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.