these photomurals seek to recapture the sentimental humanism of the postwar era or point to its inevitable decline? Was the experience of teaching and learning at Black Mountain always so life-affirming? After all, frictions exist in any system. These threads of ambiguity are masterfully woven into the show, waiting to be pulled.

At the centre of Black Mountain’s myth lies John Cage’s _Theatre Piece No._, commonly referred to as “the first happening.” The improvisational event included David Tudor on a piano, a dance performance by Merce Cunningham, poetry readings by M.C. Richards, Charles Olson and Robert Rauschenberg, who played songs on a record player. No documentation of it survives – only conflicting reports from those who were present. Cage’s piece encapsulates the problem of curating a show about education: how to give form to those more “invisible” teachable moments, which remained undocumented for posterity. A small schematic floor plan of the piece produced by Mary Caroline Richards in 1989, functions as a stand-in for the missing documentation. It is exhibited alongside Robert Rauschenberg’s _White Painting (Four Panels)_ (1951), which was allegedly hung on the wall during Cage’s concert. This contradicts Richards’ recollection that it was Franz Kline’s _Painting_ (1952) that was featured in the piece. Rather than demystifying the event by providing an accurate history, the juxtaposition between Richards’ floor plan and Rauschenberg’s canvases preserves the myth: it provides an open field upon which to project our fantasies about what might have taken place that summer evening in 1952.

The spectre of _Theatre Piece No_. is summoned in the adjacent room. Upon entering the space, the viewer confronts a large video projection showing three separate dance performances: Merce Cunningham’s _Septet_ (1953/1963) and _Changeling_ (1957/1958), and _The Glyph_ (1951/1977) by Katherine Litz. The large black mat in front of the screen serves as a stage, establishing a coextensive relationship between real and virtual space. Nearby is Rauschenberg’s colourful set design _Minutiae_ (1954/1976), an open wooden structure made of painted fabric panels and comic strip newsprint that he fashioned for Cunningham. The gallery also includes a suspended anthropomorphic wire-crocheted sculpture by Ruth Asawa, a hand-drawn notation by Cage, as well as photographs and weavings. A grand piano sits in the left corner, and a large wooden loom on the right. Both instruments wait for a set of nimble fingers to play the score that will set the performance in motion. One of the most exquisite installations in the entire show, it is the crescendo in the story of Black Mountain College. In collaging together these different pieces, the room celebrates the spirit of interdisciplinary experimentation at the school.

The exhibition ends with a glimpse into the literary arts and the publishing efforts of the college. One of the last surviving documents is a typeset diagram created by the college’s new director, Charles Olson, in anticipation of its closure in 1957\. He envisioned a new cooperative, organizational model for the school in which satellite institutions (a magazine, a publishing house, a theatre and an art institute) sprout in different directions around America from the central core at Black Mountain. While the activities at the Bauhaus were concentrated towards the final aim of architecture, the new priority for its American offshoot would be more rhizomatic and not rooted in a particular locational identity or art form. Black Mountain College is long gone but its spirit lives on in the global network of artist residencies and decentralized schools, and the multi-disciplinary degree programs of today.

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This article reviews the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from Feb. 21 to May 15, 2016.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College

**Emily Fitzpatrick** is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

Chester Station is a Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) subway stop that serves the adjacent communities of Greektown, Withrow Park, Riverdale and Broadview North. Being one of the only TTC stations that does not connect to an outbound bus or streetcar, the clientele of Chester Station is familiar and depend- able. For a year, beginning on May 8, 2015, Chester Station commuters have been the primary audience for _The Artists Newsstand_, the year-long, site-specific project of a collective led by performance artist Jess Dobkin. Occupying a vacant Gateway Newsstand kiosk, _The Artists Newsstand_ offered a range of products, including magazines, snacks and artist multiples, while also acting as a gallery space for performances and installations.

After a busy year of motley programming, it’s important to consider _The Artists Newsstand_’s impact on its dual audience of the Toronto’s arts community and Chester Station’s subway commuters. The impetus for this project was a desire to create a space that could be activated in a variety of unprescribed ways, and which could be adaptable and responsive to its diverse and ever-changing audience. When considering an unoccupied Gateway kiosk as a site for an artist project, the artists reflected on its initial function as a destination for reading material and refreshments. The function of these kiosks has diminished in recent years, as people increasingly get their news from other outlets, like through their smartphones. Responding to such changes, the collective took on the present-day inconsequence of the site, and attempted to restore it as a conduit for dialogue, and as well as create an alternative venue for exhibiting and distributing art objects.

In most cases, the reason why successful public artworks work is because they respond to their context, often negotiating pre-existing social systems. In this case the artists employed the familiar form of a newsstand kiosk to engage with the general public. With opening hours from three until seven pm, Dobkin described her varied audience as commuters on their way home, people going to Greek restaurants in the neighbourhood, patrons of the nearby Big Carrot health food store, TTC employees and teenagers on their way home from school. Listing these groups with great detail and recollecting the patterns of people’s movement through the station, Dobkin mapped an informal ecology of Chester Station.

For Dobkin, it was critical that _The Artists Newsstand_ functioned as a newsstand, and offered commuter-patron necessities like candy and gum, alongside locally sourced items like artisan lip balm and home-baked cookies. Dobkin recalls the conversations the collective had about what they should sell and what people would want. “Do we sell bottled water?” “Do we sell candy made by Nestle?” It was decided that, while it’s not their politic, these necessity items provided options for people to engage with the newsstand in a way that was familiar, encouraging a comfortable exchange that could provoke further conversation. The $1 potato chip special, for instance, presented an opportunity for kid-commuters to inquire about Mary Tremonte’s ultrasound-imagery in _SERIOUSLY_, her installation about reproductive rights and gender justice; apple juice encouraged the sale of a _Mother Nature is a Lesbian_ pin to a male commuter; bottled water introduced Sarah Mangle’s _The Affirmations Colouring Book_ to a range of patrons, leading to a conversation about life skills and positivity with a commuter. The curated selection of artworks and sundry fare offered a platform for patrons to contemplate new subjects, and topical issues and events, like Pride Week and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, for example. With gum acting as the relational conductor towards load- ed artistic content, The Artists Newsstand answered in accordance to the pulse of the city, providing alternative forms of political engagement in public.

The program of performances and installations at _The Artists Newsstand_ maintained a similar empathy towards its public and considered the specificity of Chester Station. The audience is transient and able-bodied (the station is not wheelchair accessible), making it necessary that each performance last only 20 minutes. Resembling the $1 chip special, the performances were conduits towards the newsstand, fostering social contemplation and providing different forms of agency to the TTC commuter. Golboo Amani’s _Public Reading_ project had the artist join riders on their daily commute, reading aloud from a publication chosen by the commuter. Amani shared her library, mobilizing a private activity in a public space through performance; she both entertained and informed participants and bystanders, with the likely potential of disturbing others. Jessica Karuhanga performed _A Still Cling To Fading Blossom_, an elegy that creates a site of black mourning through a private ritual that was on display within the mixed, fleeting setting of Chester Station. Karuhanga moved throughout the space with daisies inserted in her mouth, which hindered her singing and breathing. She was less concerned with whether her gestures would translate to the site, but instead regarded the performative behaviour of both parties – hers and the audience’s – and the moments when they came together and broke apart.

Now that _The Artists Newsstand_ has completed its year-long tenure, after recalling visitors’ and artists’ accounts, and sifting through Reddit comments, it is evident that the project developed a steady alliance with its local community and engaged meaningfully with the concerns of those who habitually occupy the space. As opposed to past examples of public artists’ retail projects, like Claes Oldenburg’s _The Store_ (1961–64) and David Hammons’ _Bliz-aard Ball Sale_ (1983), which primarily critiqued the gallery system and the constrictive circulation of objects in the art market, _The Artists Newsstand_’s success came in focusing attention on community education and activism rather than objects. Offering a productive and much-needed example of alternative artistic commerce, it produced new economies based on knowledge and material exchange, and generated a group of citizen-artists that moved with the city.

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This article reviews the site specific installation titled The Artists Newsstand at Chester Station, Toronto from May 8, 2015 to April 28, 2016\. 

The Artists Newsstand

Emily Doucet is a writer and PhD candidate in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto.

In Carlos Motta’s _Deseos/تابغر \[Desires\]_ (2015), the character Nour asks: “Do you know who you are?” Later her interlocutor, Martina, asks, not quite in response: “What is wrong with my body?” Forming the first half of Motta’s solo exhibition _Beloved Martina_ … at Mercer Union, the film braids together a fictional correspondence between Martina, a women in Suesca, Colombia, and Nour, who moves between Beirut and Damascus throughout the course of the film. Their place in real time and space is left ambiguous, albeit for the camera panning hands unpacking archival material in Spanish and surveying abandoned buildings whose architecture signals their possible Middle Eastern origin. Exhibition materials tell us that Martina is modelled after the historical figure of Martina Parra, a 19th-century woman in Columbia, charged with being a hermaphrodite.[^1] The figure of Nour, while historically situated, is not archivally defined, opening the imaginative opportunities for transnational solidarity and friendship suggested by the film. A collaboration with Lebanese anthropologist Maya Mikdashi, the film is at turns a work of literature, poetry, performance film, historical research and anthropology.

The second half of the exhibition features a central display of figurines, 3D-printed by Motta in sand-stone. These small sculptures replicate a variety of representations of intersex figures, depicted in Greek and Roman antiquity, and later in photographs from the 19th century. Surrounding this collection of models of a diversity of human genitalia are a series of video portraits created as part of Motta’s oral history project _Gender Talents_ (2015). These videos feature intersex activists describing both their personal experiences with gender identity and their public efforts towards the recognition of intersex identity and politics. Completing the circle around the central sculptural display is Del LaGrace Volcano’s commanding _Self-Portrait: Blue Beard_ (1996), Arisleyda Dilone’s compelling film _Mami y Yo y mi Gallito_ (2015) and Pidgeon Pagonis’ photo series _Children Memorial Hospital Killa \[CMHK\]_ (2015). In this part of the exhibition, historical objects and personal histories are mediated by accessible technologies (such as photography, video and 3D-printed replicas), creating formal cohesion without collapsing nuance. Different unions of images, words and material forms are encountered as one moves through the gallery and catches pieces of portraits. Dilone’s film is particularly striking, centering on an interview with Dilone’s mother, interrogating their memories of a devastatingly personal experience of the medical definition of gendered bodies.

That the exhibition rambles between the historical, the archival, the present and the fictional is squarely in line with the rest of Motta’s expansive practice. Another film entitled _Neferandus_ (2013), features the words:

> I look for marks of an unknown and undocumented moment. I search for an image of desire before it was created, manipulated, altered, judged. I look for another history: one without violence or oppression. I seek to construct a lie in which I can see myself reflected. I escape from knowledge. I look for myself in a non-existing state.

Similarly, in an interview with _BOMB_ magazine, Motta describes what he sees as the two modes of his practice: that of the more straightforwardly activist (_Interface Project, We Who Feel Differently_, amongst other symposia and public events), and those projects which he describes as a more poetic exploration of these same themes. He describes his poetic projects “as (secretly) more autobiographical.”[^2] Through both these processes, Motta weaves gendered histories as a means of creating and expanding a queer archive.

In a recent article in _Artforum_, Homi K. Bhabha writes, “the exercise of writing is a lesson in the art of thinking against the grain of inheritance and illusion, and the discipline of poetry is an experiment in thinking otherwise….”[^3] Interrogating what Bhabha describes as the power of the question “yet to be asked,” Motta posits archival and cinematic space as both a stage for imagining future radical changes, and for coming to terms with a past in which sexuality and gender expression had a wider range than what has been offered up to more recent generations. The relationship between colonial contact and sexual repression is threaded throughout Motta’s rich reconstructions, asking what it would mean for our present to have access to both real and imagined histories of sexuality.

Near the end of _Deseos/تابغر \[Desires\]_, Martina describes her liberation, not only by way of geographic dislocation, but also through her political involvement with the national liberation movement in her native Columbia. She describes both the bureaucratic violations of her body and the colonial subjugation of her country as soon-to-be past, uniting both forms of violence in their historicity and their complicity in her struggle for personal freedom. Her correspondence with Nour is positioned as the way in which she is able regain control of personal narrative. She writes to Nour, who is worried about whether she will be able to see her lover Aisha again, and says: “we must believe in the future, dear Nour.” Through speculation and imagination, mediated by their correspondence, these women (and perhaps us too) are able to frame a different present. In this way, Motta crafts a time-space in which Martina and Nour are both objects and agents of history, wary of the ideologies to be projected on to their bodies by the coming centuries. The word “historiography” figures prominently in many of the titles of Motta’s work, suggesting as it does a history of histories – and that is what Motta has created: a (by necessity incomplete) cultural history of intersex experience crafted through the exhibition’s delicate composition of cinematic reconstruction, oral history and sculptural replicas.

[^1]: Current usage of the term “hermaphrodite” is discouraged by organizations such as the Intersex Society of North America; I use it here to describe the charges that were laid against Parra in 19th-century Columbia.
[^2]: Cat Tyc, “Interview with Carlos Motta,” _BOMB_, May 6, 2016, “http://bombmagazine.org/article/946053/carlos-motta”:http://bombmagazine.org/article/946053/carlos-motta
[^3]: Homi K. Bhabha, “Writing the Void,” _Artforum_, Summer, 2016, “https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201606&id=60099”:https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201606&id=60099

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In this article, Emily Doucet reviews the exhibition Beloved Martina… presented at Mercer Union in Toronto from April 14 to June 4, 2016\. 

Carlos Motta: Beloved Martina… with Arisleyda Dilone, Pidgeon Pagonis and Del LaGrace Volcano

Gentiane Bélanger is a writer and independent curator. She is also Director/Curator of the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’ _Putting Life to Work_ presents a strong – albeit paradoxical – injunction: To let go of our desire to be productive, and to find meaning in our actions beyond the reductionist binary of failure and success. This principle of non-productivity traverses the history of their collaborative practice and a larger part of their corpus – an observation guest curator Véronique Leblanc is eager to bring forth in this exhibition.

Leblanc situates _Putting Life to Work_ in relation to the idea of cognitive capitalism, where the complexities of life are reduced to a one-dimensional productivist imperative. The so-called creative class is often considered a standard bearer of cognitive capitalism and work–leisure integration. Leblanc reads Ibghy and Lemmens’ conceptual materialism as an attempt to restitute the richness of life, which falls between the cracks of imposed models of productivity, framing this attempt as an act of political resistance. She emphasizes the corporeality of their practice, wherein the body is simultaneously treated as a depository for internalized ideologies, and as a potential site for overturning embedded ideologies.

_Putting Life to Work_ is structured around the critical appropriation of abstract representations of human labour and corporeal experimentations in non-doing. Half of the works on display, including _Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation_ (2016), _The Many Ways to Get What You Want_ (2011/2016) and _Diagrams Concerning the Representation of Human Time_ (2009), speak to Ibghy and Lemmens’ interest in diagrammed forms. This part of the exhibition presents an epistemological inquiry into rationalized configurations of knowledge, and the distillation of reality’s rich complexity into a reductionist language. Forms of data visualization like graphs, charts and diagrams shape our knowledge of the world in a rhetorical way. They are not merely a reflection of the real – as if ontologically separate – but a conceptual space that constructs meaning out of phenomenal reality. Ibghy and Lemmens present a constant shift between abstract thought and concrete forms, as occurs in _Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation_, where abstract visualizations of labour efficacy are re-materialized as delicately crafted sculptures. Countless graphs, meticulously built with acetate, thread and wood skewers, and propped up on makeshift tables throughout the main gallery, are reminders of the careful narratives and rhetorical power produced by visualized data.

An art historical paradox percolates at the surface of this work, as its aesthetic is strongly reminiscent of Russian Constructivism – a movement that was notoriously infatuated with a productivist ideal. For the Constructivists, the world order epitomized by modernity and its sweeping tendency to rationalize labour and social structures was liberation from the stifling embrace of tradition. Ibghy and Lemmens overturn this ethos, but by way of recourse to a similar aesthetic, thus undermining the pervasiveness of productivism through all realms of human desire and social behaviour.

The same goes with _Real Failure Needs No Excuse_ (2012), a series of filmed and interleaved performances enacted by Lemmens in an abandoned office building, where she undertakes the Sisyphean task of endlessly stacking office furniture into precarious constructions that inevitably crumble down. Throughout the film are suspended moments when these structures hold, for a time, their angular mixture of disparate materials resonating with Vladimir Tatlin’s turn-of- the-century counter-reliefs. But again, _a contrario_ to the Russian avant-garde’s apology of progress, the somewhat incidental formalism that emerges from this piece is meant as a stumbling block to productivism and a celebration of its dismissal.

Selected by Leblanc for its corporeal exploration of non-productivity, Is There Anything Left to be Done at All? (2014/2016) was produced in close collaboration with four other artists: choreographer Justine A. Chambers, visual artist Kevin Rodgers, community- engaged artist Rodrigo Martí and singer Ryan Tong. It consists of an experiment held in four parts, where each artist enacts prescribed recalcitrance to produc- tivity in his/her own medium. Presented in a single contiguous space, the films blend into one another to form an endless cycle with no tangible results – other than the process itself. The sounds, images and ob- jects from each session form an immersive context, punctuated by the regularity of a metronome, the sweet melancholia of a refrain, shuffl Ving sounds and sporadic laughter. The absence of productivity turns out to be surprisingly comfortable – soothing, actu- ally. It is tempting to linger in this convivial refuge, cradled by repetitive noises and contaminated by the enthusiastic business of non-doing.

The performance work of Ibghy and Lemmens points to a sustained practice of unlearning productivity, resisting the comfort zones of know-how, avoiding efforts at optimization and embracing the deterritorializing horizon of incompetence. Highly proficient in the world of art,[^1] Ibghy and Lemmens find an exhilarating sense of freedom in non-doing. Véronique Leblanc shares with the artist duo a fascination for a meaningful world outside of productivity. This is perhaps the most convincing sign that all three are active participants in a post-industrial economy, where individuals cannot find refuge from productivity. One can only crave standing “outside” when occupying a fully integrated and functional stance. Anyone who struggles to integrate society at its full speed knows the violence of such exclusion. The crucial factor separating Leblanc, Ibghy and Lemmens from actual unproductive outcasts is intentionality, as intentionality is power.

This contradiction can be sensed in the art world’s propensity to question – while fully partaking in – capitalist power dynamics from the standpoint of an expanded institutional critique. In the early 2000s, Andrea Fraser acknowledged the conundrum faced by art forms undermining the very conditions that allowed their existence. In the face of what appeared like an intellectual impasse, Fraser framed the question from a different angle, arguing that we cannot be against the institution since, “we are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of re- wards we aspire to.”[^2] Provided that the “institution” referred to by Fraser becomes the imperative of productivism in Leblanc’s curation, and in Ibghy and Lemmens’ practice, the on-going issue shifts from complete avoidance of productivity to a questioning of the trap it has become in our lives and how it has come to exert violence on our existence. We shall never stop producing, but we shall produce more sensibly.

[^1]: Rising stars in Canada, Ibghy and Lemmens have a manifest international success. Following their exhibition at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, another solo exhibition is planned for the Esker Foundation (May 28 – August 28, 2016), and their work has been shown at the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), La Biennale de Montréal (2014), Toronto’s 27th Images Festival (2014), Manif d’art 7: Quebec City Biennial (2014) and other international venues.

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This article reviews the exhibition Putting Life to Work by Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, presented at Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal from Feb. 18 to April 16, 2016\. 

Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens: Putting Life to Work

Jane Affleck is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Trent University, a part-time instructor at NSCAD University and a freelance writer.

A member of Halifax’s art community since she relocated from New York more than 30 years ago, Leya Evelyn has had a busy season, with an exhibition in Ottawa followed by this one at the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery. In Halifax, she presented two distinct bodies of work, site-specific to each of the gallery’s two spaces. Both are from the family tree of abstraction, but are distant cousins with differing aesthetics and scales.

In the gallery’s main space are several large-scale oil paintings with subtle, muted colours: planes of buttercream and lightly toasted marshmallow are partitioned by lines and marks in other hues, such as ultramarine, aqua, emerald, forest and dusty purple. These solemn, calming works command the viewer to spend time looking, from afar and up close. The latter — from a standpoint within sniffing distance of the textured surfaces — rewards the viewer with sightings of fabric swatches beneath the palimpsest application of paints.

Evelyn’s skill in layering these materials creates realms beyond the textured surfaces. In several paintings, swarms of scribbled brushwork hover above fields or seascapes of ochre-tinted cream, sometimes appearing to be reflected there and to exist on a plane other than the painting’s. Similarly, the colours and forms in _When, No. 2_ push and pull, establishing spaces: a plane of milky lemon melts into cream at a sepia-toned horizon — perhaps a glowing sun setting (or rising) behind a bank of fog over a bridge. This painting in particular evokes the misty tumult of J.M.W. Turner’s later paintings, such as _Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway_ (1844), produced after he had relinquished objectivity to better focus on the essential qualities and capabilities of paint: colour and texture, and the alchemy of reproducing light itself.

Evelyn’s work traces its lineage through Abstract Expressionism, though it shares few traits with “Zombie Formalism,” a flash-in-the-pan and lifeless revival of Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic.[^1] Her inclusion of collaged fabric countermands the necessary purity of materials lauded by Greenberg, who stated that “\[i\]t is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself.”[^2] Regardless, the fabric swatches’ contribution isn’t entirely about their materiality but their patterns. Perhaps to this end, the artist chose to leave fragments of the patterns exposed amidst the layers of paint: squares and polka dots; amphibians; French horns; and the word “love” in peacenik-style font. This text—legible in several of the paintings—links the work to other forebears of non-figurative mid-20th-century art, from Robert Indiana’s _LOVE_ sculpture to Ed Ruscha’s paintings, many of which feature a word as both subject and content. But why these machine-manufactured icons and text, in work so concerned with the painter’s hand, as evidenced in Evelyn’s multifarious mark-making? Why salamanders? Why “love”? From afar, however, the fabric swatches blend into the paintings’ colour-variegated compositions: a blushing square of red, a spherical blare of gold, a smattering of purple melding with paint of like hue.

Speaking of colour, the 15 miniature works in the smaller alcove space are bright and tangy, their impasto hues representing every colour of the rain- bow. And they’re arranged as such, in a row from red through to indigo. Can anyone fault this symbol of hope, good fortune, gay pride? Yet, this chromatic presentation somehow renders these works trite. Or perhaps it’s simply that, after the subdued and dignified larger works, the incessant cheer of these pint- sized pieces can’t help but over-stimulate. (Imagine attending a week-long meditation retreat only to be transported into the midst of commuter chaos in Tokyo’s neon-screaming Shibuya district.)

But what place does work such as Evelyn’s have in contemporary art-making: why abstract painting, why now? As W.J.T. Mitchell queries, “Can abstract art recover any of the utopian, revolutionary, and spiritually transcendent ambitions it was associated with in the early modernist era, the heroic age of Kandinsky, Malevich, and the historical avant-garde?”[^3] He later suggests that abstract painting has the potential to foster a collective intimacy. Perambulating Evelyn’s exhibition, I experienced a kind of intimacy with the other viewers, as with silent civil inattention.[^4] we gave each other space. But more deliberate was an evening of music and dance, composed and choreographed precisely to have a “dialogue” with the paintings. As Evelyn noted on her blog, during this performance there was “hardly a dry eye in the audience.”

Mitchell’s assertion that the intimacy evoked by art creates “a circle of acknowledgement and recognition” thus holds up.[^5] The ability of art to bring viewers together, to make them feel something, in a time that encourages us to keep a kind of ironic distance from each other, is arguably nothing short of revolutionary. The exhibition’s title, which might first be understood as a comment on the seeming inability of abstract work to signify, thus has new resonance: if it’s not what you _think_, then perhaps it’s what you feel, as you peer amidst those furrows of paint and glance at that stranger standing next to you.

[^1]: Robinson, Walter. “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism.” _Artspace_. April 3, 2014\. “http://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see\_here/the\_rise\_of\_zombie\_formalism-52184”:http://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see\_here/the\_rise\_of\_zombie\_formalism-52184\. Accessed June 12, 2016\. Here, Robinson explains: “‘Formalism’ because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting … and ‘Zombie’ because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg…”
[^2]: Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” _Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1986, 23.
[^3]: Mitchell, W.J.T. “Abstraction and Intimacy.” _What Do Pictures Want?_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 2005, 223.
[^4]: A term coined by sociologist Ernest Goffman to describe the social phenomenon in which strangers tacitly recognize each other’s presence in a public space.
[^5]: Mitchell, “Abstraction and Intimacy.” 230

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This article reviews Leya Evelyn’s exhibition It’s Not What You Think at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, from April 1 to May 29, 2016.

Leya Evelyn: It’s Not What You Think

Duncan Scovil is a designer who holds degrees from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in Cambridge, MA.

As you approach the young man speaking, the chatter of the room fades and the boy’s voice becomes clear as he quietly confides in you. He apparently is a prince on the run, in need of your help to reclaim the wealth he has lost. He promises you riches for your assistance. You see, you are his only hope: the last trustworthy person. As he finishes speaking, he disappears. An old woman, the widow of a former senator, quickly replaces him, requesting your assistance in recovering the fortune she too is due. Again, rewards are offered, desperation imparted and trust ensured. Fade to black again.

From these opening moments of _I Must First Apologize_ …, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s exhibition currently on view at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, you, the viewer, are asked to participate, your sympathy casting you the hero in the show’s fluctuating and surreptitious narratives. Moving around the painfully dark room of the show’s opening installation, _The Rumor of the World_, the appeals of the prince and the widow quickly lose their exceptionality. Engaging with a field of television monitors, each with a pair of characters speaking, the story of lost wealth repeats, as a humanitarian, a refugee, a president, a banker, even a soldier all plead for your help. Slowly, the room becomes clear, as you adapt both to the light and the con. These are scammers, or to be more precise, actors portraying scammers, reading out actual emails collected by the artists.

As you numb yourself to these pleas, the physical mechanisms of the room are subsequently revealed. A web of microphones branches out above you in the space, enabling both the intimate moment–the private confidence of the scammer – as well as the overwhelming and disorienting voice of the crowd. It is an impressive structure, an embodiment of the tricky network that the show ably navigates and charts. In its interplay of narrative and structure, and manipulation of sympathy, _The Rumor of the World_ serves as a guide for what is to follow in this focused, yet productively contradictory exhibition. _I Must First Apologize…_ unrolls as an experience of acclimatization, each subsequent piece further revealing the reality behind scam – its history, participants, geography and emotions.

The rest of the show that follows _The Rumor of the World_ begins by fully exposing the structure of the con first presented. _The Jerusalem Letter_, a blow-up print of the 19th-century precedent for the email scam, reiterates the story of lost treasure, showing its historical origins and longevity. Accompanying this print is _Fidel_, a video interview with a former real-life scammer who describes the contemporary processes of the con. Further revealing the overwhelming scope of this practice, two partial globes entitled _Geometry of Space_, constructed through the overlaying of bent steel rods, chart the movement of individual scams around the world.

If these initial pieces offer the hope of a would-be objective understanding of scams, exhibiting research as evidence, the show quickly reinstates the disorientation necessary for these scams’ existence. _synchronicity_, a four-channel video installation, presents an active street in in Lebanon, complete with the scammers’ internet cafes and wire-transfer centres. A cast of characters walk between shops and cars, awkwardly jumping between screens, disappearing at a single display’s borders, only to re-appear elsewhere later. In this way, the street is revealed as a construction, suggesting the instability of the scammer’s reality.

_The Trophy Room_ continues this movement, fully destabilizing the scammer’s position, inverting the roles of victim and perpetrator, as it catalogues the efforts of “scambaiters,” who attempt to manipulate their would-be attackers. These vigilantes’ successes are displayed as a field of monuments celebrating the scammers’ humiliation: images of tattoos gotten, performances enacted and sculptures carved. It is a strangely agonizing moment in the show, in which you become aware both of the humanity and desperation of the scammers. Sympathy begins to drift.

In its final room, _I Must First Apologize…_ makes painfully real the narratives _The Rumor of the World_ first presented as false. _It’s All Real_ consists of video interviews with the actors who portrayed the characters/scammers in _The Rumor of the World_. Residing in Lebanon – which is also Hadjithomas and Joreige’s home – these actors are, like their characters, struggling. Their lives are filled with the same pain and adversity their characters claimed. In these true stories, however, there is no silver lining of fortune to be found. Lying nearby, on the floor of the gallery, is _200 , A Matrix_, the mold used to form _Geometry of Space_. Instead of the vectors of movement seen in that previous work, here only single points dot the partial globe, each burned into its inverted surface. It is a poignant gesture, one that instills the analysis and research of the show with the marks of reality, removing any link between (or even indication of) victim and perpetrator.

One last piece goes unnoticed in the gallery, listed only in the show’s notes. Entitled _…About Love_, it is a ghost, apparently standing in for the victims of scams. In the text, Hadjithomas and Joreige cite a friend who fell prey: a prototypical stand-in for the scammed. Yet reaching the show’s conclusion, _… About Love_’s apparition appears to be a broader spectre, haunting seemingly everything and everyone: the scammed, the scammers, the characters and the actors. Returning to the darkened room of _The Rumor of the World_, fully adjusted to the show’s layered reality, empathy rewrites the room’s components, as the characters/scammers/actors emerge now fully dimensional, with the above structure serving to link their burned-in stories through the geometries and geographies of sorrow. Unable to actually participate in these narratives, given no avenue to help, you, as a viewer, can only observe the connections and the emotions, acting as a hollow embodiment of the “last trustworthy person.” It’s hard to imagine an exhibition could ever ask as much of a viewer…or offer quite as many rewards.

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This article reviews the exhibition I Must First Apologize by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige presented at MIT List Visual Arts Centre in Cambridge, MA from February to April 17, 2016.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: I Must First Apologize…

_Rich and Poor_ is the story of a billionaire tycoon evaluating his life and career, and a pianist-turned-dishwasher who plans to murder, or at least sabotage him. In his latest novel-cum-social commentary, Montreal-based writer and performer Jacob Wren offers an alternately eviscerating and oblique examination of the role of wealth in shaping political subjects and community in late capitalist society.

_Rich and Poor_’s thematic focus on the ways in which wealth, or lack thereof, impels distinct experiences of identity and human relationships is reinforced by the formal dichotomy Wren develops between the titular classes. The narrative oscillates, chapter by chapter, between first-person accounts from the tycoon and the dishwasher. The protagonists’ narration commonly engages their respective encounters with monetary and social networks, the coalescence of these spheres – the workplace – constituting the site where the tycoon and the dishwasher interact.

Wren’s juxtaposition of “have” and “have- not” perspectives establishes a strong allegorical framework for the story, which, in turn, provides a tangible link to his corollary exploration of the limits of representing political and narrative perspective in fiction. As evoked by _Rich and Poor_’s dyadic title, Wren’s presentation reflects a prescient focus on the growing chasm between the masses and the “one-percent.” Though his political concerns are timely, and his narrative conceit engaging, Wren’s portrayals of wealth and relative poverty periodically veer toward polemic and nuance is sacrificed to form.

At times, it is as though the characters know themselves too well to appear convincingly grounded in the world of chaos, suffering and mercurial hope where Wren situates them. As the reader parses the tycoon’s and the dishwasher’s worldviews, the two men sometimes come across as more akin to props in an omniscient monologue than active participants in the novel’s reality. The ensuing detachment could arguably be interpreted as a means of re-engaging questions about allegorical affect. Nevertheless, the political heft of _Rich and Poor_ would be more strongly administered if the reader was more invested in characters or plot.

Despite occasionally single-minded portraits of the tycoon’s and the dishwasher’s interiority, and an unexpectedly sentimental conclusion, Wren’s literary talent is on full display for the majority of _Rich and Poor_. His prose is enviably lapidary. Whether describing corporate players’ tacit creation of possible scapegoats or a revolutionary’s concomitant hubris and selflessness, Wren is a master of small details.[^1] Aphorisms seem to come easily to him. Observations like “Each man has to decide: a pleasant, empty life, or a difficult one but with meaning,” expressed by the dishwasher, initially hook the reader.[^2] However, as the narrative progresses, the proliferation of pithy, yet invulnerable, remarks begins to detract from plot urgency.

The ambiguity and ambivalence of relationships between members of the elite working class is a central topic of the tycoon’s narration, and the passages where Wren dissects these dynamics form several of _Rich and Poor_’s rhetorical highlights. Many of these sections revolve around the tycoon’s, and later also the dishwasher’s, relationships with Emmett, who is introduced as the tycoon’s lawyer and “\[close\] friend.”[^3] Early on in the novel, the tycoon gushes that Emmett “was often my bedrock, an eternal confidant who had my back when my better judgment was not in my own best interest” and compares him to a “son.”[^4] When the tycoon’s narration shifts from pre-published memoir to contemporary, informal contemplation, the reader learns that, after the memoir was published, the tycoon betrayed Emmett in order to secure a business deal. In retaliation, Emmett develops a rapport with the dishwasher, eventually supporting the dishwasher’s attempt to form a union that seeks reparations from one of the tycoon’s many affiliate companies.

It is telling, perhaps, that _Rich and Poor_’s three principal characters are male. (The widow of a felled revolutionary does become the dishwasher’s mentor after he is exiled to a remote town for trying to strangle the tycoon, but her role is secondary.) The observation of this gender imbalance is not intended as a critique, so much as a requisite note. As in a few of Wren’s recent narrations of the politically dispossessed, including _Polyamorous Love Song_ (2014) and _The Infiltrator_ (2013),[^5] there is a pronounced focus on the relationship between masculinity and control in _Rich and Poor_. There is also a consequent irony inherent to such a traditional grappling with identity politics. Doubtless, the novel’s binary form may be Wren’s way of making a similar observation about mainstream society’s limited visions of political futurity. Even so, a contemporary parable about wealth and power, opportunities and degradation, and the social infrastructures that support or prohibit certain kinds of freedom, would achieve greater resonance were it more critical of the limits of its own ideological paradigm.

In the end, the reader concedes the lofty goals of _Rich and Poor_ and is drawn to a sustained consideration of its themes. Parallels between _Rich and Poor_ and 19th-century fiction that chronicles social microcosms in order to humanize broader abstractions – _Crime and Punishment_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ come to mind – provide the reader with an alternate means of negotiating the text. _Rich and Poor_’s ubiquitous first-person narration reminds the reader that ours is an age of corporate spin, where professional and amateur criticisms commingle in online forums and reviews, but where, nonetheless, some voices are more powerful than others. The overt editorial presence in _Rich and Poor_ continually recalls the reader to the task of how best to engage with parable, reminding us of the lessons being explored. This novel may be a commentary on wealth as a tool of two men’s making and unmaking, but it is also a story of what stands to be lost when certain voices are omitted.

[^1]: Wren, _Rich and Poor_, 51.
[^2]: Ibid., 24.
[^3]: Ibid., 32.
[^4]: Ibid., 32; 31.
[^5]: “The Infiltrator” was published in Maisonneuve in 2013\. It also appears in Wren’s collection _If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates_ published by Book Thug in 2015.

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This article reviews the book Rich and Poor (Book Thug, 2016) by Jacob Wren.

Jacob Wren: Rich and Poor (Book Thug, 2016)

Heather White is a writer, and a psychotherapist-in-training, in Toronto.

Last year, demonstrators staged _CRYING; A PROTEST_ at the Dia:Beacon Carl Andre retrospective. In a room featuring the austere minimalism of a man accused (but acquitted) of the spousal homicide of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, a crowd formed to sob together and conspicuously. Not defeatist or passive, this crying comprised activism. The event was an expression of collective anguish about violence that’s not isolated. It came on the heels of internet artist Audrey Wollen’s proposal (“Sad Girl Theory”) that the very feeling of sadness is a resistance of the systems that perpetuate it. Wollen claims as activists those who have never cried for an audience, and who would never consider themselves protesters. Some, like Judy Garland or Virginia Woolf, she claims posthumously; they died long before the art world grew so interested in crying as social commentary.

In a recent book from Pioneer Works Press, _I Cry: The Desire to be Rejected_, Amy Lawless and Chris Cheney also question what our tears mean vis-a-vis our isolation. Their work considers the political in the most generic sense: they care about how people collaborate, communicate, co-exist. 

The authors, who are poets, are mostly interested in the inevitable, developmental consequences of being human. Their book opens with a description of a parenting technique called Ferberization, which distinguishes between two ways we all cry when we’re starting life. There’s the baby’s cry for food, which should always be heeded, since a baby can’t satisfy her own hunger. But if the child “is having difficulty sleeping or being alone, a parent is suggested not to comfort the child, but to let that child ‘cry it out’”. The idea is that the child will learn to soothe herself; she’ll stop crying when the tears flush out whatever emotional irritant is inside. (It may be politically relevant that this ignorable cry is called a “protest cry” on some online parenting forums I found. And perhaps it’s aesthetically relevant that this unhungry cry is also described as sounding “more fake.”)

Like a pair of tear deconstructionists, the authors of _I Cry_ challenge this binary wherein either another person is needed or the self is enough. They present a third kind of crying, a kind that self-soothing can’t stop, because the crying itself is what soothes. The baby’s protest becomes a kind of prototypical performance. “This kind of crying is sung from a need to not be alone, and you are not alone, you are with your selves: audience and performer.” _I Cry_ is always _We Cry_; you are not self, but selves. In this model, crying is both expressing and witnessing together, and it becomes a structural impossibility to cry alone. Not because, as Wollen suggests, we’re always expressing a piece of communal, inflicted pain, but because a single self can be its own community.

_I Cry_ is itself, like so many texts, a community of sorts: Lawless and Cheney incorporate thinkers, artists and other others whose work and violence help explain what builds and what limits identity. Serial killers and pop singers make cameos, as do siblings and mothers. The authors quote repeatedly or at length: psychoanalytic theorist Žižek (to establish how the Other is always implicitly referenced); installation art pioneer Kurt Schwitters (to consider how one’s tangible creations – and the loss of them – constitute the self, or don’t); and a friend who’s an advice columnist (to address the emotional fallout of an absurd Twitter abandonment).

They also reference the fictional selves they’ve created, and this is maybe the best stuff of I Cry. One of the poets once created a Myspace profile for the least famous Baldwin brother (Daniel), and one of them posed on Yelp as a widower who reviewed restaurants (unfavourably) before moving on to critiquing ATMs. And so the book also serves as documentation of virtual performance art that’s never quite named as such. Context about these performances proffers some of the most poignant insight on the book’s central question: how many can we be? Or, maybe, how can we be many? 

The inventor of the widower laments that “I wanted to be more than myself.” The Baldwin impersonator explains that “I needed someone to wear like a glove in order to escape my own life.” The authors don’t replace themselves with others, but rather expand themselves by accumulating others. They escape by growing. To this end, they’re also preternaturally interested in facts about cannibals. They explain how, “\[p\]oetically/metaphorically speaking, _of course_, cannibalism seemed so romantic: finally two or more people can be together 4-eva.”

Concern with numbers pervades _I Cry_. In their quest to be many, Lawless and Cheney yearn to reach many. Fluctuations in the number of a tweet’s likes or an account’s followers comprise plot points: these authors cry to be heard and they count their listeners. They grapple with the embarrassment of the truth that virtual popularity is important to them; they’re thrilled when a group of role-playing Korean teenagers follow their Twitter account, and deeply hurt when they defect.

Perhaps playing to this sensitivity about being popular, reader @realitybeach consoled in an Instagram caption of a photo of _I Cry_: “This book is so much better than The Argonauts. Thank you.” Of course, _The Argonauts_, Maggie Nelson’s latest book, was also a poetic narrative about identity grounded in an artworld life and interspersed with critical theory. It’s been so trendy that, when a friend recently complained to me of the absurdly long waitlist he’d joined at the library, I knew it couldn’t be for anything else.

My library doesn’t carry _I Cry_. I was gifted it by another friend who loved it so much she bought several for those she figured might feel the same. And maybe it takes a village to read a book. As Lawless and Cheney (alongside Wollen and the crying protesters) suggest, intimations of community often flicker in solitude. When I consider whether my friend’s friends and I might form such a community, I imagine us hushed and huddled around a baby monitor, eavesdropping on an absurd but affecting performance of cries, nodding at each other.

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This article reviews the book I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected (Pioneer Works Press, 2016) by Amy Lawless and Chris Cheney.

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Issue 131