May-June 2006
 
Residency in Berlin

During a recent residency in Berlin, I was lucky to be there just before the World Cup Soccer madness began and during the 4 th Berlin biennial for contemporary art. The juxtaposition of the two events proved surreal, lending an air of celebration and general frenzy to public spaces. One of the famous chocolatiers created 2 meter long replicas in chocolate of the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Titanic and a giant white and dark chocolate soccer ball. As for the soccer matches, the whole world became involved through their TVs and newspapers and radios. What most people didn't hear about, was the invitational brawl about a month prior to the Cup that took place on the common border between Poland and Germany. One hundred hooligans from each country participated. Another surreal incident that took much ink space concerned a brown bear that had inadvertently crossed the Alps from Italy into Germany and was snacking on sheep and small animals, including (it is alleged) some household cats and miniature poodles. The bear, it turns out, is the national symbol of Germany although there had not been one in that country for 135 years. So how did the government handle the situation?   It sanctioned hunters to shoot to kill. Somehow the bear eluded capture and death, although there were numerous sightings. Weeks went by and finally the bear crossed over into Austria. Go Bruno!

With these events as backdrop, the street that the biennial occupied seemed serene. The serenity, however, belied a complicated and tortured history: this street, Auguststrasse, was part of the area where many Jews lived before the Nazi deportations and executions. It is in the Mitte, an area that ended up on the communist side when the wall went up. But the artworks in the biennial did not merely make allusions to the history of the place and the anguish and nostalgia that it evoked. Rather, they presented a broader and more ambiguous meditation on collective histories and personal stories. The title of the Biennial, "Of Mice and Men," references John Steinbeck's novel that in turn references a poem by Robert Burns. Both literary works look at the nature of the human experience, the delicate, the vulnerable and the quotidian alongside the grand and the overwhelming. The artworks in the biennial did not always relate to each other in a clear way and there was not a lot of humour in the pieces. There was, in fact, an overriding sense of foreboding that reflected the state of the world revealed during the violent summer that followed.

Michael Beutler

There were a few pieces that went against the dark grain and were thoroughly charming. Two of them were installed in the stables of the post office. In one stable, sculptor Michael Beutler, an artist living in Berlin, constructed a fantastical series of staircases, out of wire and heavy-duty industrial yellow plastic. The staircases were a contradiction in their materiality (they could not support the weight of a child) versus the gothic sensibility of flying buttresses and secret stone passageways leading to cathedral rooftops or mysterious dark upper level chambers.

Jeremy Deller

In the stable adjacent to the yellow staircases a video loop by Jeremy Deller, a British artist, featured an aging Klezmer band that played on Auguststrasse. They are all immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The loop lasted about 20 minutes and showed the four members practicing in a schoolroom of a Hebrew school. In the video they are celebrating the birthday of their elderly percussionist at one of their weekly sessions. The music was buoyant and infectious and the focus on the players' faces revealed the nuanced role of history and community in music and music making.

Both Beutler and Deller's pieces were smartly installed in an environment that recalls ghosts. The stables harken back to a defunct mode of transportation and the post office, a massive stone structure with carved decorative elements, references both a time when letters were the main mode of long distance communication; and the people long gone who wrote those letters. The poignant and warm portrayal of klezmer, a musical genre that defined the Jews of Europe and an extinguished cultural existence, resonated in its placement next to the empty stable yard of the post office. The slick cheeriness of the yellow plastic of Beutler's labyrinthian staircases played against the sentimental ambiance.

Felix Gmelin

Two other videos started to migrate from the purely delightful toward the odd. One, by a Swedish artist named Felix Gmelin, is titled 'Sound and Vision'. It is a black and white video that has the appearance of a 1960s sex education class. Two young adults, a male and a female, stand nude at the front of a grade school class. The teacher, an older woman, coolly instructs the children on human biology and encourages them to touch the bodies. The children, it turns out, are blind. The contrast between the awkward young hands guided by the models themselves, the looks on the faces of the children (shy smiles, deep concentration, wonder)   and the detached decorum in the voice of the instructor, is riveting.

Nathalie Djurberg

The video 'Tiger Licking Girl's Butt' by Nathalie Djurberg, a Swedish artist living in Berlin, straddles (so to speak) the delightful and the dark. The video is claymation and shows exactly what the title suggests: a tiger with more than a touch of evil in his eyes attempts to lick a nude girl's bum. They are in a lovely room with flowery wallpaper and a checkerboard floor and a bed. It seems to be the girl's bedroom and she is tidying up or puttering around. The tiger gets more and more aggressive. At first the girl giggles and pushes him away but as he gets more insistent, she seems to send a mixed message: she gets angrier and waves him away more vigorously but at the same time she makes it easier for him to lick her. While looking like a children's sweet Saturday morning cartoon for young children, the video actually deals with the murky boundaries of sexual propriety where "No means no" and "She wanted it" frame the discussion.

Anri Sala

Videos formed a strong presence at the biennial. Two of the most heart-wrenching involved animals. Anri Sala, an Albanian artist living in Paris and Berlin, showed a video called "time after time". When watching this video one wondered whether he staged this or just came upon the scene. It has a single static camera angle and takes place at night, so it is pretty grainy. The subject is a white emaciated horse stuck in the middle of a series of highway underpasses and overpasses. Cars are speeding around him and he is terrified and completely unable to act. His fear is palpable and one of the few movements he makes in the whole loop is lifting his hind leg for a moment and putting it back down.

Mircea Cantor

The other powerful video was by the Romanian artist who now lives in Paris, Mircea Cantor. His video, 'Deeparture', has been shown in New York and is receiving much acclaim. In it a wolf and a deer are isolated in a white room that apparently is a gallery space. One is tempted to read into this a statement about artists and critics, but Cantor's video speaks to a much broader political situation of displacement and ambivalence. The animals, enemies in nature, pace around each other, unsure what to do in this strange, out-of-context situation. The close-ups of the deer's head show the pulse in its neck beating very rapidly, indicating extreme fear. The eyes are wide and unblinking and the ears are erect and alert. The wolf seems more relaxed but bewildered. It sniffs the floor, paces around, stalks the deer. This imbues an air of paranoia and danger to the dance-like quality of their movements. The tension is ultimately dispelled when the wolf yawns and lies down. The deer never relaxes.

Matthew Monahan

Drawing, painting, photography and sculpture were media included in the biennial that were represented by strong submissions. Matthew Monahan, an American artist from California, had a mixed media installation, called 'Twilight of the Idiots', that incorporated all but photography. The three-dimensional charcoal drawings were the most inventive elements. These were giant faces of people in anguish or other intense emotion, executed in charcoal. The paper support was then manipulated into cones or uneven tubes or other 3D shapes. They were attached to the edges of the vitrines where the small sculptural elements were assembles, creating a narrative of sorts. Monahan calls these "psychodramas".

Michael Borremans

Belgium painter, Michael Borremans, showed a series of paintings that continued the themes of injury, isolation and disillusion. His colour palette is reminiscent of the paintings of another Belgian, Luc Tuymans. Borremans isolates both objects and parts of people (example, from the waist up, or with no arms, etc) and reduces the background to ambiguous geometric shapes that could be the corner edges of tabletops or floor corners. However, the placement of the shadows subverts the notion of corner or angle of wall. Old-fashioned items of clothing, such as collars or blouses, usually white or creamy, sometimes are the subjects of the paintings. The dark green/blacks and greys and the luscious oily white highlights are reminiscent of Dutch genre painting but are suggestive of violence and trauma.

Pravdoliub Ivanov

Ivanov is a Bulgarian artist, living in Sophia. His sculptural installation, 'Territories', was exhibited in the Former Jewish School for Girls, where four floors of artworks were housed. Many of the pieces were places in the classrooms but some were in the washrooms and the hallways. Ivanov's piece was in one hallway and caused a traffic jam of viewers because of its powerful statement about national and ethnic identity. The piece consisted of ten flags on poles that were set into the wall side by side. The arresting aspect of the flags is that each one is encrusted in varying shades of brown to reddish brown mud. Some flags have more hay bits in the mud while others are made of smoother finer silt. The difference between them is negligible. This could be a comment on both the hope and danger of eliminating political or ethnic histories and perhaps, additionally, it is a comment on the current situation toward unification of all nations in Europe.

Paul McCarthy

The famous (sometimes infamous) Los Angeles artist, Paul McCarthy, presented a mixed media piece called 'Bang-Bang Room' that, true to its title, could be heard outside the Girls' School. The piece is the room of a house with a door in each wall. There is wallpaper on the wall but no furniture or pictures or other signs that someone lives there. The walls, it turns out, are kinetic and move in irregular rhythms away from the McCarthy's floor and then back toward it. The doors of each wall move more rapidly and crash shut continuously. They sounded like gunshots. It was hard to figure out whether the movement of the walls was motion-induced because people stepped up onto the floor of the room and were soon enclosed by the four walls moving back into place. The doors continued to fly open and close loudly all the while. There was some apprehension regarding injury and whether the viewers would inadvertently get in the way of the moving walls or doors if they stepped onto the floor of the McCarthy's room. Many took the chance. Yet the overriding sense of the sculpture was one of tongue in cheek in its recreation of the hyperbolized type of ghosts that inhabit Hollywood scare movies.

February 2005
 
Enticed by Cristo, awed by Bill
   
After the opening of our exhibition at Loop Gallery in Toronto and before the opening of our exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Libby Hague and I decided on a whim to fly to New York for a few days. We wanted to see the Cristo installation in Central Park. The buzz had escalated over the Gates. Even the officer at the American security desk waved me on quickly with a “Ya, ya, the gates, the gates.”
 
We arrived in the park three days after the grand opening, on a sweet-smelling spring-like day. We sat on a bench with our Zabar’s take-out lunch and watched the people and the gates. Everyone was so happy – it was a real 70s happening. Reporters interviewed children, arriving by the hundreds in yellow school buses, for their thoughts on the installation. Thousands of adults strolled along Central Park’s pathways and took pictures. People were telling stories about the gates. We heard one about two little dogs who ran onto a frozen pond chasing ducks. Because of the mild weather, the ice cracked and they fell in. One of the Gates volunteers jumped in (it was only waist deep) and used the tennis ball attached to the pole that he had. Each volunteer held one in order to flip down the orange fabric if the wind twisted it. The little dogs doggy-paddled toward the ball and the shore and were saved! This incident made the evening news.
 
It perked everyone up in a grey rainy February to see sparks of orange through leafless trees. But after walking under the orange gates for three days, I became increasingly ambivalent about them. As an event, it was successful in that it brought the idea of artistic intervention into the public domain. But as an art piece, the installation was past its expiry date. The scale of it would have been stunning in the 70s, when it had first been conceived. However, now it was out of context and out of the international conversation that had been going on since the 70s among artists who have been doing massive earthworks and environmental installations and most recently, light- and/or sound-based installations that are interactive on a truly grand, even international, scale. Cristo’s piece in comparison, and you can’t avoid the comparison because those other pieces exist, felt like a very expensive piece of fluff which lacked grace of proportion (the frames should have been much taller) and grace of movement (the fabric was plasticy and stiff rather than flowing). And the colour was decidedly industrial orange and not saffron. Flowing saffron would have added the sensuality that this piece lacked.
 
When I returned to Toronto, I went to see the drawing exhibition by Cristo at the AGO. The drawings are of many of the wrapped installations that he has done throughout his career. They are strong and beautifully rendered in charcoal, graphite and even with plastic and rope collaged elements in some. The photos and drawings made me wish I had seen the other magnificent projects: the covered bridge over the Seine, the covered Reichstag and the pink fabric floating on water around islands. These touch the imagination; the Gates, in contrast, are pedestrian.
 
 
Bill Viola “Five Angels for the Millenium” (2001) at the Whitney
 
One exhibition that was breathtaking was Bill Viola’s “Five Angels for the Millenium” at the Whitney. Viola is considered the godfather of American video art. His installation consisted of five full sized movie house screens in a large darkened gallery. There was an accompanying sound element to the projection. The entire loop seemed to last about half an hour but most people were so mesmerized that they stayed, like us, for a second or even a third loop.
 
If you focused on one screen (although most of us kept track of the action on two or three screens at once), you saw indications of water: bubbles, a horizon line sometimes, surface disturbances. There was a saturated colour ambient in each, black, midnight blue, deep red. The colours would stay for a while, leave an imagistic impression of a pre-dawn sky, a bloody sunset or a mushroom-shaped cloud, and then melt into another colour. The sound was hard to define. At first it was a general unfocussed hum, then it sounded as if you were underwater with snorkel and goggles, hearing your own breathing magnified. Gradually the sound began to get louder, a portent of ominous activity. There was more and more agitation in the water. And suddenly, shockingly, something – perhaps a whale’s tail or a body – punctured the surface in its upward thrust.
 
All this visual activity was filmed in slow motion and it was still difficult to tell exactly what that disruptive being was. But as it progressed to the top of the screen and out of sight, it seemed to be a human figure that moved its arms from above its head to its sides, like an angel flying. Oh yes, these are the five angels of the title. Or a diver diving. Only this diver was diving upside down into what at first had seemed to be air with water drips but was, in hindsight, actually water with air bubbles. The video had been flipped upside down. Then another diver dove upwards on another screen, and another. Finally they stopped and the surface was still for a while.
 
The viewers in the darkened gallery were transported. Once the anxiety of anticipating something fearful had dissipated, the anticipation of wonder took its place. This recalled feelings experienced while watching spectacular fireworks or, better yet, northern lights. But here the wonder of a larger than human-scale event evoked a sense of beauty both awesome and sinister.
 
 
Tim Hawkinson at the Whitney
 
A second exhibition at the Whitney that was a huge comprehensive retrospective, was that of Tim Hawkinson. Hawkinson is a California sculptor who constructs machines and sculptures out of low -tech everyday objects. His range is so broad that for every piece described here, there are ten equally brilliant pieces not described.
 
There were many works in the show that had parts that moved. Sometimes they were so tiny that you couldn’t detect movement unless you watched them for a while (the title often offered a clue). One such piece was a hairbrush where two hairs had been replaced by tiny clock hands. They kept accurate time. Another sculpture was of a hugely oversized index finger with a dirty nail and a cut. If you looked very closely at the stitches on the cut, two of them also moved in clock fashion to tell the time. Not only are these pieces whimsical, they also speak to the relationship of the human body to time: a body in time both heals and decays. A second giant index finger sculpture did not have stitches. But if you peaked around to the back of the finger stump, you could see the points of hundreds of red pens, pencils and markers. It turns out that Hawkinson had used all of these to create a huge red line drawing installed on a nearby wall. When one would run out, he’d throw it into a bucket. When the bucket was full, he decided he would use these discards. They became the structural support, as well as the metaphoric support, of the giant red stained index finger sculpture.
 
Hawkinson incorporated sound elements into a number of pieces as well. In the largest installation in the show, a version of which was shown at Toronto’s Powerplant gallery a couple of years ago, Hawkinson had constructed a room full of funny looking humans, about the size of 10 year olds, who made musical sounds. The figures were made out of cardboard with layers of cardboard glued together where the volume increased – much like the way mountain elevations are indicated in 2D on maps. The figures were nude males and females and there were some animals too. The figures were in every part of the gallery, high up near the ceiling and low on the floor and were connected by tubing that looked as if it came from laundry driers and vacuum cleaners. Vacuum motors blew air into the various tubes that caused body parts to move and sounds to be made. The collective sound was reminiscent of a breathy bassoon ensemble tuning up.
 
The viewers were intent on figuring out the intervals between movements and sounds and also how the whole thing worked. But again, this whimsy was juxtaposed with a serious sense of the connectedness of all living creatures and the fragility of breath and life.
 
Hawkinson seems to really love the stuff he finds in his garage. It is a source for much of the material incorporated into the sculptures. There were a number of sculptures that were made of extension cords (the yellow and red industrial kind). A number of artists have been using industrial cords of late: it’s in the air as a drawing medium. They suspend a mess of cord from the ceiling to achieve an energetic 3D scribble. Hawkinson added an element of grace to his cord drawings by crocheting the thick macho medium into lacy shapes that looked like embroidered Irish knots. The delicacy of his creations belied the utilitarian, greasy, dusty places from which the extension cords were borrowed.
 
Hawkinson, although never trained in mechanics or engineering, is also fascinated with invented movement and sound. In a few pieces he had constructed his own low -tech computers and machines that imitated the human voice or some other musical sounds and mechanical movements. This retrospective showed him to be incredibly prolific, curious and smart. Make a note to spend a lot of time with his work, if you ever get the chance.
 
 
Rubens and Kentridge at the Met
 
The Metropolitan Museum had a couple of excellent special exhibitions. One was a show of Rubens drawings. They were primarily portraits on paper. What exquisite draughtsmanship! The portraits, done in coloured pencils and chalks, of his young children and his second wife, were especially well done. They sparkled with life and love.
 
The second special exhibition was small but potent. It was prints and drawings and an animated film by William Kentridge. Kentridge is a South African artist who has shown extensively over the past ten years. The subject matter of the work was political and ethical, dealing with South Africa’s experience of apartheid. It was very muscular in nature. The film was an animation of his large drawings in which the process – the erasures, additions and transformations – was made evident. He used black charcoal with minimalist touches of blue or red. The black and white etchings that he showed alongside the film, were also exquisite. Rich, deeply embossed areas of velvety charbonnel black were juxtaposed next to scratchy drypoint lines, some tentative and others determined.
 
 
Steve McQueen at the Marion Goodman Gallery on 57th
   
This is not the actor of the 60s and 70s we’re talking about here. This Steve McQueen is a British video artist. The video we saw was wall-sized and lasted about half an hour. There was only one image on the screen the whole time – a man in a black undershirt lying on his back, his muscular arms spread-eagled. We saw him foreshortened, the crown of his head at the closest point of contact with the viewer. This is a 180 degree reverse perspective from an historical painting of a foreshortened dead Christ. Our man, like Christ, had a wound. There was a pronounced scar running from ear to ear across his crown, giving it the impression of a cracked egg ie fragile. The man’s hair was greying but appeared to have been shaved, with the beginnings of growth showing.
 
Throughout the video, he lay absolutely still, no breathing, no movement. Was he dead? Or was this a video of a still image of the man? The audio accompanying the visual image had him (we presume it was the voice of our man) telling us his story. He was cockney, a working man. That explains the muscles. He told us the story of a horrendous accident in which he shot his brother while trying to dismantle a gun that belonged to neither of them. He told us the details surrounding the incident and how it impacted upon him and his mother. She couldn’t tolerate the loss and jumped out the window of her flat. He himself initially considered suicide. His anguish was heartbreaking but he tried, in his unschooled yet thoughtful way, to make sense of his life.
 
There were biblical and classical allusions to one brother killing another. In this case, the strength was in the telling: straightforward and deeply moving. The contrast of movement and action in the story told versus the stasis of the visual figure was also very powerful. We saw his stitched up head while he told us that the bullet ripped open the side of his brother’s head. He tried to push all the bloody insides back together – it was the only thing he could think to do in his shock. Here too was a contrast, this time between the whole, the fixed and the irreparably broken, the dead.

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Exhibitions in Japan

During my visit to Japan in May, I was extremely fortunate to see several spectacular exhibitions. Every temple complex has connected to it a display of traditional Japanese crafts. But the most comprehensive and breathtaking was the one at the Fine Art Museum in Kyoto. There was room after room of ancient scrolls, screens, silk kimonos, ceramic work, theatre masks and costumes, metal work etc.

At the National Museum of Art in Tokyo, I happened upon a traveling exhibition of relief and free standing Roman portraiture from the Vatican. There were marble and limestone busts of the wives of Roman citizens, sporting elaborate and very inventive hair-dos. There were some life-sized portraits of nobles and emperors, some proudly displaying blemishes and physical imperfections while others posed in imitation of Zeus. There were also funerary tributes and sarcophagi with heroic portraits. The show gave viewers a revealing glimpse into the lives of a few individuals who populated a powerful class of society during a rich momentous period in human cultural history.

Contrasting all of these exhibitions whose artwork was created in antiquity, was a stunning exhibition of the work of Yayoi Kusama. It was titled Kusamatrix. Yayoi is a Japanese artist who is now in her 70s and has exhibited in most major art centres throughout the world. She is an odd character who over the years has checked herself, for long periods of time, into mental health institutions. She is a contemporary icon in Japan and the exhibition was hugely popular. It was situated in a very large gallery on the top floor of one of Tokyo’s tallest buildings - in the Roppongi Hills shopping site (a Rodeo Drive type exclusive shopping neighbourhood which is featured in Sophia Coppolla’s movie ‘Lost in Translation') .
Each of her installations had a lot of breathing space and the show as a whole was very well curated. I will highlight some of the pieces. The first installation required viewers to walk into a completely blackened room. We couldn’t tell how large the room was because it was so dark in there, but after going back through it a couple of more times, I think it was actually a wide hallway. The only light came from tiny electric lights, like little white Christmas lights, that were reflected by mirrors on the walls, floor and ceiling. The effect was magical: it felt as if we were floating through the galaxies of outer space.
Another piece used mirrors also. There was one large circular mirror on the floor and another identical mirror on the ceiling directly above the first. Between the two mirrors and attached to them, was a ladder made out of neon tubing. The ladder became infinite in both directions. As well, the colour of the neon ladder slowly changed to hot pink then to lime green then to all the other colours, returning to white at the end of the loop.

A third installation was a farm scene that had real sweet smelling hay on the floor. There were various plastic blow-up pseudo animals painted with polka dots - the ‘dog’, for example, had red dots on yellow ground. His mouth and ears were white on blue. There were some large blow-up ‘farmer’s daughters’ as well, also painted variously coloured polka dots. Even their purses were polka dotted and other patterns. The walls and ceiling were covered with little human figures drawn in coloured markers on acetate. They stuck out from the wall attached to acetate strips, which allowed them to shudder in the breeze of the many people walking by. It seemed to be raining people.

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New York in Early Spring, 2004

Early spring in Toronto seems to be a time when gallery fatigue sets in. The grayness, the slush, the blustery winds make it uninviting to wander in and out of the galleries along Queen Street West. New York, however, is energizing. On another visit to NY (the second in three months), the air smelled sweet and warm, even in the meatpacking district. My traveling companion, artist Libby Hague, and I decided to visit the galleries of Chelsea.

The auto body shops everywhere in the area belie the huge sleek art spaces behind some of those metal garage doors. After the initial WOW, the uniform look of the galleries - white walls, wood floors and hard-edged metal banisters - started to feel tedious. We broke up the design monotony by entering a couple of upscale designer clothing stores, Commes de Garcons and Balenciaga, whose doorways and interiors were inventive and whimsical. One interior (I think it was Commes) was a white plaster riff on Frank Gehry's curved walls. The clothes hung or lay like colourful gems in the folds of these walls.

We also went to galleries around 57 th St. and the Queens Museum, MOMA Queens, PS1 and, of course, the Met. And to the opera, recitals, plays. Following are highlights of some of the best artwork we saw.

Pippilotti Rist
Matt Mullican
PS1
PS1 is an old school in Queens that has been converted into a contemporary art centre with visiting artists from around the world doing residencies there. It is supposed to exhibit cutting edge contemporary art. But we were disappointed. There were only two good pieces in the whole place. One was a piece by Pipilotti Rist. When we first walked into PS1, we could hear someone calling "Help! Help!" No one at the front desk seemed alarmed. We looked for the source of the distressed voice and followed it to a hole in the floorboards. We crouched down and saw in a crack about an inch wide by maybe two inches long, a video loop of a woman in hell. Flames were leaping up around her and she was trying to climb out of the hole toward us. She looked right at us and yelled for help. We think she was also speaking lines in Italian from Dante's Inferno. Clever, compelling and funny.

The other smart piece at PS1 was by Matt Mullican, down in the basement. The guard told us to take our shoes off. We entered the room to discover a small set of white wooden stairs that led us up to the interior of a VW hippy van. The back and front had been cut off. The interior walls and ceiling of the van held objects that gave a sense of semi-permanent habitation - dishes, pillows, toys, etc. To get through the piece to the other side we had to crawl (in our socks) over the floor of the van, which was composed of paperback novels with the pages facing up. They were very tightly packed, so that we didn't squash them but rather were cushioned by them. What a great idea: the awkward, crawling (perhaps even pre-upright) human is supported by the imagination; the mundane is uplifted by literature and by fable.

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher
Candice Breitz
Sonnabend Gallery
Where Do You Think You Are? is a photography exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in Chelsea. The photographers are Andrea Robbins and Max Becher. It is a two-fold show, one half showing American influences on consumer goods in France, such as a Toys R Us strip mall store in Toulouse with the text in French but the graphics are decidedly American consumerism. It's pathetic and funny.... The other half shows images from the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. That part of the exhibition is not so successful except as a documentation of life on such tiny rugged islands. The concept   of France in North America doesn't work as well with Canadians since we are very familiar with places in Quebec City or Montreal that look like neighbourhoods in France.

At the same gallery there is a video installation by Candice Breitz. There are seven sets of back-to-back monitors in the gallery space. The monitors facing us show seven popular movie actresses (Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Lopez etc). Each actress is seen in a close up scene from one of her movies. The sequence is looped. At the back of each monitor is a matching monitor that shows the same scene, but this time acted out by the video artist, Candice Breitz. Candice's non glamorous imitation shows the narrowness of emotional range and the reliance of the actresses upon ticks and mannerisms. There were headsets with each of the corresponding actress's voice reciting the lines. This deconstruction of voice from face added to the feeling of artificiality and shallowness of the acting.

Chris Burden
Gagosian Gallery
Apparently Chris Burden has been around for many years and has done some real cutting edge work in installation and performance. So some critics are disappointed in the straight ahead sculpture that he presents at the Gagosian. I, however, am unfamiliar with his work and found the ideas and the execution impressive. The gallery itself is huge (and white, of course) and Burden's main piece filled almost the entire space. The piece is one giant bridge constructed out of mechano pieces that Burden designed himself. Because it became so costly to manufacture all the newly designed units, Burden made multiples. One whole set was lined up neatly inside the open drawers of an old fashioned wooden desk. Now this is childhood activity on a very grand scale! That is the charm and beauty of the piece.

Marc Quinn
Mary Boone Gallery
This is a show of marble sculptures that seems to have quite a buzz around it. In fact, it was completely sold out (and at incredibly steep prices). The work is amazing in its technical virtuosity. The marble is all carved by hand, no electric drills or computers or other modern aids (so the gallery sitter told us). Each nude - they were all 3/4 or human sized nudes - is subtly carved and delicately finished. What a contrasting shock to the content! With each of the figures depicted, there is something physically wrong. Some have missing or withered limbs while others have what look like thyroid or pituitary problems. One central piece depicts a nude couple hugging each other - she seems to have aspects of dwarfism and he is strangely elongated and hunched. The message, of course, is a sentimental one: that everyone needs to love and be loved. But the juxtaposition of attractive surface and repellent subject matter (deformity), sent me reeling.

Charles Long
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Long is an LA sculptor who has shown at some impressive venues, including the Whitney and the Saatchi in London. His sculptures are detailed, complicated looking pieces made out of ceramic, plaster, papier-mache, aluminum and steel. They almost always have an interior illumination that throws shards of patterned light all over the darkened gallery. There are abstract shapes within exterior structures that are reminiscent of some imaginary Tower of Babel or of a Russian constructivist drawing come to 3D life. In other words, they feel both ancient and futuristic in a wonky, playful way.

.....

The next day we went to the mid-town galleries on East 57 th Street. We saw two excellent painting shows there.

Mark Rothko
Pace Wildenstein Gallery
It was the last day of the exhibition and the place was packed. But nothing detracted from the emotional impact that Rothko's work still holds. Since my student days I have had a special spot in my heart for Rothko's painting: for the subtlety with which the paint was applied, for the underlying energy and for the deep sadness and sense of loss that seem ever present. The true depth of the work only exists in the real-life pieces. Reproductions have never done justice to Rothko's paintings. They render them decorative. In this exhibit, the paintings from one year only, 1949, were exhibited. Pretty prolific for a man who suffered from depression and who ultimately committed suicide. We see life, vibrancy and intensity in the work. We see intelligent experimentation with balance of large areas of colour above small areas; with composition; and with unusual colour mixing. Stunning.

Tom Uttech
Alexandre Gallery
Uttech is a painter who lives in Wisconsin and spends a lot of time in Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario. I'm certain his work will be shown in Canada at some point in the future because it has a decidedly Canadian feel to the landscape. Being American, however, he is absolved of needing to incorporate any reference to the Group of Seven. The paintings are basically constructed in two layers. One layer is the pre-Cambrian landscape - granite rocks, mixed hardwood forests, shallow lakes with reedy islands. Good canoeing landscapes. Uttech is particularly adroit at capturing the fluorescent edges of the sky at dawn or dusk.   The second layer is one that includes hundreds of birds, bugs, butterflies, wolves, bears, moose, etc. All of them are moving in the same direction. Yet they do not seem to fleeing a fire - there is no apparent fear in their migration. There is just an overwhelming unity in their en mass movement. The work is mystifying and beautiful.

The Met
What a luxury to wander without an agenda. We never made it past the first floor. To our great delight, we just happened upon a special exhibit of medieval illuminated manuscripts from different principalities of what is now Italy. Each scriptorium had its own distinctive style and it was thrilling to see so many original artifacts and to be able to distinguish one style from another. One town specialized in pictures within the initial letter of a passage while another town specialized in chant notations with illuminations in the margins. The chant books were usually painted large because the whole choir would share one manuscript. They would all stand around the lectern and read the music. The notes had to be visible to all.

Joan Jonas
The Kitchen
On the Saturday night we had a wonderful experience at an alternative space at West 19 th and 10 th Avenue. The place is called The Kitchen and feels like a 50s beat and poetry place. It's in the old meat packing area that is now becoming transformed into fabulous lofts (we caught glimpses through open curtains). It is not yet completely gentrified so we found the Florent diner, a stylized yet cheap eatery straight out of the movies.

What we saw at The Kitchen was a performance piece by Joan Jonas. I had never heard of her before but she is one of the early feminist performance artists from the 70s who has spent most of her career in Europe. The day before her performance we had seen a retrospective of her work at the Queens Museum. Each piece incorporated elements of video, found objects, slides, movement and text. Jonas seems to have been very interested in stories, mostly about women. There were videos of the original performance pieces. The two that I felt were most successful were a video titled 'Wind' (1968) and 'Volcano Saga' (1985 - 89). 'Wind'was filmed on a very windy beach and shows characters struggling against or giving in to the power of the wind. The sound of the howling wind is mesmerizing. The second good piece, 'Volcano Saga', is more narrative. There are slides of Iceland with its black volcanic landscape and steamy hot springs. The video tells the Icelandic tale of a woman who tells four dreams she has had to a seer who interprets them. The seer prophesies that she will marry four times. This dialogue takes place while they are sitting chest high in the hot springs water. The strength of this video lies in the acting and the story. Tilda Swinton, a British actress who has been seen in a number of American films recently, is excellent, as is Ron Vawter as the seer.

The Saturday night performance piece at The Kitchen featured Jonas herself (quite elderly now) plus three other performance artists. It was a reprise of 'Lines in the Sand: Helen in Egypt'. This had been created a few years earlier. We had seen the earlier piece on video with the original objects (chaise lounge, chalk board etc) at the Queens Museum. The piece revisits the myth of Helen of Troy. Visually it was lush and strong with repeat symbolic movements and emblematic objects. The let down was in the written word and Jonas's recitation. Some of the use of language was clunky and reminiscent of the touchy feely lingo of the 70s. And ultimately there is no reason to care much about Helen of Troy as a person and whether she was ever in Egypt at all or just in Troy. In the program notes there were some esoteric references to the writer of the epic poem 'Helen in Egypt', Hilda Doolittle, and her analysis with Freud in the 1930s. This merely confused the issue. In the end, the lesson to performance artists great and modest is that if you can't write clearly and concisely, hire someone who can so that your visual impact will not be spoiled by badly written script. Or don't use text at all.

But the atmosphere was wonderful. We followed the arty crowd out into the neighbourhood. On our way back to Chelsea, we happened upon the infamous Chelsea Hotel, of Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen fame. We walked into the lobby and saw artwork by many well-known painters and sculptors: Jim Dine, Larry Rivers, Lichtenstein and many others we could not identify (no signatures). They had all traded artwork for a room at some point in their early careers.

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New York, January 2004
During the recent holidays I was in New York City and saw as many exhibitions as I could absorb. Here are my reviews of some of them, in non-hierarchical order.

El Greco
Metropolitan Museum of Art
An enormous retrospective that took my breath away, both figuratively and literally. The latter because of the Christmas-time crowd. It was packed and hot and I had to jostle to get a front row view. But it was worth it. I followed the 16th – 17th century painter from his beginnings as an icon painter on the isle of Crete to his assimilation of the Italian painters’ styles (particularly Titian and Tintoretto) and finally to his mature distinctive work done in Toledo, Spain.
Many famous paintings are in this exhibit and in a few instances various-scaled versions of the same piece are displayed side by side. How fabulous to see in ‘real life’ the dark modernist ‘View of Toledo’ (the first poster I bought as a university student), and the elongated portrait figures such as ‘The Cardinal’. El Greco has captured in that man’s face so many human qualities – intelligence, sizing up the viewer, pride, grace, sadness, humility and a hint of humour.
An added treat with this exhibition was a series of sketchbook drawings of El Greco’s drapery (minus the figures’ heads and hands) done by Jackson Pollock as a student.

Kiki Smith
QNS MOMA
With the temporary closure for renovation of the MOMA, the exhibitions have been moved to a warehouse in Queens. It’s about half an hour’s easy subway ride away from the old site. There are two major shows on until March. Kiki Smith and Mona Hatoum.
The Kiki Smith exhibition shows only her printmaking explorations here. Smith is a New York artist who also has a huge sculpture oeuvre. She is impressively prolific and thoughtful. There are a number of videos that show her talking about her work and how she loves the collaborative aspect of printmaking. In fact, she says she doesn’t have her own studio but always produces her projects with master printers and student assistants at universities or print shops or in the collaborative milieus of foundries.
The exhibition follows her printmaking development from the early 80s to the present – from witty silkscreened aprons to large sophisticated layered etchings based on Lewis Carroll’s and other Victorian illustrations, which were produced in 2003. Smith is adept at and loves the visceral tactile nature of drawing and printmaking. We see this in the way she draws every feather of a bird or every hair of a man’s beard and chest. Conceptually she can really jar the viewer into a fresh perspective, as in her portrait of a man, showing a grid of isolated images of the orifices of a man’s body. Good intelligent stuff.
The other major exhibit at MOMA is a show of contemporary pieces in the permanent collection curated by Mona Hatoum. Hatoum is an artist of Palestinian descent living in London. It’s a lot of fun to see how she has installed various artists’ works together to create a conversation.
Some highlights are:
Bruce Nauman – Two monitors are stacked vertically. Each one shows a close-up video of Nauman’s head bouncing up and down as if he’s jumping. But the bottom head is upside down. It then appears as if the heads are bashing into each other. Both heads are yelling ‘Think, think, think…! It feels violent and irritating and funny all at the same time.
Robert Gober – Sculpture. One piece is a baby’s crib with one side removed. Opposite that and about 15 feet away is a false white gallery wall with a jail cell window way up high. A brightly lit blue sky is seen through the bars.
Martha Rosler – ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’. This is a video of a young woman in an apron standing in a kitchen using kitchen knives and utensils to form the alphabet in semaphore. The butcher knives forming the letter ‘Z’ are nerve-wracking but funny yet again.
In fact, humour and irony seem to draw many of the pieces together. One final piece I will mention also adds a touch of poignancy to the humour. It is an installation by
Felix Gonzalez-Torres – He died of AIDS in the 1990s. His installation is called ‘Untitled’ (USA Today). It consists of a huge pile of candies piled up in the corner of one room. Each candy is wrapped in red, blue or silver and is free for the taking. It is charming to be given a candy in an art gallery. Everyone smiled. But it is also moving to think that even though he is dead, the artist is still actively touching people. You can delve even deeper and see the connection to the religious ritual of the wafer on the tongue. Has Felix, then, placed himself in the role of God?!

John Currin
Whitney Museum
Currin has received much publicity of late as the new ‘bad boy’ of the current art scene. I went with great expectations to see what all the fuss is about. I gave the work much time and art historical effort, but I was sorely disappointed. Currin paints larger than life-sized figures that are distorted in a garish way. Yes, there are references to Renaissance, Mannerist, and Rococo painting along with references to contemporary comic books and Norman Rockwell illustrations. But I found Currin’s work predictable in that every painting became a game: ‘guess what famous painting I am now riffing on’. The essay about the work says that he is a skilled painter. He may be, but I couldn’t get past the formulaic pretentious approach and the lack of solid conceptual grounding to the work.

Philip Guston
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Guston was an American who was born in Montreal in 1913 and died in Woodstock NY in 1980. The family moved to Los Angeles when he was young and he became friends with Jackson Pollock, a classmate. Both became active in social causes. Guston dropped out of both high school and, later, art school.
In the 20s and 30s he was inspired by the Mexican mural painters and became a muralist himself. Pollock urged him to move to New York in 1935 where he met Kline, Rothko, Gorky, De Kooning etc. In the 40s they became proponents of the new movement, Abstract Expressionism.
So Guston’s work moved from figuration in his murals to abstraction in his canvases. In the late 60s and 70s he shocked everyone with a return to figurative work that reads like cartoon images but is both personal and very subversive. There are hooded protagonists that look like the KKK, there are portraits of him as a one-eyed head shaped like a lima bean and there are images of Richard Nixon in a suit on the beach with his leg swollen with phlebitis (‘San Clemente’).
This exhibition was a revelation to me since I had just had limited exposure to Guston’s work. I was taken by both his focus on solving painting problems and by his formulation of the human condition. He was a fascinating man and an intelligent and courageous painter.
P.S. There is a wonderful article contributed by Philip Roth, twenty years his junior, who befriended Guston in Woodstock when Roth had moved there to get away from his notoriety after the publication of ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’. Guston had moved there because he had been blocked artistically for two years and was in transition from his abstractionist work to the new powerful but shocking cartoon-like paintings.
Run, fly, drive to see this show.

Viennese Silver Exhibition
The Neue Galerie
Museum for German and Austrian Art
This new gallery at 86th and 5th Avenue, is a gem. The building itself is a spectacular old mansion transformed into several large gallery rooms on the upper two levels. The main floor is devoted to a fabulously well-stocked bookstore that looks like an old-fashioned library with its own rolling ladder. As well, there is a fin-de-siecle Viennese café with strudel and Sacher torte and long line-ups to get in.
The art work was great, especially the extensive collection of drawings and paintings by Egon Schiele (a personal favourite) and Gustav Klimt. There was also a special exhibit of Viennese silver from the 1840s to the 1930s, from the Biedermeier tradition to the Art Deco designs of Josef Hoffmann. The curatorial thrust of this show was clever in its juxtaposition of silver pieces that demonstrated similar impulses but were decades apart. I was with an art historian friend and colleague at the Royal Ontario Museum, Judy Gorman, who really enriched my appreciation of the silver by discussing it in the context of historical events in Europe.
One returning home, I discovered through another friend that Ron Lauder, son of Estee Lauder and president of the Neue Galerie, is involved in court battles surrounding the collection. It seems that the provenance of much of the collection is in question – the Schiele paintings and drawings particularly are alleged to have been looted by the Nazis from Jewish collectors. We’ll have to keep an eye on these developments.