Photography was the ideal medium

Photography was the ideal medium for the project in its vision of a seamless reality because in photography "space does not present itself to us as successive in nature, like time, but as pure presence, present-all-atonce ... photography normally functions as a kind of declaration of the seamlessness of reality itself as well as in the form of photo into painting." Brassai, as his prolific publications in Minotaure demonstrate, was seen as a particularly seamless photographer. Although unlike Breton, Brassai did not consider himself quintessentially Surrealist, and therefore declined the opportunity to become an official member of the group, philosophically he shared some of their tenets, most specifically, the sense of some (greater) truth, of the existence of an "essence" to be percieved from a collection of its many individual parts. As he explained in a 1921 letter to his parents, Brassai hoped in his photography "to express the essence of things." By the time his works were produced in Minotaure, he felt confident enough to claim in a 1935 letter that "a perfect whole is slowly emerging from the pictures I develop day after day (light and shadow, front stairs and back stairs, the 500-franc banquet and the cesspit)." Thus, through an objective(?) balance of light and dark, inside and outside, rich and poor, Brassai saw his photographs as containing a range, a breadth, that expresses a "whole," a "truth."

We might make the claim that in his almost realist inclusion of such a democratic range--of people, cityscapes and objects, Brassai can be seen as photographing, albeit from an exteriorized subject position, a sense of community--commonality is based on nothing greater than general geographic nearness to Paris. Brassai quantified this wholeness, this essence in more specific terms, however. He insisted that "nature is the foundation of every starting point, the line of progress is constant simplification, a purer and purer emphasis of the essential."

Whether Brassai conceived of this natural essence as truly associated with nature--an instinctual traditional conception of the earth, or as man's natural state--that of the Surrealist unconscious, is unclear, but it seems likely that it is through this emphasis on the "natural" that Brassai turned to the figure of the nude woman. After all, nature is traditionally and consistently coded as feminine. It is thus that we have chthonic conquest terminology of despoiling virgin lands or ravaging Mother Nature, where woman is conceived as intimately connected to the earth. Indeed, it was this quality that allowed poster artists to link woman's body with the national body. On the other hand, for the Surrealists, women "were not grounded in what is 'natural,' but rather, were subject to fantasy and fabrication."

But even if Brassai's vision of "nature" had more to do with the Surrealist unconscious, Surrealism focused on 'woman' as 'other', as closer to the unconscious than men. Woman was idealized--which is certainly nothing short of traditional--but for different reasons than traditional ones: the Surrealists loved woman for her irrationality, her spontaneity, and especially her passion--for everything about her opposed traditional values of reason, practicality, and logic, and thereby brought her closer to a state of unconscious, convulsive beauty. One might make the claim that the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, so frequently critiqued by feminists for their objectification of and even violence upon the body of woman, paradoxically have much in common with the feminists of the 1970s, (who have, of course, borne the brunt of their own share of critiques for their essentialism). But as Rosalind Krauss points out, the idea of revaluing the signifiers of the feminine--which was, she claims, at the heart of the Surrealist project, "could at least prefigure a next step, in which a reading is opened onto deconstruction. It is for this reason... that the frequent characterizations of surrealism as antifeminist seem to ... be mistaken." Woman, whether tied to nature for traditional reasons or because she is closer to the unconscious based on Surrealist reasoning, was a natural place for Brassai to begin.

And nothing could be more natural than the simple, unmanipulated straight photographs, the two 1932-1933 Nus (Figs. 3, 4) published in Minotaure. They are Surrealist only in their positioning, such that they defamiliarize through "a simple rotation and consequent disorientation of the body." There is no collage or montage work used. Rather, the clipped torsos are posed in strange, unusual positions, consistent with Surrealist practice. On the one hand, these images are yet another cliche example of male objectification of the female body, simultaneously dismembered and decapitated by the violent cropping of the photographic frame, while the figures are sexualized in their flattering attention to the feminine torso, a site of viewer desire. The cropping of photographs severs the continuous fabric of reality. The frame, as in most Surrealist photographs, makes itself known as a sign--"an empty sign, it is true, but an integer in the calculus of meaning nonetheless, a signifier of signification."

Historically the massive field

Historically the massive field that stretched from the east bank of the Tiber to the slopes of the Quirinal hill had been the principal staging ground for military exercises and the place where Roman men assembled for the census and voting. Its southern end, the Circus Flaminius, had been the site of massive displays of manubiae (battle spoils) and enormous triumphal monuments erected by victorious republican generals competing for the most impressive building (e.g., Pompey's theater, Metellus' earlier portico, and C. Octavius' portico). During the early imperial era, Augustus and members of the imperial circle replaced the fragmented, competitive identity of the region with a unified building plan whose structures complemented one another and presented a harmonious display of imperial power. Octavia's contribution to the agenda added a woman's hand to the family tree of buildings arising here. Indeed, Octavia's benefaction helped shift the character of the region from a staging ground for individual displays of power by men to a tableau of familial largesse.

Yet, perhaps due to the novelty of her unusual benefaction in a traditionally male-dominated world of architectural patronage, scholarly accounts of the portico have questioned Octavia's actual role. Modern studies often cite Augustus as author of the monument that bore his sister's name, pointing to literary sources that credit him with the erection of buildings to which he gave the names of female relatives. A passage in Augustus' Res Gestae, the autobiographical account of his life's accomplishments, has also provoked modern confusion. Here, Augustus describes his restoration of a portico called the porticus Octavia--that is, the Octavian portico, rather than the portico of Octavia--located along the Circus Flaminius. Though a seemingly innocuous difference, the implications for authorship are significant. An ancient source from the philologist Festus clarifies these ambiguities as he explains that there were two porticoes on the Circus Flaminius associated with the Octavian name: one was near the Theater of Marcellus and was built by Octavia, while the other stood near the Theater of Pompey and was built by an ancestor of Augustus, Cn. Octavius, and later rebuilt by the emperor (Festus, 188L).

Some scholars have resisted the attribution to Octavia, instead holding fast to the idea that Festus erred and that it is the later ancient authors who give the monument to Augustus--namely Suetonius and Cassius Dio--who are in fact correct. This position is problematic, for both Suetonius and Cassius Dio wrote their commentaries much later than the erection of the portico. Their attributions, then, should be used judiciously, and contemporary sources, like Festus, given greater weight. The Augustan poet Ovid provides further evidence for Octavia's patronage and adds further that she was joined by her son, Marcellus, in this effort (Ars Amatoria, 1.69-70). (32) If, as Ovid suggests, Marcellus participated in the benefaction, probably in its early years, then it is likely that he and Octavia first worked on the project jointly, but that she added the libraries and meeting hall after his premature death. In fact, evidence for comparable mother/son collaborations existed in some of the most notable benefactions by women in the Augustan era, such as Empress Livia's porticus Liviae in Rome carried out with her son Tiberius, or the famous colonnaded building in Pompeii paid for by the priestess Eumachia and dedicated in her own name and her son's. In both examples, scholars have interpreted the joint benefaction as a means by which a publicly prominent mother lent political support to her son. (34) Such was probably the case with Octavia, who was no doubt interested in promoting her son's future in the imperial lineup.

Can art exhibitions have upsets?

In the shadows of the big-name international art events of this past summer, the fifth Montreal Biennale opened the season with Crack the Sky, organized by Centre International d'Art Contemporain de Montreal and curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, director and curator of Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design (and former director of the Power Plant in Toronto). The Biennale was initially scheduled for 2006, but for financial reasons was rescheduled to open in May 2007. In a departure from previous editions, Crack the Sky hosted a series of exhibitions and events dispersed across the city in a variety of venues. While the curatorial vision of Baerwaldt and collaborators such as Ray Cronin (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia), Louise Dery (Galerie de l'UQAM) and Sylvie Gilbert (Comic Craze) was distributed throughout the city, the majority of works were on display in the Bourget Building, Concordia University's old graduate studio premises. The opening weekend was disorganized and chaotic (many of the shows were not installed in time for the opening), but the lack of formality set the tone for a fun mix of events and installations.

Crack the Sky featured more than 50 artists and artist groups and focused primarily on emerging and established Canadian artists. It also included a handful of international artists whose work has, as Baerwaldt put it, an "aesthetic allegiance" to contemporary Canadian art. At the opening press conference, Baerwaldt announced his interest in the theme of borders as an overarching metaphor, proposing that Canadian artists are continually negotiating physical, geographical and imaginary borders that influence both individual and collective identities. If the goal of the Montreal Biennale was to focus on Canadian artists and their role within an evolving international scene, then Baerwaldt executed a successful initiative with one glaring omission: almost no diasporic artists from Canada were represented in the Montreal Biennale. It is surprising that while linking his selection of works and artists with the somewhat vague and predictable theme of "borders," Baerwaldt is indifferent to cultural race politics within Canadian art production, given its vital contribution to our contemporary understanding of borders in an international context. After all, several generations of migrants and refugees from around the world have crossed Canada's borders, and many are practising artists whose work is noticeably absent in the Biennale. While the show did include several artists who address indigenous and aboriginal issues in their work, including Dana Claxton, whose powerful video installation at the Cinematheque Quebecoise is a tribute to a tradition of aboriginal resistance to colonial culture, Crack the Sky was sorely lacking a more complex engagement with the broader race politics within Canadian art.



On the other hand, Baerwaldt, known for his queerly Canadian sensibility, was able to bring together an already existing network of queer Canadian artists, whose works in various media were among the strongest presented in the Biennale. Works of note included Luis Jacob and Noam Gonick's Wildflowers of Manitoba (2007), in which pastoral porn is projected onto a homo-hippie dome at Parisian Laundry; Lesbians on Ecstasy's rock opera, Amphitheatre of Homosexuality, presented at the Societe des Arts Technologiques (SAT) along with a performance by lesbian rock legend Carole Pope; and, at the Bourget, the haunting, erotic paintings of Paul P., Scott Treleaven's film installation and collage work incorporating images from North American queer punk movements, and a fun multimedia installation in a closet by Montreal's 2boys.tv (Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard). A highlight of the Biennale was a series of events featuring Toronto-born, Berlin-based gender-bending artist Peaches, whose various activities were a testament to her dynamism and included a lecture on gender and contemporary art at La Centrale Powerhouse Gallery, a performance at the SAT and a 12-foot-wide hair-cave video installation at the Bourget, filled with ephemera and objects that fans have thrown at her over the years.

Kitsch was a recurring motif, defining much of the work at the Biennale, including the melted white Darth Vader mask by Quebec art star collective BGL and American trio Paper Rad's temporary installation, The Gender of Space (2007), in which they displayed, in their signature neon colour palette, popular images taken from the wastebasket of our collective memory, such as old-school video-game geometrics and archaic computer graphics. The Gender of Space was installed at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse with Julie Doucet and Dominique Petrin's L'Animalerie Ju-Do (2007), a mock pet store that featured papier-mache birds, insects and even a pug--all caged and available for adoption by the viewing public. The popularity of L'Animalerie was a tribute to the spirit of self-made, self-distributed DIY art practice, and most of the animals found homes within an hour of the show's opening.



Parisian Laundry hosted some of the best of what the Biennale had to offer, and while works by Canadian heavy weight artists Brian Jungen and BGL were strong, they were overshadowed by the work of Saskatchewan-based artist Graeme Patterson, whose installation was arguably the most impressive at the Biennale. Patterson's sculptural multimedia work Woodrow (2003-06) is a scale re-creation of the small, nearly abandoned town of Woodrow, Saskatchewan. Once a thriving farming community, Woodrow, like many rural areas across the country, is now a decaying ghost town. By reproducing a number of sites, including the town's grain elevator, hockey arena, church and dump, as well as his own home and studio (which is housed in an old barn), Patterson creates a dark but romantic narrative about local history, rural decay and nostalgia. Woodrow's structures are complete with detailed interiors, and stop-motion animations shown on miniature screens dramatize key elements of the local culture. His work is at once deeply sentimental and obsessively archival, as he re-creates and records the minutiae that define Woodrow, and articulates a mythology of Canadian identity in the midst of continual urbanization.

David Altmejd's retrospective at the Galerie de l'UQAM also consisted of large-scale, sculptural installations. However, in contrast to Patterson's meticulously rendered rural narratives, Altmejd's sculptures represent a metanarrative of extravagance, fantasy, deviance and pastiche. In his work, hybrid, disfigured and mutated human and animal parts are embedded in crystal-like sculptures and mythical labyrinth structures to create a fantasy world. It is easy to see why Altmejd is the Canadian representative at this year's Venice Biennale and why his work has created such an international buzz. It has all the right elements: it is figurative, fantastical, sexy and detached from any particular history or context; it is nothing if not postmodern. Altmejd's work amalgamates many of the themes that are present throughout Crack the Sky, yet it also lacks the depth of many of the works by lesser-known artists. That this shortcoming of Altmejd's work becomes apparent within the context of the Biennale as a whole is perhaps one of Baerwaldt's greatest achievements. By placing artists who would normally be limited to the artist-run-centre circuit on the same stage as some of the biggest names in Canadian art, Baerwaldt gave a host of emerging artists the chance to outshine their more internationally established peers, and they took the opportunity to do just that.

Leila Pourtavaf is a Montreal based writer, independent curator and activist. She is the co-founder of the BOOKMOBILE project, serves on the board of Paint My Photos Gallery and is a member of No One Is Illegal Montreal. She holds an MA in Communication and Media Studies.

Nature is an inert pile of resources

Nature, as defined by industry, or science, or profit, is an inert pile of resources to be rationalized and exploited at the will of something that stands above this pile, something absolutely superior, separate and independent of it. It is important to recognize that there is something fascinating about this capitalist conception of nature, and the intoxication of self-will that it engenders.

The nature I find most familiar is Art. Culture, the ecology of spiritual contact as enacted in human communication, is what I find myself so committed to. The marvel of intuition and inspiration; the mysteries of synchronicities and correspondences that spark the imagination; and the processes of resoluteness, of reinvigoration, of keeping traditions alive while "burying the ruler" (to summon Carl Beam)--these are the things that I identify so intimately as being in my nature.

I am stunned by how anti-life the art world is--how calcifying and conservative is its search of novelty, how professionalized are its channels of access, how closed and airless are its means of discourse, how discouraging to outsiders are its manners of socializing. This situation is what the dancer's frozen environment so frequently recalls in my mind.

AA: I sense in your work a coming to terms with a certain thread in anarchist art concerned with the dynamic interrelationship of the ecological and the social.

In Gramsci is Dead (Between the Lines, 2005), political theorist Richard Day argues against the Marxist project of striving for political, social and economic hegemony as a revolutionary strategy. (4) He counters that affinity can bind us together in a manner that does not tie us down to a hegemonic social program. Furthermore, the refusal of hegemony frees us up to evolve our society organically--it is the prerequisite for the anti-determinism that anarchism argues for. This organicism, this free flow of social experimentation, has an ethics that demands ends and means be complementary, ethics that carry over to our relationship to the world in all its diversity. In what sense, then, is your art ethical, metaphorically and experientially?

LJ: The peculiar thing is that, despite all my talk about universality in this interview, I vehemently believe in the value of the universal's other.

What is heretical is true, because it is heresy that propels the gears of Truth as an activity, rather than as substance. We judge the freedom of a society by its treatment of dissent, of difference, of poverty. The concept "freedom," like "democracy" becomes an empty signifier open to abuse unless it remains rooted in the experience of the dispossessed within society.

The cripple, the queer, the one at the margins, the minority, the one who is unintelligible, the one who lacks--these are the only beings who give the universal its content, and it is they who are most immediately and keenly impacted when the universal is instrumentalized as an excuse or disguise. There would be no universal without these beings, there would only be the cruel abstractions of universality.

Although the experience of dispossession ought not to be glamorized, I am convinced that there is a profound resource in the experience of alienation. Anarchists have long been suspicious of the hegemonic tendency in Marxism. The important anarchist concepts of affinity and mutual aid are intended to replace the substantive concept of class as the basis for the formation of collective identities. Anarchists need to be careful, however, that our "affinity groups" do not become a comforting excuse for relating only with those like ourselves, and thereby perpetuate already entrenched social divisions. At every level, how "we" relate to "them" is the ethical question that the discursive idea of the universal keeps open.

I'll avoid saying too much about myself at this point, because it is truly up to those who come in contact with my work to determine the extent to which that work contains an ethical dimension. I will, however, end by mentioning the work of another artist exhibiting in documenta 12, whom I have come to regard very highly: the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski.

Zmijewski's sound-art work titled Deaf Bach (2003) was included in the documenta audio guide (it can also be heard at www.radiodays.org/program.php). This was a recording of various Bach cantatas being sung in a church by a group of deaf or near-deaf people, as a choir, as duets, and sometimes accompanied by a trained singer.

Zmijewski's sound-work allows for an incredibly moving experience. Is its cacophony experienced as noise, or as music? Can this cacophony possibly configure itself for us who can hear, as anything resembling music and not noise? Are we able to hear the music emerge out of the noise, as a higher-order musicality produced by the noisy efforts of people transcending social and bodily limitations, and joining their voices in prayer?

From our own particular life-situations, are we open to experience a bare-life, human affinity with those whose experiences and even whose bodies appear as so fundamentally different to our own? What kind of spiritual or artistic or educational or transformative process is required to connect and convey from one life-situation to another: from me to you; from you to me ? Again, posing these questions is profoundly anarchist to begin with.

Allan Antliff, Canada Research Chair in Art History at the University of Victoria, is author of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. His reviews and essays on contemporary art have appeared in Fuse, C Magazine, Art Nexus, Canadian Art, Artichoke and Galleries West.

A Group Show From New York

Canada provided a sense of the homemade, in that all the works were painterly, often muddied in palette and lo-fi in physical appearance. Running through two spaces in the Charlotte Road, London, gallery, Canada brought the work of a group of younger artists into a dialogue with the established work of David Askevold, who is one of the figures who made the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design such an influential institution in the 1970s. The exhibition's name derives from the Art by Wicks Gallery in New York, from which the show was exported, although among the artists only Askevold is Canadian.

In the middle of the main gallery space there was a cardboard sculpture, Sarah Braman's Donkey (Euphoric) (2006). Sections of text from commercial packaging--a Sharp TV box--marked and erased with paint were visible, interspersed with cut, folded and ripped sections of the material. The roughly hewn construction appeared to melt into the floor. Removed from any discernable narrative, a sloppily painted blue line drew the eye into the interior of the structural wreckage where awkward pockets of blacked-out abyss lent no further clues.

The remaining works in the exhibition were all wall-based, and walking clockwise from the entrance in the main gallery the first works encountered were three medium-sized prints by Askevold, collectively titled Childhood Drawings Surrendered (1-3) (2001-3). In each one a border enclosed a black space-like void containing refracted rainbows of sharply contrasting fluorescent colours. The childlike conjunction of abstract shapes, recognizable objects and the high-keyed, almost vulgar, aesthetic of the works created ambiguous compositions in which the translucent sides of numbered gaming dice appeared to be ocular landmasses, spacecraft or asteroids. The displaced sense of scale within Askevold's work was provoked further by drawings that referenced Aztec and "primitive" notions of picture-making, scratched and carved into the sides of these solid yet lucent objects. Elongated and angular hybrid animals, reminiscent of Egyptian carvings, helped to create a sense of contemporary carnival or circus.

Anke Weyer's large abstract art on canvas appeared heavy and muddied. Weyer's painting was lucid; it traded colour with brazen brushstrokes that read formally and figuratively as expansive abstracted landscape. Dark grounds were acutely set against sharp bursts of colour and drips gravitated upwards, distancing the work from a purely Abstract Expressionist frame of reference.

Moving clockwise through the gallery there were two almost identically medium-sized paintings by Elena Pankova, both called Untitled (2006). Their tight formalism and intelligently manipulated sense of sculpted space appeared to inform and be informed by the odd conjunction of cardboard shapes that made up Braman's floor piece.

Against the general sense of formal abstraction running through the works, Brian Belott's reassembled paper patchwork of mismatched squares and rectangles had an informal, erratic and disjointed surface. While the collaged, cartoon-inspired sections provided a humorous and purposefully kitschy aesthetic, the works lacked the clear edge of grittiness to which they and their titles gestured.

In somewhat marked contrast were a series of reconstructed photograph albums also by Belott. These "dark" anthologies of human psychosis juxtaposed unseen images (turned-over photographs with a mix of messages written and scrawled across them, ranging from personal feelings, notes and descriptions to perverse fantasies) with visible photographs that animated and hinted at the collection's origins as holiday snapshots. Graduation (2005), a high school graduation album from 1993 lavished with a predictable level of graphic and pictorial exuberance, was the most succinct work, pinpointing a moment of transition in the lives of young people. The charged adolescent messages written across every inch of conceivable space on the opening pages of the book added to the abstract dialogue created by Belott's adjacent manipulation of images and text within the remainder of the album.

The heart of the exhibition was the collection of early video works by Askevold dating from the late 60s and early 70s. Made in a formative time for video, with the advent of the technology, Nova Scotia Fire (1969) shows raw footage of a lakeside, with burning trails of fire running through it. Catapult (1970) another leading example of Askevold's work, shows trails of gunpowder in neat lines levelled across a road. The artist's lower body is seen running and jumping onto a plank of wood balanced across an oil drum. His repeated action catapults a series of fireballs in or around the lines of gunpowder to ignite and burn out.

These video works marked out the terrain of intuition, action and playful abstraction that draws together the works of Weyer, Pankova, Witney, Belott and Braman. Of these artists it was the sharp and measured balance of Pankova's paintings that stood out most. Braman's cardboard worked also; although the concise formal construction of her flat wall-based works (found in the back gallery) fared much better than the more brutish, obtuse floor piece in the main space. From folded cardboard to retreating painted voids, the abstract language of brushstroke and handmade marks by these artists set in motion a loose set of reference points that neatly added to Askevold's complex and long-developed art practice.

Young Canadians

The idea of doing a Young Canadians issue of C came up as a way to showcase a number of artists whose work we like. The artists featured are young in the sense that all Canadians are young and in the sense that the idea of Canada itself evokes the youthful optimism of 1965, the year we adopted the red and white maple leaf flag, championed by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, as our national symbol. The white spaces on the Canadian flag signal the blank spaces of newness, neutrality and maybe even surrender; the colour red points to democratic values (by evoking Coca-Cola, for example) and socialism--both strong attributes of Canada even today.

It's a reflection of that socialist-democratic ethos that the idea that certain artists could be "better" than others is controversial. Canada is not a country that expects excellence from its cultural producers. Cultural elitism is a foreign idea, one that this country saw no reason to import. Of course this isn't true for the many Canadians among the top echelon of artists working today. If the Young Canadians issue of C asserts that the artists we like are also the best younger artists out there, this is to go against the national tendency to balk at superlatives. It's a reflex deeply ingrained by the awareness of where exactly unabashed superlatives come from: that country to the south--or in any case, other places, not here. Although Canadians may think that it is simply vulgar to be unequivocal in one's opinions, this view elides the simple fact that it takes confidence to celebrate accomplishment. I recall reading once in the New York Times that Matthew Barney is "the best artist of his generation." I can't remember reading something similar in Canada, about anyone, ever.

In his article "Law and Ordering: On Evaluating Recent Canadian Neo-conceptualism," Earl Miller suggests that an aversion to evaluative hierarchies might be a good thing, or that at least it makes for good art. Discussing the work of 11 younger artists, Miller finds a subtle and surprisingly consistent tendency throughout their respective practices "... present everyday, unpretentious materials and situations that cogently question elitism, truth value or both." A similar desire to debunk elitism is found in the work of Vancouver artist Althea Thauberger. With a freshness of expression equal to the invigorating qualities of Thauberger's art, Emily Vey Duke makes an analogy between the revolutionary powers of the Internet and the artist's ongoing project of community collaboration. Both put the control of narrative conventions into, as Vey Duke writes, "the hands of the little millions." Steven Shearer also makes art that focuses on ordinary people, giving poetic life to the longhaired social type known as the "metal head" or "stoner." Writing about Shearer, Monika Szewczyk notes the artist's ability to depict his subjects with a "seething luminosity" that elevates the hirsute outcast to all but iconic status. Yam Lau's article about Kristan Horton characterizes the Toronto artist as another ordinary type, "the amateur." Noting that Horton's work is "marked by a tenuousness that is typical of a hobbyist's touch" Lau points out that Horton's proclivity for craft "is oriented not towards perfection, but rather ... constructs a critical position for the artist."

Elevating themselves out of the realm of the ordinary, not by dint of craft but through the application of strategic thinking, are the youngest of the young Canadians in this issue, the Vancouver entity informally known as the Collecting Collective. Working together to act as art patrons and--maybe more Importantly--to represent themselves as collectors, the group is frank about what motivates their endeavour: in the words of collective member Cedric Bomford, "we've decided to pursue a different trajectory through the art world in order to avoid having to wait for something to come our way." Making your desires come true by inserting yourself into the picture is, seemingly, an obvious tactic. The combination of old-world aesthetics (their inspiration is the 19th-century French portrait painter Henri Fantin-Latour) and the self-actualizing YouTube/MySpace culture of today makes the Collecting Collective's endeavour absolutely contemporary. It complements Thauberger's project to bring art's reflective capacity to bear on the aesthetics of popular culture in a way that is empowering for the ordinary person.

With this issue C introduces a new look for the magazine. C's previous design scheme--black and white with a different spot colour each issue--had the aim of giving tangible expression to the bare conditions under which the magazine was produced. We were not a glossy publication, nor did we have the resources to become one. Our intention was to position the magazine as the upstart--or the underdog--of Canadian art periodicals, with a punk attitude and, quite often, with punk content to match. It was an approach that met with considerable success, including more than a few stalker-like letters of admiration. C extends its thanks to outgoing designer Andrew DiRosa for the key role he played in masterminding this look. However, as someone pointed out recently, C is not a fanzine, but a quarterly publication funded by the Canadian government. In keeping with this insight and the feeling that our previous strategy had run its course, we decided that a change was in order. Responsible for our new look are Antonio De Luca and Brian Morgan, designers also responsible for The Walrus, the news daily Dose and Maclean's magazine, among other publications. We are very excited to be working with Antonio and Brian and welcome them to the organization.

Devotional paintings

Essays by Brown, Peter Cherry, Jordan, and Claire Berry follow Stratton-Pruitt's introduction, addressing the artist's themes, philosophy, and practices. Brown's lucid and accessible discussion of the artist's devotional paintings reflects the strong presence of these objects in the exhibition. Defining this genre of religious painting as small- to medium-sized works intended for individual experiences in the faith, Brown locates the objects within the history of sacred painting, the Devotio Moderna, and the Ignatian prayer method. He likewise identifies the formal characteristics of devotional images and draws parallels to contemporary prayer manuals. Brown then sheds light on Murillo's reproductions and offers a reason for the painter's overwhelming success in this market. He explains that Murillo's gift was his ability to engage the viewer's emotions through a strategic use of gaze, pose, illumination, and palpable brushwork. Scholars have long accepted Murillo's credentials as a devotional painter, but Brown's discussion is enlightening for its distillation of this category of the artist's oeuvre. Furthermore, as part of the rehabilitation of Murillo, Brown forces the reader to examine his/her assumptions about the role and effect of the paintings. Seen through this lens, works that some have dismissed as trite and uninventive become sophisticated expressions of artistic skill, disegno, and theology.

Beyond a small body of Hispanists, few art historians have paid attention to Murillo's participation in Seville's drawing academy; his academic ideals are certainly lacking in texts employing Murillo's romanticized persona. As remedy, and to locate the artist in the larger European academic tradition, Cherry summarizes the history of the Seville institution and its patronage, and examines its intellectual climate. More importantly, he presents the academy as a later seventeenth-century manifestation of a century-long campaign by Spanish artists for social and professional recognition, whose well-known champion was Velazquez. In doing so, the author dislodges Murillo from his romanticized (and vilified) role as painter of sentiment and intuition, relocates him within contemporary academic culture, and reveals him as the product of theoretical treatises in line with his contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. Cherry challenges longstanding notions about Spanish art and its supposed prudishness with his discussion of the philosophical significance of life drawing among the Seville academicians, for whom the nude figure represented the apex of creation and proved the superiority of narrative themes.

Like Cherry, Jordan defends Murillo's currency in his essay on the artist's cabinet paintings. In this case, it is less the painter's intellect than his professional practice that concerns Jordan. The author states that while the literature recognizes selected Italian and northern European artists who created small, gem-like luxury paintings for wealthy patrons, it has been assumed that Spaniards did not generally participate. Once again, the assumption is based on misinformation about Spain and its artists, and specifically the belief that Iberian painters and their patrons were so seized by piety that luxury objects like cabinet paintings held little appeal. Alternately, the presence of these works on inventories could be explained away as imported objects and the reflection of Spain's artistic self-loathing Armed with primary sources, recent conservation reports, and his own connoisseurship skills, Jordan convincingly demonstrates that Murillo produced a substantial repertoire of cabinet paintings, many on metal and stone supports. The author then matches these works to their earliest collectors, including Murillo's patrons Nicolas Omazur and Francisco de Neve. Like Brown, Jordan demands that the reader examine his/her assumptions about even these small works, arguing that the cabinet paintings are not to be dismissed as revealing more about the artist's salesmanship than his artistry. Instead, Jordan ends his essay with a provocative reevaluation of a 1680 Virgin of the Immaculate Conception on copper, turning on its head the belief that its vaporous technique revealed it to be a modello or a copy of a monumental work. Instead, Jordan demonstrates that even on this small scale, for this familiar theme, and in his last years, Murillo continued to invent.

The ancient Roman buildings outside of Rome

Concerning ancient Roman buildings outside of Rome, Jefferson owned Charles-Louis Clerisseau's Antiquites de la France: Monuments de Nimes (Paris, 1778). This valuable work should be considered one of the most important archaeological books published between 1750 and 1780, and the only to be concerned with the classical architecture of France. The Antiquites is composed of a short text and a limited number of illustrations of monuments in Nimes: the Temple of Cayus (the Maison Carree), the Amphitheater, and the Temple of Diana. Jefferson bought this book from Clerisseau himself on 2 June 1786, a year before his famous visit to Nimes. But Jefferson had known about the Maison Carree as early as 20 September 1785 when he wrote in a letter to James Madison: "We took for our model what is called the Maison-quarree of Nismes, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity." In another letter, written in 1786 to the Directors of Public Buildings for whom he designed the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia (Figs. 7-9), Jefferson reiterated his comments:

   There is in Nismes in the South of France a building, called the
   Maison quarree, erected in the time of the Caesars, and which is
   allowed without contradiction to be the most perfect and precious
   remain of antiquity in existence. Its superiority over any thing in
   Rome, in Greece, at Balbec or Palmyra is allowed on all hands; and
   this single object had placed Nismes in the general tour of
   travelers. Having not yet had leisure to visit it, I could only
   judge of it from drawings, and from the relation of numbers who had
   been to see it.


Similar comments were also made by Clerisseau in his Antiquites: "... artists and men of letters all agreed that Rome never had a more perfect monument than the Maison-quarree". Jefferson and Clerisseau's statements may reflect some of the rationalist ideas expounded in Marc'Antoine Laugier's Essai sur I'architecture (Paris, 1755). Laugier also considered the ancient Roman monument in Nimes to be one of the most beautiful classical buildings because its essential parts and trabeated design are close to primitive wooden buildings from which classical architecture originated.

Another important archaeological publication in Jefferson's catalogue that offered descriptions of Roman architecture outside of Rome is Robert Wood's The Ruins of Balbec (London, 1757). This book includes a history of Balbec, an account of the author's journey from Palmyra to the site, and an analysis of the inscriptions he found. There are fifty-seven plates of the site and its architecture, and five perspective views engraved by Thomas Major. Two views of the Temple of Bacchus and three of the circular Temple of Venus along with plans, sections, and building details are by P. Fourdrinier. In England in the 1760s, the newly discovered late Roman buildings of Balbec were quite popular. The Circular Temple was twice replicated in 1761 by William Chambers at Kew, and used as inspiration by Henry Flitcroft, a few years later, at Stourhead. The Notes explicatives des plans du Capitole pour l'etat de la Virginie, instructions written by Jefferson for Clerisseau who assisted him in the design of the Virginia Capitol, makes clear that Jefferson looked to ancient temples in "fixing the proportions of length, breath and height" of the building. Jefferson not only named the temples, but he also cited the books of his library and their specific plates: Plate 41 in Wood's Ruins of Balbec representing the Temple of Bacchus, "the temple of Erectheus [sic] in Athens (Le Roy, part 2, p. 16), a Peripter of Vitruvius (Perrault edition, p. 67) and a temple of Mars (Palladio, Book 4)". He also cited these ancient temples in his "An Account of the Capitol of Virginia:"

   The Capitol in the city of Richmond ... is the model of the Temples
   of Erectheus at Athens, of Balbec and the Maison quarree of Nismes.
   All of which are nearly of the same form and proportions, and are
   considered as the most perfect examples of cubic architecture, as
   the Pantheon of Rome is of the spherical.

Here the words "cubic" and "spherical" stand for the modern classification of ancient architectural forms into trabeated and arcuated structures. Jefferson's choice of the former type for the Virginia Capitol may well reflect current French rationalism, disseminated in the mid-eighteenth century by Laugier.

Rome's public monuments stood in various stages of decay

By the beginning of the empire, many of Rome's public monuments stood in various stages of decay. As the Mediterranean's newest power, Rome demanded a public image that would rival the famed cities of the Attalids and the Ptolemies. Augustus' political strategy as the new leader in the capital city included not only new construction, but rebuilding of Rome's infrastructure and renovations of its older structures. These typically were reattributed to their Augustan patrons as older patronal affiliations took second stage. Such was the case with Octavia's portico. Metellus' structure was razed and its foundations re-used for a grand rebuilding. Reconstruction began contemporaneously with other projects by Augustus and various members or the imperial retinue in the Campus Martius: In the north, the emperor began his mausoleum and its associated monuments; Agrippa, Augustus' son-in-law and military comrade, built his bathing complex, completed the Saepta lulia, and erected the Pantheon. To the south, Augustus' ally Sosianus restored the Temple of Apollo Medicus while Augustus took over construction (begun by Julius Caesar) of a large theater, later dedicated to the late Marcellus. The whole of the region, previously characterized by victory monuments built by rivaling republican generals, began to emerge as a center of Augustan civic beneficence specifically tied to the imperial family. Octavia's portico was the principal contribution by a woman.

In its refurbished state, the colonnaded complex provided the Roman people with a splendid, enclosed quadriportico set off from the bustle of the nearby forum Boarium (Rome's cattle market), the Campus Martius, river traffic, and urban life in general (Fig. 5).  A large portal centered along the building's southwest facade provided access to the interior court. Inside, the portico's walls and floors were covered in colorful marbles and, according to Pliny the Elder, other famous statues and sculptural ensembles joined the Granikos monument and Cornelia's portrait. To the restored temple's inside, Octavia added a curia (a meeting hall) and two libraries for Greek and Latin literature inside the precinct.

The Porticus Octaviae's Significance in Augustan Politics and Propaganda. It seems that the impact of the portico and of Octavia as its patron has been overlooked in past scholarship primarily because its reconstruction occurred at a time when other building projects by men of note were just beginning. However, careful analysis of the complex will reveal that Octavia and her monument were critical links in the developing dynastic ideology focused on women and family. Her beneficence, not only represented a highly generous outlay of capital, but a virtuous selflessness that characterized the ideal Augustan woman. It was this facet of her persona that had garnered her fame as Antony's beleaguered wife. From this perspective, the Porticus Octaviae emerges as both a part of a larger Augustan initiative to rebuild Rome, thereby promoting the emperor's political hegemony and social legislation, and as a unique monument that spoke to the life of its patron. Octavia, a woman--albeit of high standing--had gained access to this predominantly masculine region, thereby also gaining placement among some of Rome's most powerful men. Her access to the region can be seen in the context of political transformations taking place in Rome.

With a shift to dynastic rule from a republic came a contemporaneous shift in the importance of women as producers of heirs. It is for this reason, as Natalie Kampen has contended, that mortal women began to be represented in the visual arts of the imperial era, specifically in Roman historical reliefs. Kampen has argued that women appear in visual arts at moments when they were ideologically most central to the dynastic or hegemonic claims of a regime. We might consider Octavia's entrance into the male-dominated world of architectural patronage in the Campus Martius analogously. Octavia's prominence in Augustan politics after the Battle of Actium was largely due to her role as mother to Augustus' heir apparent and as a figure with the potential for fecundity. In this position she provided in her son a link in the new dynastic line of succession. Her architectural patronage in the Campus Martius must be seen as a logical extension of her role in the imperial family dynamics.

The opportunities for assimilation offered

Thus the opportunities for assimilation offered by these avant-garde dresses, the sartorial emblems of an elite high culture, were complicated by the simple fact that the items appealed to a very small clientele. The complex phenomenon of assimilation depended on strategies of disappearance, invisibility, and naturalization, which modernist fashion would not have facilitated. To display a Floge or Werkstatte dress would have been perceived as an unusual act in obvious conflict with typical vestimentary practices. The woman who purchased and wore one of these radical designs would have been viewed as avant-garde, but she would not have blended in and, consequently, would not identify or be identified with the secular, non-Jewish cultural community. We might be tempted to interpret this attempt at non-conformity as an articulation of the wearer's irreducible and anarchic singularity, conjecturing that the display of exceptional clothing functioned as a solitary gesture of self-definition. Certainly the decision to assume garments so recognizably unlike other dresses seen in the Viennese urban landscape would have seemed an act of defiance, a bold rejection of conventional norms. However, if actually donning modernist designs marked the wearer as visibly different from most Viennese women, it is significant that she would also be perceived as similar to those women who did wear these clothes. While she may not have adhered to the fashions worn by most Viennese, nonetheless she exhibited a taste in clothing that was, importantly, shared by other women. Wearing a design created by the Floge salon or the Wiener Werkstatte created ties to a group that existed alongside and in opposition to the normative fashion world, a realm populated primarily by the Jewish bourgeois women who chose to promote modernist art practices. From this perspective, the use of avant-garde fashion would enable an identification with like-minded, similarly situated Jewish women, an anti-assimilationist strategy that would seem not to have facilitated acculturation but to have promoted a Jewish collective identity.

This communal strategy can perhaps be better understood if one remembers that the dream of assimilation was at its best a flawed one and, around 1910, the Viennese Jewish community was beginning to doubt its benefits. This loss of faith stemmed in part from the unanticipated effects of assimilation itself. Often, bourgeois Jews were so eager to meld with the dominant culture that they began to be perceived as more Viennese than the Viennese and, therefore, as different. Furthermore, towards the turn of the century, Jews began to dominate the very liberal, elite culture into which they had hoped to disappear. By 1914, Jewish participation in this realm eclipsed that of non-Jews; Jews were assimilating into a Jewish world. The failure of assimilation, however, was not brought on simply by the paradoxical nature of skillful acculturation. Jews had always struggled with persistent antisemitic sentiments, even after the liberal reforms of 1867. Nonetheless the Jewish bourgeoisie had remained hopeful that they could not only integrate, but fully assimilate into Viennese society. Faith in assimilation became increasingly difficult to sustain, however, as antisemitism strengthened towards the end of the century, and it began to rapidly disintegrate when the explicitly antisemitic Christian Socialist government came to power in 1897. Religious identity could no longer be casually suppressed under an administration in which classification as a Jew or non-Jew became a mandatory and public process.