WESTQUEENWESTQUEEN

Dan Goorevitch, Sophia Lada, Eva Lewarne & William Oldacre
At the Artscape Triangle Gallery

38 Abell Street, Toronto, Ontario, June 8-18
Curated by Daryl Bank and Wendy Campbell

Full disclosure: I am Dan Goorevitch and I will benefit financially if you heed my sage advice and put Dan Goorevitch’s art at the top of your fine art buying list. “I refuse to recuse.”

William Oldacre’s photographs are one legitimate answer to the many thorny problems of color in photography. First there is focus. A shallow depth of field will enable the viewer to see the thing of greatest importance first, everything else being less focused to the extent of it distance from the focal point. But here’s the problem: trivial and important things at that same distance will be equal in focus because they lie on the same focal plane. When the mind sees, it sees according to its interests. Another problem is that black and white photos are a quick read. Color slows down the process. So Oldacre’s photos eliminate both problems with ultra-soft focus that rids unwanted detail. They read quick. Not only that but they also give something photography isn’t good at but painting and sculpture are: it emphasizes the surface of the paper. You can see every tooth. The photo looks more like a pastel than a photo. Cheap! $500 each!

Eva Lewarne’s work is always funny. There’s a dog in a dress with what looks like a woman’s legs. Full disclosure: we’re neighbors. The dog is sweet but kind of old and her hip hurts. The other painting shows some kind of know-it-all: some lecturer with his finger up about to make another point. It’s called “And Another Thing.” Beside him appears to be some kind of chart, like the ones used for economic projections and for some reason I think of a Canadian flag. So he might be a politician. In the left bottom corner it’s like the edge of the image is coming loose, implying the wish to just rip this fellow up and throw him away. Cheap! $750 each.

Sophia Lada’s embroidery involves tall narrow canvases stretched with linen on which is stitched another piece of linen into which is stitched cotton thread. The color is profoundly subtle. The outer linen canvas has a rosy glow compared to the workpiece stitched on top of it, which has an olive green hue. The cotton thread by contrast is quite yellow, like straw, putting harvests in mind. It’s as if the closer you go toward an absence of color, the more visible it is.

The iconography is complex, intricate and the interplay between stitching thread into a fabric and letting it hang like hair (in fact, it represents hair) on top makes these works deserving of serious scrutiny and thought. The symbolism clearly has something to do with nature and has a ritualistic feeling. I believe they are related to a spring ritual though they recall harvests to me. But hey, sow and reap... or in Lada’s case, sew and reap. I’m not sure if these meticulous works are for sale.

Last but not least, Dan Goorevitch’s two drawings are kind of disgusting, like something a mother would see opening her teenaged son’s door at just the wrong time. But as repulsive and klutzy as they are [and personally embarrasing to me -ed] they are “human, all too human.” There are many artists whose works have had these attributes but modesty forbids me the comparison. Together they explain the artist’s rejection by the MFA program at York University with these words, “Although the board agreed that your work was of a very high quality, it is too psycho-sexual and not socio-politically committed enough.” It’s true. I am not a communist. The drawings are a mere $2,000 and $2,200. That’s cheaper than your last trip. What are you going to do? Enjoy a fine vacation two weeks of the year and live in a hovel for the next 50? Are you insane?

There! Most critics would insult your intelligence. I’ve only called you cheap. Come see!!! Closes too damned soon!!!

Edward Burtynsky at the Metivier Gallery; Art of War: Bullet Paintings by Viktor Mitic

Well, I saw two shows today, one bad, one good.

The good one was Ed Burtynsky's Gulf Oil Spill photographs at Metevier Gallery [some good images are available here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/08/ed-burtynsky-on-gulf-oil-spill.php]. Burtynsky has solved the problem of surface in photography. The finnesse of the high contrast, the sharpness of focus and subtlety of tonal and color gradation made these appear to be paintings complete with skeins of paint. One painting seemes to have a bit of paint smeared on the photo with the thumb. It was actually the long wake of a white boat.

My favorites were Oil Spill numbers 4 and 5. One of them had that Klein blue but, unlike the witless businessman Klein (he manufactures paintings), there was more... a lot more... the detail of the fire barges made them look like delicately painted watercolors. Bits of rainbow could be seen in the spray and the cloud of the spray softened the waves where otherwise they were as sharp as tree bark. I wanted to take photos of the details, which is like reading a poet and wanting to read it aloud: the highest compliment. Another photograph was all gray silver and gold... like metallic paint... really amazing... not to be missed.

In sharp contradistinction, Viktor Mitic's paintings at Moos Gallery, in a "hi-concept" advertisement for his genius, such as it is, was dead. Giving it up to a concept is the surest way to kill it. The car outside was another matter. That wasn't bad at all. I guess he fired a shotgun into a car (I don't read gallery blurbs: they're bullshit) and then put the shells in the car... stuffed them into the glove compartment, left them on the seat. Let me guess: there are no more and no fewer than the number of shells used to cause the damage. And I'll admit the destructive sense of what these things can do did come home to me and I felt quite vulnerable. But the idea that there is either art or war is a kind of delusion only artists can support. Why invent a world of one's own, a parallel world to be true to, to immerse one's self in it if it has to be tied by the throat to the real world? How pointless. And the paintings! Hiroshige (or was it Hokusai?)... that wave? Copy it and shoot bullets into it? Well, they say beauty's skin deep and Mitic isn't that deep. Dorothy Parker once said of Katherine Hepburn that her performance ran the emotional gamut from A to B. Mitic doesn't make it to A.

Burtynsky is smart enough to know that his reasons for going to the Gulf of Mexico (to photograph an event in which he has an interest) is to photograph it and the beauty of the ugly event is the best way to ensure that people look at it. To see the beautiful in every thing in this world... is there really another reasonable way to live?

McLuhan's Animal Farm

When you believe in things you don’t understand then you suffer.
Superstition ain’t the way. -Stevie Wonder

At Ruth Kaplan’s show, “Some Kind of Divine” I read the usual gallery blurb til I got to the word “McLuhanesque.” I walked away. Nothing in Kaplan’s work is McLuhanesque and I wondered aloud what McLuhanesque could possibly mean. McLuhan wasn’t a photographer. He was an academic.

I mentioned it to someone and she said “The medium is the message.” Wow. Yup. That’s the name of one of his books alright and I remember the old fart saying how the content of any medium is meaningless: the real meaning of anything was the medium itself. Got it. But is it true? Who says so? And where's the proof?

I remember his writing a lot of things that I believed: that technologies were extensions of men’s organs into space and that, in extending them, those faculties and organs were amputated. Really? With the advent of musical notation, mathematics and verbal literacy (among many other media) human beings were able to work, not just inside their heads anymore but “out there” on paper where music became infinitely richer and communicable to each orchestra member. Did the notation of music amputate the ear? The ability to conceive and imagine music? Really? Where is the proof? All of the evidence tends to the opposite direction.

Did the famous blackboards of movies amputate the ability of mathematicians and physicists to work on their ideas? Really? And the train, plane and car. Did that really amputate our legs just because we feel bandy-legged after a long trip? Did the ability of sprinters suffer after flying so fast to other continents for track and field events? Or did they break world records, just as before?

Each new technology forced a change in sensory adaptation to the world McLuhan said. TV was a cool medium, and an extension of the eyes which blinded us; radio was hot, and extension of the ear that deafened us; the computer an extension of the brain that made us duh. So that’s what causes war! First the invention of bronze caused the bronze wars and then the invention of iron caused the iron wars. But what of the rain in Spain? Didn’t it rain mainly in the plain in Spain just before each and every war? By George I think I’ve got it!

But it’s food for thought, that rain in Spain being the cause of war and since everyone wants an end to war, I can hear the cash register ringing and singing somewhere in the mountains and the plain, each of which are their own medium by the way, and whether slaughter or love happens there, because the medium itself is the message, it doesn’t matter if there are tears or peals of laughter but no matter, the cash register rings like the bells in yon meadow whose message was:“Aye! Coom and milk the cows Donat and stop lingering with the sheep.”

War is the tragic result of natural aggression and the inclination of that not always nice animal, man, to take advantage of the weaker position of others to take what he needs from him and the countermeasure: to maintain a strong defense against such trespass. That technologies cause war is dubious. Less dubious is that many technologies are a response to war. But I’ll let it lay like a chicken on the other side of the road where the egg goes splat. War will end when man himself changes: not his technologies (sorry Bucky Fuller) not his politics but his soul.

My conversation partner said that it was really not nice of me to “attack a dead man's ideas.” Well, I'll be damned! That’s chutzpah isn’t it? I can't think of a single dead person’s ideas that are not argued against, discounted, disproved, discredited and razed to the ground daily. For what reason exactly would McLuhan of all people be exempt from intellectual examination?

Is it because his work is a hollow shell that he should be canonized and treated with solemn piety? A Zardoz* phenomenon?

Because McLuhan's ideas are so empty, people can put whatever they like in them and no one can challenge them because the medium is the message and the message is therefore the medium and since you’re using words to say what you’re saying it doesn’t matter what words you use they’re just words after all and all you’re saying is words? Bullshit.
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[(Wi)ZARD(of)OZ]

© Dan Goorevitch 2010 (A red rag to Bullshit™ since 1951)

Ruth Kaplan at Ryerson Gallery: "Some Kind of Divine"

“Some Kind of Divine,” Ruth Kaplan’s new show of photographs (and a video) opened at Ryerson Gallery (80 Spadina) Thursday night, May 13th. Thirteen must be a lucky number. It was for me. I saw pieces that, in themselves, were as good as everything—not anything but everything—I’ve seen at CONTACT this month so far. There were several pieces of that quality.

The first thing you notice is that the photos seem to be floating in air and the images themselves do not dispel the impression. They are soft, printed on what looks like watercolor paper, maybe about 40 x 50 inches each with a generous white border around them. They are all in greyscale (or the misnomer “black and white” if you prefer). [update: they are actually about 2 feet square. First impressions are longest lasting, not the most accurate!]

I’ve never liked large scale photographs and never saw much need for them until now. I’ve never liked those dry-mounted thingies either, especially on aluminum but I do now. Everything about these pieces was right and I haven’t even mentioned the pieces.

The first image as you walk in is of a woman, about 35 years old, standing, praying in a church. She is framed to the right of center in a horizontally oriented photo, looking heavenward. [see update above: the image is square] Her face is filled with some kind of appeal that eludes me: questioning, searching, expressive. Some kind of divine exactly expresses what’s seen here. But what kind? That’s not easy to discern. But you want to. It’s a mystery.

The photos were all taken with a medium format camera so they are quite fine. But they’re not all fussy as if the artist only thought of photography as some kind of fetish where only the most grainless image of a vegetable had merit (eek! a dust spot!). In fact there’s lots of soft grain that exactly matches the paper, the theme and the content of the photographs. They are more than beautiful. Simple, quiet, elegant. Even with all the people there at the opening (and it was crammed) the place felt like a church.

The next photo I remember struck me powerfully. The degree of community support these church members had for one another was staggering. It wouldn’t be my cup of tea but the contrast between what Kaplan depicted and the big rude city I live in was stunning. This kind of community doesn’t exist on the subway trains where the faces at rush hour are full of (with a few pleasant exceptions) envy, spite, fear, hate, rage and indifference.

The photo that hit me hardest (one of four) was of a man in a dark grey suit, his hands behind his back with his bald head encased by two hands that were almost exactly like the two hands Rodin sculpted in his piece called prayer. The fingers were preternaturally long, slender and very large. They held his head as if it were an egg: the egg of the world. A not-too-good shot on the gallery wall is available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dangoorevitch/4604891211/

The fourth image that really amazed me was another shot of the pews with several people in them. The wealth of tones was astounding: it was like looking at a color photo without color: like when we were children and imagined color in the black and white TVs (those of us old enough to remember).

I didn’t get a chance to see the video that was part of the show but I did catch a glimpse of my own face talking (I was one of the participants). I shouldn’t have been surprised that I didn’t look like an idiot. I probably don’t sound like an idiot either. That’s why Ruth Kaplan’s subjects trust her. She has a rare gift for taking and presenting people as they are and as they themselves would like to be presented. This is a rare accomplishment.

The only objection I had to the show was the blurb. But I hate blurbs. As soon as I saw “McLuhanesque” I walked. I can see “Langesque” or “Evansesque” or even “Weegiesque” (except there’s no hi-con shots) but.... McLuhanesque? Huh? Did dat man make photographs? Um, no... but hey...

It isn’t enough to thank Malka Greene for curating this show. We should get down on our knees to thank her for it. If “McLuhanesque” was her idea, well, Malka, as Mahalia Jackson sang, I forgive.

"The Rape of Africa" at MOCCA

The photo on the exterior wall at MOCCA seems to be a critique of The West. It isn’t. A critique is a subject closely studied: studied to a critical degree. “Critical” in the moral sense is more like judgment or denunciation. “Critical” in the academic sense is a degree, a measurement of rigor, honesty.

The attributes of art are similarly enumerated and then assembled pell-mell into a mere facsimile of art. If art is always transgressive, for instance, being transgressive must be the path to art: but his is putting effect before cause. But since there are so many more imitators than originators, the political case in sheer numbers always weighs the scales toward not the cause but the effect, to the shadow and not the thing, the imitator and not the originator. This is what makes the art world seem to be so political. (“Transgressive” is another bullshit word by the way. Trangressive cannot be an attribute of an action since to transgress means to act beyond a boundary. It is in itself an act, not an attribute.)

Of course it’s nothing of the kind (truly political). Try to bring up any topic and I mean that literally. Not a single topic will be discussed in even the most shallow depth but strenuously avoided. If one says: “This is bullshit” as I said today, one gets “That’s the artist’s style,” as if that were a perfectly reasonable retort. “To talk bullshit is his style?” I aked. The man’s jaws were clenching. “Who are YOU to challenge anything anybody says?” is the real content of his retort which pretends to be polite while being as rude as anything could possibly be. I would answer, “who am I not to?” And the answer to that is, since everything’s democratic, it’s unfair to say something is true or false, is good or bad or that something is better than another. When I said Canon makes their articulating screen properly and Nikon’s is perversely wrong by hinging at the bottom instead of the side, the salesman gave me the same line: it was Nikon’s style and that it was very useful for shooting low and high. Yes it is. I have one and it is useful for those two things. But the Canons I have hinge at the side and can be used to shoot low, high, around a corner and you can see your party in the viewfinder when taking a portrait on a tripod whereas Nikon’s viewfinder is hidden by the tripod. Is there any doubt one is better than the other? But nothing can be right or wrong anymore.

We’ve become inured to such bullshit, allowing it to sort of run down our legs, if you’ll permit me the crudity. Actually, since the culture is an open sewer of strong deodorant and feces, my crudity is apt and mild.

The photograph purports to show “The Rape of Africa.” The Spanish and their gold (don’t, for God’s sake, forget the gold cross!), Rome and its ruins (beside a modern crane, of course) and a Cupid character attempting to waken Psyche [sorry: Venus and Mars... ed], America in other words, which sleeps away its role as new Imperator, the new rapist-in-waiting to exercise his noblesse oblige who unconsciously lies effete as an Adam on a Sistine Chapel, finger at the ready to receive the touch not of God but of the pavement below. Africa herself lounges, one pretty breast exposed, cheesecake style, Playboy style.. How many women about to be raped precede the act with the words: “C’mon, big boy. Why sleepest thou?”

But it makes a decent backdrop for the occasional photograph of real people living real lives. I’ll give it that. Oh! The technical Mastery! I almost forgot to drool! But isn’t it that very technical facility that makes the (evil) West (successes) the oppressors of the (saintly) non-Westerners (losers)? I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not it constitutes hypocrisy.

But I will say the color of the photograph is completely unintegrated with the figures and their grounds. From a purely visual point of view it has all the content (feeling) of a McDonald’s restaurant interior design or a Disneyland. Feeling blocked and iron barred. The iconography is a compendium of cliches.

I don’t know the name of the “artist” and don’t care what his parents called him. His mural speaks against, against, against... It speaks FOR nothing. And that is its fatal failure.


© Dan Goorevitch
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[Update: David LaChapelle is the artist responsible for "The Rape of the West"]

The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra

The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra played Toronto tonight and the more Oriental the more sublime. In the end I was quivering and wondering if it's still possible to live, to really live, quivering like this somewhere.. in China? of all places?

The music was so open, the silences so profound and I thought, oddly, of Ed. McDowell's "To A Wild Rose," from "Woodland Sketches" and Ellington.... Cecil Taylor crossed my mind and Puccini.... "Find the distinctive melody" he wrote in his notes... and tonight I heard it. I heard Turandot melt.

Tears and sniffles made the Chinese man lean forward, thinking I might have H1N1. Talk about irony. How long to total integration? About one generation. The young Chinese man in the men's room confirmed this: "I got it till they played the second half." Right. He got Rachmaninoff's ambivalent East/West stuff (I prefer Dostoevsky, who really had a Russian soul to that fool Tolstoy who wrote a thousand pages just to set one stone, one great idea on history* in its setting).

The Rach-3, as Olivier so stupidly said in one of the most moronic movies ever made, "Shine," is, of course, the musical acrobatic act that tore poor David Helfgott's mind. Right. I'd call the movie a piece of shit if I didn't believe so strongly that that kind of language shouldn't be used in public and, secondly, if I thought the movie was anywhere near deserving of the insult. What was I saying before I so comically and artfully digressed? It was pretty good.... which is about all you can say about a slob like Rachmaninoff. I mean, it was better than I've ever heard it. The dynamics were far in advance of anything I've heard recorded but who wants to hear a crazy lout who can't decide if he's Oblomov or Stolz?

Still, the Russian insanity was infinitely better than the German noise the pianist, Yja Wang, played as a second encore just to throw a wet towel over the more excited of us in the audience so she could go call her broker.

For me, it was all in the second half. Xiaaoduo Chen, soprano, Meng Meng, soprano were extraordinary, as were the three musicians nan Wang on erhu, Jia Li on pipa and Xin Sun on guzheng. Together with the orchestra under Long Yu, they made a sublime bucolic masterpiece of sound and silence that quivered and made the soul grateful to be alive, especially grateful to have been born an artist. To sweep the floor under the feet of the master who wrote this would be an honor.

Now.... where the hell in the program is his damed name?! I'm serious! The list is there for the night before and the night after but... ah! It's Qigang Chen: "Iris devoilee" (minus an accent or two)

Correction... the first crazy Russian (better) was Mussorgsky (Prelude to Khovanshchina) and the second was Rach-2, not the impossible Rach-3 upon which so many minds have been flayed and left to rot.

My bad

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*from memory: “All great events take place in the unconscious and a man who participates in an historic event never understands its true import: the moment he tries to realize the significance of his actions, his actions become sterile.” (this explains the galleries of our day)

Updates

Updates to "Thank Yous (and R.I.P.s)" below:

Update: Jo-Ann Robinson died in the winter of '06 after a long fight with Scleroderma which took out her original kidneys, her transplanted kidney and a list of other organs I don't have the heart to mention. Jo-Ann was a beautiful person. She left a 14 year old daughter.

Update: Jennifer Choo-Chee got a transplant a few months ago! Just half a year earlier she was given no hope whatever of getting onto the list because she had too many antibodies in her blood. They are making great strides in transplantation: now they can even transplant organs of different blood types. A better solution is the living donor transplant swap: people who aren't a good match for their loved ones get matched up with others and they swap organs. Living donation is best. It can be scheduled, the living organ is never put on ice, the donor can now be up and about much more quickly now due to the new keyhole surgery pioneered at Toronto General Hospital.

Update: My beloved uncle Jerry Mayer died on May 1, 2008 due to a perforated bowel. He is deeply missed. Jerry got a transplant 23 years ago and it worked very well for a long time before he had to go back on dialysis just a few months earlier. Jerry was born in a plywood shack on Fort Road in Edmonton and his father died before he was born. He was orphaned at 11 and went on to study Linguistics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, where he received the Governor-General's Gold Medal for scholastics. He earned his Masters and Doctorate in Pennsylvania and taught first at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin and then, until his retirement at Fordham University in the city he loved, New York. He leaves a longtime boyfriend and many devoted and loving family members. He was planning to get back on the transplant list for a second go. Jerry wasn't through with life even if life was through with him. For ten days he fought cascading multiple organ failure with an astounding will and, just as we could see the blood come back to his face and feel the heat from three of his four extremities he gave up the ghost.

Update: My friend Eric Layman, author of "To A Stark And Clean Place" and "The Brightest Fire" died only a few days before my uncle Jerry. Eric died from complications related to emphysema. We never discussed a lung transplant. We ought to have. There are a couple of excellent eulogies here in the Globe and Mail and The Canadian Jewish News, where he worked. There's a small Wikipedia entry here. Eric's integrity was awesome. His life and death taught me that you can have any one thing you want so long as it's one thing. Eric wanted art through poetry and he was honoured for it. Between one and two hundred met to celebrate his life last summer. A man who speaks his mind is rare: when we lost Eric, we lost a whole city. I will try to find out where to get his books and when I do so, I'll post the link here.