This Week at the AGO - Making Connections

Each week during my volunteer shift at the Art Gallery of Ontario, I try to find something interesting as I float around the galleries - discover new works, stop a little longer in front of an old work , think about new themes for tours.  So I'm going to try posting weekly about whatever catches my fancy at the gallery

This week it's making connections.  I often find myself making connections between works, such as a share aesthetic, or different ways artist grapple with issues of representation (such as, death, bodies in motion, colours, etc.).  Sometimes it's a piece with another artist that inspired it.  Sometime it's two sides to the same story. I'll start with a few this week and add on.  Enjoy!

Here is a piece from Art Rental with detail from a Peter Doig.

Here is Frank Stella with Frank Gehry's serpentine staircase.

Here is Emily Carr and Steven Andrews

GGs rock Angell Gallery

My group of AGO Daytime Gallery Guides visited the Angell Gallery on May 25.  Owner Jeff Angell showed the group works from established and up-and-coming artists, several of which recalled AGO works.

Current show "Exhibition Narrative", featuring photographic work as part of the Contact Photography Festival, features work by Oli Sorenson, who pays homage to Michelangelo Pistoletto's Arte Povera mirror paintings with a series of photos of smashed TV monitors.

Tim Roda's portraits of shrouded men holding children references the Victorian mother and child photos displayed last year in the AGO's Light My Fire show.

Another current show, The Plastic Arts by digital "painter" Rafael Ochoa, features a time-lapse video showing how Ochoa painstakingly creates  his works, first "sculpting" a model with Zbrush software, then "painting" it, and finally adding light and shadow with Photoshop to bring it to life. These pieces may have particular resonance for AGO volunteers, in light of the Pistoletto piece in our permanent collection that our new contemporary curators are keen to get on display, as well the the newly restored Jar of Apricots in which  the play of light  is so crucial.

In addition, the dreamy urethane and pigment-based landscapes of Steve Driscoll simultaneously recall the cosmic panoramas of Patterson Ewen and the oil & latex paintings of Stephen Andrews.  

Another parallel to the AGO collection included collaged treescapes by Gavin Lynch, which create a modern counterpoint to Emily Carr's lush forest scenes.

For more info on the shows, see www.angellgallery.com.

Before Their Time - Death, Art and Trying to Make Sense of Loss

Two friends of mine died this week.  Randy was the husband of Asha, who I met through a new moms group 15 years ago when our kids were babies.  I didn't know him super well, and we socialised only occasionally, but we'd run into each other now and then, his kids went though my kids' school for grades 7 and 8, and he took the time to chat with me during my job search.  But he made an impression because he was one of those rare people you would genuinely call a great guy.   Real, positive and would leave you feeling better for having spent time with him.  He got cancer and died after a long battle,.  He was 58.  We knew it was coming because we were on a mailing list that got updates about the ups and downs of his treatment over three years.  But it still sucked when he was gone.

Two days later  I learned my volunteer colleague Ann died suddenly, alone at home, after a trip to Greece with other volunteer friends.  I knew her from various committees, though I wouldn't say we were really friends.  She would be in her mid-60s, vibrant, impeccably turned out, a retired principal, and someone you felt in good hands with.  It was a shock, in contrast to Randy.    Neither make any sense of course.

I was at the art gallery on both days.  I happened to come across a painting called Heaven the day of Randy's death.  I posted it to Facebook with a terse comment.  It's sort of a maudlin statement and I don't know what reaction I expected.  I hope I didn't disturb the people who are fighting cancer now.  But I had to grasp on to  the thought he is somewhere out of pain.

Today as I walked around I came across images that represented memento mori - reminders of our mortality.  They're supposed to keep us humble, but today they represented not just that our time is finite but that it can come at any time.  One piece by Micah Lexier is a carefully crafted piece showing two cases full of coins, calculated to show a person's lifespan.  Every six months a coin is moved from the ordered set to the jumbled one.  I looked at it and realised life is really like a sack of coins  - you don't know how many there are.  The bag might seem heavy but it can run out any time.   Randy kept reaching in day after day until this week, when he looked in his bag and there were none left.  With Ann it felt like someone had taken the ordered case and just tossed it all in the other one at once.

The other piece is one in a series collected by Ken Thomson that fashionable 17th century Germans would have commissioned to keep themselves grounded.  This one is called Death Triumphant.    I draw no conclusions for living my life any better.   I jut thought it made an interesting if more traditional interpretation of the same theme.

On a final note, here is The Ever Open Door, a corny passage to heaven you-can't-take-it-with-you piece from the European salon, where half the pictures seem to be about death with a romantic sensibility. RIP Randy and Ann.  We'll remember you.

Logic is killing me

Logic is killing me.

A few years back I took part in a True Colours workshop.  Participants would answer various questions about how they would react in a situation or how they would prefer to work, for instance.  The woudl then score themselves and determine their dominant and secondary colours.  There were only four designations, but multiple combinations, giving a similar number of "personalities" to the more established Myers Briggs grid.

I discovered I was green, with a hint of orange.  This meant I am "logical", but with a hint of maverick.  The point of the exercise was understand not only yourself, but also your co-workers, and presumably be better equipped to work with those who were wired differently.  And it certainly did help - the woman who was gold (super organized) seemed less annoying the next time she stuck rigidly to a timetable, while I was less confused about how some of my coworkers seemingly disregarded our training about having a tour plan, when I realized a few of them, being orange (again, the maverick) were pretty much incapable to any sort of planning or basic timekeeping.  I was even able to understand my own mother better when I saw in her an interesting combo of blue (helping) and gold (organized), basically the opposite (but complement) of me.

As for myself, even though I had long ago determined I was INTP, it was enlightening to realize despite my knowledge I was "logical" I was still about 15 % rebel.  This explained a lot about myself I had never quite been able to put my finger on and many of my life choices.  When I was in grade 10 we learned basic computer programming code.  (FYI This was the 1980s - we were working on Texas instrument calculators.) You wrote numbered lines of code to create a sequence of actions for the computer to execute.  We were instructed to number each line  as a multiple of 10 (10, 20, 30, etc), which would leave space for any additions in between (at say 15 or 25).  I thought this was boring, so I picked random numbers for my code (8, 12, 17, 23).  This didn't affect the execution of the code.  However, it did make taking up homework in class challenging, as I had to figure out which of my lines corresponded with the ones the teacher had written.

(Further digression: In fashion I noted all the trends, and while I more or less followed them, I didn't want to appear remotely trendy - I would go out of my way to find a different version of what everyone was wearing - purple suede moccasins instead of brown leather; squishy leather ankle boots instead of tall ones.  It was a lot of work, and I was still never confident I was getting it right.  Eventually, I discovered the solution was to take on a "rocker" aesthetic.  No one at my small private high school wore black biker jacket and Joan Jett shag but me.  The need to belong to a teenage "tribe" was fulfilled by hanging out with the stoners from the local high school - I wasn't quite "of" either set of people, so I never had to feel like a follower.  The downside of course, was that I never quite developed a strong set of friends in either place.  But that's another story...

 And that was it.  I didn't think too much about it again until recently when I had another bright insight.  I've long been aware of many of my quirks - I'm always running a few minutes late (magically imagining I can teleport myself to where I need to be); I'm frequently bored - I need to work on several things at once, I need to have my work be a bit different each shift; I am never 100% prepared for anything - I'm good at noticing and following up on details, but I get "antsy" before I'm truly finished getting ready for a presentation - I get to just good enough, then figure I'll wing it.  On one hand this last one means I can be flexible and change things up on the fly - I almost welcome the challenge.  But then the big realization: these were all interconnected.  I left things unfinished because THAT gave me the stimulation I crave.  When I''m doing things last minute, on the fly or just making them up it gives me a mental workout.  It's that rebel thing again.)

So logic.  I freak people out.  First it was my younger sister.  Whenever we argued, she would run out of arguments and start hurling personal insults - "Well at least I'm pretty."  Later it was my husband - again, although he is a lawyer, he gets completely emotional whenever we argue and he counters any of my arguments with personal invective ("I think you just like being mad at me!").  It came to a head this year, when someone I am on a committee with sent me a series of extremely vitriolic emails decrying my arrogance and controlling nature.  I couldn't figure out what had triggered this and what quite perplexed.  Then a friend explained that it was logic.  My ability to grasp things quickly and present a cogent analysis is intimidating for many people.  This one person was so put off she responded to my "threat" with a pre-emptive attack.  Suddenly things made sense.  While many people are happy to recommend me as capable and sensible, she saw me as arrogant and presumptuous.

I once thought being able to make a clear argument was a good thing.  People always urged me to become and lawyer.  I indeed went to law school, based on my LSAT aptitude, which was basically being logical.  However, law school was a completely different creature, and the practice of law even more so.  I soon discovered by inability to manage details was going to be a detriment to a legal career, when missing a deadline or a case citation will cause a client to lose money or go to jail.  I abandoned that career path for event planning (short term projects that change frequently) and eventually instructing and touring (short bursts I can change up when and how I like).

A recent book (The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden - see the Guardian review) has put this into a larger perspective.  The author posits basically that the minds behind the Enlightenment believed the world's ills could be solved with reason.  As the subsequent centuries have shown, however, reason eventually takes a back seat to emotion.  In fact, humans resist it, much as my husband resists anything his gut hasn't told him is true.  It can be seen in today's politics.  Toronto mayor Rob Ford and  US tea Party politicians plays to those who find egghead politicians suspect and "elite".  Basic evidence of unfitness and untruths won't change what they know in their guts to be true.  Arguing or even questioning is pointless; instead it becomes simply slinging well-rehearsed and unalterable phrases back and forth to the point of exhaustion.

Still I believe logic has its place - as long as it's tempered with patience and empathy  - and buffered with a thick skin!

Tweedle dum - musings on the Ford brothers

About 15 years ago in Toronto there was a clown duo called Mump & Smoot who were very popular.   They would put on these amazing full length productions with a full story line about them getting into some kind of scrape then working their way out again, such as dying in a plane crash after setting out on vacation, and ending up in hell ("Inferno").    They managed all this with no real words, just a dialogue of gibberish, some great props and evocative sets, and of course some amazing clowning skills. 

I noticed after watching a couple of these that one character was the cunning, devious and  domineering, the other slow and sweet, but always faithful to his buddy, no matter what trouble the got into.  (Interestingly, if Mump was ever too mean to Smoot, the audience would groan and boo, Mump would look contrite and try to set things right.) 

I then started noticing this trope in other comedy duos.  You may remember tv's My Name is Earl, featuring the titular Earl and his brother Randy as Earl tried to make amends for years of selfish misdeeds against family, friends and the citizens of his county.  The flashbacks always showed Earl ruining people's lives by stealing cars, clothes, valuables, girlfriends, etc, while clueless Randy was mostly just along for the ride.  In one episode Randy moves home and their mother finally tells Earl he's a bad influence:"One of you is mean and the other's stupid. I won't say which."   Earl figures it out and realises he needs to make up to his own brother the most .

Glee presents a slight twist: while the pairing of Coach Sylvester and Down Syndrome cheerleader Becky started out as a similar dynamic, little Becky has now turned it on its head.  She may be developmentally challenged, but she's not clueless, and she's proving to be even meaner than Sue, if that's possible.

Anyway, I thought of this dynamic again recently in the midst of Toronto's recent mayoral woes. Rob Ford was a buffoon of a councillor, making a life in politics because he was pretty much unsuited to any other gainful employment, even at his father's company.  Meanwhile older brother Doug took the reins from their dad and successfully expanded the business, a classic ruthless entrepreneur.  When Rob made to a go for the mayor's seat, his political insider Nick Kouvalis knew instinctively Ford would not be able to manage actually running a city on his own, and convinced Doug to run for councillor and be a backup.  In three years he has became a "shadow mayor" doing most of the speaking for Rob and pushing a more nuanced agenda than the "gravy train" mantra Rob spouted during the election.  The only thing Rob seems good at is phoning and meeting with constituents; he has no head for numbers, policy or city building.  Doug has most recently spent his energy covering for Rob's indiscretions, blaming everyone but Rob for his troubles.  

They spend a lot of time insulting and threatening anyone who disagrees with them, telling councillors they will "get them" come election time or suing ex-staffers for answering police questions honestly.  But Doug also has a harsh spot for Rob, constantly belittling him for being overweight.  Rob acts like he's spent his life being bullied, and is just turning it on every else.

image by Chantel Leclerk for Spacing

A bully and a clown?  Absolutely.  Too bad the joke's on us.

For further analysis see Ed Keenan's excellent Grid article:
http://www.thegridto.com/city/politics/worst-brother-ever/

For awesome Ford-related paraphernalia, try the Spacing boutique:
http://spacing.ca/toronto/2013/11/22/new-store-schadenford-button-magnet-sets/

Tag This! pt II

Here at last is my delayed follow-up to my last graffiti post.  Just as I was writing it, I found a link to an interesting argument FOR graffiti.  Interestingly, it was not about freedom of expression, or an explanation of how it's the only way the disenfranchised can communicate with an uncaring world,  or how it's art in its own right.  Rather it was an aesthetic defence of tagging as a wake-up call to urban complacency.  And a load of BS.

Graffiti glossary necessary  to a vibrant city

Don't get me wrong - I love the unexpected.    A few years back there was a guerrilla crew called the City Beautification Ensemble spray-painting bike posts in a rainbow of colours, my favourite being gold, silver and bronze.   A few remnants remain, reminding us to look twice at a utilitarian object, while finding a way to beautify it.  I love yarn bombers, who also create a juxtaposition of soft and hard, decorative and practical, and always with a sense of humour. (For further thoughts on fighting urban greyness, check this awesome Projexity blog post by Calvin Kuo.) 

Still, I take exception to the idea that taggers are being creative or "improving" the blank slate out there, and that I, in finding it unsightly, am somehow hung up or that I'm somehow attached to a phone and not cognizant of my neighbourhood.  Sure, the author's Intstagram pics make everything look so shiny and hip, but that is not my reality.   I am very cognizant and I feel it's oppressive and yes, ugly.  Now, I grasp the irony of using the term oppressive as a privileged citizen - however, I do so not so much politically as viscerally.  When you are surrounded literally on all sides with what amounts to  people shouting rudely to mark "their" territory, it makes for an overwhelmingly negative sensory experience.  I normally enjoy walking my neighbourhood with my eyes looking up and around, noticing new things, clever ideas, the beauty of the everyday - artful window decorating, a wasp's nest in the snow, half hidden garden gnomes - but with relentless tagging, I actually have to block much of it out for my own sanity - the opposite of what the author espouses.  It feels endless and depressing and it makes me angry that there is no where for me to avert my eyes - I am constantly forced to confront someone else's self-centred need to make my city a worse place.

So, with that out of my system, here is a little Easter treat that appeared on the garage across from my back window.    At least one person around here has the right idea.

Go Donatello!

BTW Here's another online discussion of the issue, this one a bit  more attuned to  the actual purpose and intent of tagging.  Happy spring! 

One more update: Torontoist.ca has a weekly street art blog called Vandalist, featuring creative spray painting and postering around the city.  Here's a link to an entry about the "art" of graffiti coverup, which I'm well versed in.  I have to admit, wielding a spray can is quite therapeutic....

Tag This - The Pics

After I saw a tweet asking whether tagging could be considered art, I wondered whether the author lived in a neighbourhood covered in it.  Sure I've seen a few creative stencils appear on my garage door, but most of the time the taggers seem to be interested only in hitting every surface until they run out of paint.  And no, that's not your territory you're marking like a dog, that's my private property.

Also it irks me to not be able to walk more than a few feet in any direction without running into this stuff.  I remember the first time I went to New York in the mid 80s.  Times Square was till a druggie nightmare, but they had started cleaning up the subway cars. At the time I was sorely disappointed not to see the rolling canvases immortalized in70s  tv and movies, like Welcome Back Kotter or The Warriors. (When the film got turned into a video game, it was publicized with...graffiti.) Still I appreciated the concept of cleaning up your backyard to improve morale and try to bring down the crime rate by looking like someone gave a damn. Now I'm the ornery property owner.

So, here is a quick tour of College St, between Spadina and Bathurst, with a short detour down a typical alleyway.  I have selected a representational sample meant to show what types of surfaces are tagged; this is only a fraction of the actual paint out there....

street sign poles

backs of street signs

garbage bins

traffic stanchions

traffic light poles

buildings that have already been repainted multiple times

news boxes

glass doors

glass brick

parking meters

security coverings

directories

plastic damaged from trying to clean off previous graffiti

benches

scratched into windows

utility poles

utility boxes

tops of buildings, including those under construction

skinny poles

fat poles

fronts of street signs

bike racks (covered illegally but aesthetically in blue paint)

this is what happens when they don't teach cursive in school

non-Bell phone booth

sides of houses

hoarding

no, I don't live in a ghetto - it's just Kensington Market

church benches

apparently small children, or possibly dogs, are getting involved

mail boxes

fences

trash cans

someone has a sick sense of humour

trees.  TREES!

papered-over failed businesses

transit shelters

pipes (note how they complement the lovely poster-shred-covered utility pole?)

construction signs

Poop Machine

graffiti on graffiti

height no problem

more graffiti on graffiti crime

even nice pictures aren't immune

this is more typical of the garage doors around here

graffiti might actually be an improvement here

even residential cable boxes aren't safe

traffic-calming flower boxes

 
In the end, the residents' association told me the solution is to clean off your own property as soon as possible (done and done) and to rat out the shop owners who can't be bother to clean up within 24 hrs.  Fine - but there are so many and who's really going to enforce it?  It would be easier for an enforcement officer to talk a quick walk like I did.

So, is it an urban scourge, or am I lucky to be in the middle of a "street art" gallery?

Next time: my rebuttal of the pro-tagging article....