Installation view of "Coming After" with works by Dean Sameshima, James Richards, Adam Garnet Jones, Susanne M. Winterling, and Jean-Paul Kelly. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
It felt like The Power Plant had me in mind as a viewer when they planned their winter programming. Not only are they presenting a selection of photographs from a new body of work by Stan Douglas (curated by Melanie O’Brian), but concurrently showing is “Coming After,” a group exhibition curated by Jon Davies that brings together works by a younger generation of artists that address feelings of latency and nostalgia for a period of queer activism (namely the 1980s and 90s in North America) that occurred before they came of age.
I already included “Coming After” on my list of favourite shows from 2011, but I also recently tried to summarize the show’s curatorial propositions for Artforum.com’s Critics’ Picks. I think it’s pretty obvious from the text that Aleesa Cohene and Glen Fogel’s respective projects were some of my favourites, but I also really loved Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz’s No Future / No Past video, Jean-Paul Kelly‘s beautiful suite of drawings and Onya Hogan-Finlay’s Periods 2012 series.
The amazing feedback machine that is Facebook has let me know that not everyone has decided they love the exhibition yet, and I’m looking forward to talking more with folks about where their reservations lie. I know that the relationship between nostalgia and political activism is a fraught one for many, and my guess is this may have something to do with the way some viewers are interpreting “Coming After”‘s main thesis. (For the record, I am quite comfortable with using nostalgia in artworks to address the unfinished work of past political movements, but that might be because I, like almost all the artists in “Coming After,” was also born post-1970 and missed being part of the activism of the 1980s and 90s. I came of age in the era of the queer neoliberal citizen, where ads for gay-friendly bank mortgages were for somehow perceived as an adequate substitution for real political equality.) I’m hoping this is something I can hash out with friends and colleagues in-person in the near future, maybe tonight, at the opening of “Lez Con,” Onya Hogan-Finlay’s complementary solo show at the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives.
My reviews of two provocative group exhibitions in Toronto which I caught late last year are now online at esse magazine. One, “Models for Taking Part,” has already received some thorough discussion and criticism during its public presentation at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (in fact, I am sadly missing a public screening and talk by Renzo Martens as I type this), as well as at its original staging at Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery. Though I don’t know that it offers any tangible solutions about how art can intervene in politics, which I take to be one of its implicit goals, as I write in my review, the show does an excellent job of demonstrating the spectrum of outcomes that can be activated when artists try to document or intervene in the lives of their subjects, operating as a nice rebuttal to some of the more utopian claims of interactive and participatory art (I’m looking at you, “theanyspacewhatever”).
Renzo Martens, "Episode III: Enjoy Poverty," 2009, film, 90 min.
The second review of “You had to go looking for it,” the group exhibition that made up Zone C of last year’s Nuit Blanche, is a show I included on my list of favourite exhibitions from last year, and was just one of several strong showings at this year’s all-night contemporary art fest. My favourite piece (as is probably obvious) was Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard’s SOON, a project that on paper sounded like it could go horribly over-the-top and be reduced to a one-liner spectacle (a fate that befalls many Nuit Blanche projects), but which in fact kept me and thousands of other people enthralled well after the actual event ended.
It’s taken me longer than usual to compile a list of the ten or so shows that stood out for me in 2011. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have the push of a deadline from Sally McKay and L.M. this year (and, let me say, I’m sorely missing Joe McKay’s annual list of best video games right now. How will I know how to waste my time on the flight home?). Or, maybe it has something to do with the kind of year 2011 was in the Toronto art world. I think it’s telling, for instance, that, rather than a traditional list, Akimblog’s Terence Dick chose a list of “singles instead of albums” in his list of best exhibitions of the year in local venues.
Like Terence, I’ve also found myself thinking back to particular artworks that fascinated me this year within larger exhibitions that weren’t always completely successful. I mostly think back on my favourite shows of 2011 as those that introduced me to new work, or solidified my interest in an artist’s practice by being exposed to more of their work. So here, in no particular order, are my ten standout shows from 2011:
General Idea, "AIDS," 1988, installation view at the AGO
1. General Idea, “Haute Culture” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, curated by Frédéric Bonnet
I don’t know anyone in Toronto who didn’t love this show and I went back to see it no less than three times. Though I didn’t love the thematic organization of the work that Bonnet employed, it was pretty fantastic to see so much of GI’s practice all in one place, especially some of their very early works, like Felix Partz’s Mylar Purse (1968) performance and the poodles-as-paint brushes appropriation of Klein International Blue in XXX (bleu) (1984). Not only was the exhibition a crowd-pleaser, but it also offered a great chance to revisit and reevaluate a group of artists whose practice still seems overdue for a proper critical appraisal. It was also a pleasant surprise to see contemporary Canadian art take over two floors of the AGO, an event that should really not be such a rarity in an ideal world.
Olivia Boudreau, "L'Étuve," 2011, video still
2. “The Work Ahead of Us,” The Quebec Triennial 2011, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, curated by Marie Fraser, Lesley Johnstone, Mark Lanctôt, François LeTourneux and Louise Simard
The 2011 Quebec Triennial was faced with the difficult challenge of topping the already amazing 2008 iteration of this exhibition which offers an overview of contemporary art-making in the province: a challenge made all the more difficult by the curators’ self-imposed rule that there be no repeats, with each artist showing in the triennial only once. Despite, or perhaps because of, these restraints, the triennial still offered plenty of exciting works by artists who I’ve followed in the past but was keen to see expand their practice in the kind of space the MACM can offer—such as Seripop’s room-sized installation made entirely out of their paper posters, or Charles Stankievech’s engrossing film in an all-white screening room—and a whole host of pieces by artists I was unfamiliar with. Standouts for me included jake moore’s feathery dirigible and hallway installation, Alexandre David’s domed plywood floor, Frédéric Lavoie’s re-edited nature documentaries, Stéphane La Rue’s beautiful geometric drawings and Olivia Boudreau’s minimalist video of an empty steam room that magically became populated as the steam plumes cleared.
Geoffrey Farmer, “Bacon’s Not The Only Thing That Is Cured By Hanging From A String,” 2011, exhibition view courtesy Casey Kaplan. Photo: Cary Whitti
3. Geoffrey Farmer at Casey Kaplan, New York
I wrote a lengthy review of this show for Canadian Art magazine, but it was a quiet but playful exhibition that stuck with me the longer I considered it. Not only was it Farmer’s first US solo show, but it demonstrated a whimsical approach to installation that reminded me of some of his earliest works in Vancouver, such as Catriona Jeffries Catriona (2001) and his solo show at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in which he collected (and then was reprimanded for “stealing”) the parking direction signs from film shoots around the city. It was the kind of solo show that made me excited to see the next phase of his artistic career.
Didier Courbot, "Adirondack Line," 2011
This month on Artforum.com, I review Paris-based artist Didier Courbot’s solo show at Susan Hobbs. I was first introduced to Courbot’s work through “Site Exercises,” a show that Jen Hutton organized at Hobbs’ space in 2010 that featured several of Courbot’s drawings that served as propositions for interventions into the facade and architecture of the gallery. In these new works, similar to his ongoing needs series, Courbot makes temporary interventions in the urban landscape, this time using discarded materials and their constituent parts (such as this Adirondack chair) to create fanciful sculptures.
Courbot’s work is concurrently showing at Paris’ Jeu de Paume as part of the group show “BLOW UP” which focuses on artists’ infiltrations into the gallery space. For the show, which continues to March 2012, Courbot is executing a series of interventions in the gallery that neither the curators nor the gallery staff know about, such as painting one edge of a white wall leading to a staircase a vibrant teal colour, or leaving a fresh flower on the edge of a railing. There are more subtle switches planned, all of which you can follow on the gallery’s website.
A longish essay that I wrote for Fillip for their new series on photography and biopolitics is now online through their website. Commissioned by Kate Steinmann, associate editor at Fillip and the series’ editor, the text tries to borrow ideas from Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography and some key writings on biopolitics and apply them to the everyday arena of the photographic images produced and circulated by Google Maps Street View. While I sometimes speak more broadly about Street View as a technology of seeing and an interactive framework for surveilling others, my main focus is on Canadian artist Jon Rafman‘s ongoing series The Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–), which extracts stills from Street View and presents them through his online venue, or as large-scale photographs in the gallery.
Jon Rafman, "78 Myrdle St, Poplar, England, UK 2010." From the series "The Nine Eyes of Google Street View", 2008–.
What I like about Rafman’s project is the way it troubles the simplistic model of the photographer-subject relationship that is often used to measure the ethical implications of social documentary photography. Instead, his compilation of Street View images stresses the ambiguous, uncertain ethical relationship between image, subject and spectator that has become the status quo in a time of authorless (as the Google Street View images seen), globally circulated digital images. It’s a new kind of relationship between spectators and subjects that I try and outline, especially towards the end of the essay, through Lauren Berlant’s notion of “slow death” (this links to a PDF of her article): the exhaustion that accompanies the maintenance of life under capitalism.
Even though the text is “finished,” I still feel it’s a work-in-progress. I haven’t entirely resolved where all these ideas might lead, or what exactly the Street View images, and Rafman’s use of them, is asking from us as viewers. I also didn’t intend for the title of the text, “Exhaustive Images,” to seem like quite such a double-entendre, but if you do make it through the (very long) article, I would love to talk more about it and how we might more adequately address all this exhaustion.
I have been auditing a course this semester on pedagogy and social difference, led by Aparna Mishra Tarc, that examines how theories about the psychic experiences of learning might help us to understand how people make sense of others’ (often traumatic) experiences. Central to the course have been questions about what it means to try and sympathize with others’ testimonies and experiences of difference, and why it seems that humans are not capable of learning from—and therefore not repeating—the conflicts of the past. The texts we have focused on in the course have been a mix of theoretical, self-reflexive scholarship about the psychic and ethical implications of teaching or learning from others, alongside fictional and autobiographical representations of the psychic difficulties that accompany learning and identification (J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural, Todd Haynes’ Dottie Gets Spanked and Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s A Dialogue on Love, for instance, have each been important case studies).
Though the course has explicit connections to my own academic research into the critical pedagogical potential of colonial-era photographs, it’s also prompted me to reconsider how I think of exhibitions and public programming in the visual arts as a form of public pedagogy. In particular, Deborah Britzman’s concept of “difficult knowledge”—the idea that learning from social trauma is always a psychically difficult task that involves the learner vacillating between love and hate—seems useful in analyzing how viewers make sense of their interactions with art. Throughout her work, Britzman underscores that learning is not only a difficult task that involves being psychically vulnerable, but one that often disrupts our sense of linear time. Difficult knowledge upsets our assumptions about the cause (in this case learning about a social trauma) and effect (conducting oneself in a more ethical manner) relationship that happens for learners who approach representations of social trauma. For Britzman, knowledge is often latent: it comes much later than the moment of learning, at a point that is difficult, or even impossible, to pinpoint or represent. Learning is therefore not only a difficult process to engage in, it is equally difficult to represent.
Britzman’s emphasis on the latency of difficult knowledge seems to help to explain why some exhibitions or public programming about social trauma or experiences of difference don’t seem to immediately generate fruitful discussions. This is something my friends and fellow curators cheyanne turions and Kim Simon have both raised in their own writing and programming and is something I think many of us have experienced at the end of a screening or panel discussion: the awkward silence that ensues that might seem to represent a refusal to or anxiety about engaging in the discussion about social trauma, ethics and difference. But I know that I am sometimes one of those silent people, and that that silence does not necessarily mean I have not engaged in or tried to learn from the text, film or discussion at hand. Oftentimes, I think deeply or even obsessively about the learning object after the event, making sense of it in my own interior monologue and in my discussions with others. And it is often only much much later that I think I have made some sense of that original encounter with the object, only to have to reevaluate it again upon new encounters with representations of social trauma.
So the question for me then becomes how to facilitate this latent sense-making or knowledge that art and its public discourses might prompt for people, especially when the economic and temporal practicalities of creating exhibitions and public programming sometimes make one-off events a necessity. Kristina Lee Podesva has suggested that one way that art criticism might tackle this temporal lag is by revisiting exhibitions through critical texts several months or even years after their original presentation to see what sense can be made about them with more historical distance. But I’m curious about how else we might engage with the latent knowledge that exhibitions and contemporary art can help spark and foster.
My first Critics’ Pick from Toronto for Artforum.com is now online. Writing short, concise reviews is still one of the most challenging critical writing tasks for me, so it took some effort to try to distill Barbara Astman‘s current solo show at Corkin Gallery, titled “Daily Collage,” into only 300 words.
Barbara Astman, "16, Daily Collage," 2011
This new series seems a bit of a departure from Astman’s past works, but still meditates on the affect of ubiquitous public images through the manipulation of images from newspapers. What particularly appealed to me about Astman’s take on collage was that it managed to avoid the sometimes bombastic readings that the juxtaposition of “political” images with luxury consumer goods tends to evoke in works by some contemporary artists that use the same montaging techniques (Martha Rosler’s most recent iteration of Bringing the War Home came to mind, for instance, which to me seems to over-determine the viewer’s possible readings of the image).
Astman’s work is on view for another two weeks at Corkin Gallery in the Distillery District. If you have a chance to stop by, they’re well worth a look in-person.
My friend and colleague Jacob Korczynski, who has just returned from De Appel’s Curatorial Programme and is now the Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), recently drew my attention to this talk by New York–based artist Sharon Hayes, which she delivered as part of the 2009 Creative Time Summit themed around “Revolutions in Public Practice.” I have been following Hayes’ work for some time now, ever since I saw her work in the 2008 exhibition “Not Quite How I Remember It,” curated by Helena Reckitt, at The Power Plant (disclosure: I was also a curatorial intern at the gallery in this period and helped with some of the prep work for the show). In particular, her performances which reactivate past political moments are some of the most compelling investigations I’ve seen so far into the collective nostalgia towards the unfulfilled promises of activist movements from the 1960s through to the 1980s that has been circulating in the contemporary art world over the past few years.
In Hayes’ talk for Creative Time, the artist recounts her early, formative years living in New York in a way that tries to eschew “speaking autobiographically,” as Hayes terms it, and attempts instead to “speak singularly” about her experiences and how they informed her practice. Rather than trying to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between the artistic, social and political experiences she had and her current practice, Hayes underscores the experiential, affective dimensions of living in New York in the early 1990s and becoming a part of movements like ACT UP seemingly by accident. She describes her entrance into these movements as being immersed into the middle of something that was already underway and also as a process of “accelerated becoming.”
Though Hayes is addressing a very particular time and place, her talk does not follow the traditional confessional model of many of ACT UP’s oral histories, which often attempt to instrumentalize suffering and death into politics in a way I sometimes find unsettling. In this model, the death of a friend, acquaintance or public figure is framed as the catalyst for political and social activism. While I know that those experiences informed the incredibly important work that many of ACT UP’s members did and continue to do, I like Hayes’ notion of “accelerated becoming” as another way that political activism takes shape: as a way of accounting for the osmosis effect that takes place within a social movement, where affect travels among individual subjects in a way that is not always easy to trace. It makes sense to me as a model for understanding how people become immersed in a movement and inspired to take action, and also seems to offer some optimism for the political effects of contemporary artworks.
Two new reviews from Toronto appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Montreal’s esse magazine, both dealing with photographic practices. The first is my take on a retrospective of the work of landmark performance artist Suzy Lake, which appeared at the University of Toronto Art Centre (UTAC) as part of this year’s CONTACT Photography Festival. I particularly liked seeing her new “Extended Breathing” series of lightbox photographs, which are quite beautiful as an extremely reduced from of performance. As I tried to suggest in my text, however, I think there are some places where the UTAC show tried to sum up Lake’s practice a bit too simplistically through the theme of “Political Poetics.” Lake’s career has been a rich and varied one that I think deserves more, sustained curatorial attention in the future.
Suzy Lake, "Extended Breathing: While Highlights Travel," 2009. Photo: courtesy of Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto
Also in this issue of esse is my review of a two-person exhibition at Angell Gallery featuring recent York MFA grad Alex Kisilevich and video and performance artist Geoffrey Pugen, both of whom exhibited photographs (Pugen’s show included some great video works as well). It was refreshing to see what felt like genuinely new work from two local artists that also managed to investigate some of the unique qualities of photo-based practices. They’re two names to keep an eye on in Toronto, including Pugen’s upcoming performance at this year’s Nuit Blanche.
Curator, writer and all-around amazing thinker cheyanne turions is currently in Banff, participating in a residency led by Dexter Sinister, called From the Toolbox of a Serving Library. The premise of the residency, as cheyanne explains it, is to “take the icon of the Photoshop toolbox (shorthand for any contemporary arts software) as a starting point,” using workshops around these tools — from the Type tool, to the Lasso, to the Pointer, and more — to reconsider and reformulate the Bauhaus foundation course as a model for aesthetic learning.
left: Sam Durant, "You Are on Indian Land Show Some Respect," 2008 right: Rebecca Belmore, "Sister," 2010, from "First Nations / Second Nature"
You can read more about the residency, and cheyanne’s contribution to it through iterations of No Reading After the Internet, on her blog, but for now I wanted to draw attention to her commentary on First Nations / Second Nature, a group exhibition at Simon Fraser University’s Audain Gallery curated by Candice Hopkins. Framing the show as her choice of a significant Canadian curated moment, and as an example of a resonant group exhibition, cheyanne’s description of the show is helpful in locating the gallery within the political and social context of the neighbourhood and city, especially in the lead up to the craziness that was the 2011 Winter Olympic Games. I also appreciate her meditation, inspired by a discussion with residency instructor Anthony Huberman, on the differences between curatorial methodologies that look inward (often selecting works that explain an idea) and those that look outward (searching for works that complicate the idea that was the exhibition’s starting question, or original premise).
I’m not always sure that it’s so easy to distinguish between these two models of curating. For me, an exhibition often begins with an idea or starting question and then it can become difficult not to see/seek out that theme in the works I encounter after I begin contemplating the idea. But it also drives me crazy when curators use artworks as illustrations for a pre-formed thesis, because it seems to overdetermine and suffocate the more nuanced or even contradictory meanings that viewers might bring to the work if it had more breathing room. It’s something I feel I’m always struggling with, both as a curator and a viewer, so it’s refreshing to have cheyanne’s keen thoughts on it, especially when it’s applied to a concrete case study.
