what is going on
Adam Waldron-Blain is a famous artist in Edmonton. More »
what is going on
I attended Marilyn Arsem’s performance at Latitude 53 last Sunday. It was, as Todd mentioned in my ear, a sort of christening of the new space. That...
Unexpected karaoke tonight. I was asked to sing the one song that Nog wants to listen to all the time when he loses his leg and only wants to hear sad songs. It’s “I’ll be seeing you”.
This is a great exploration of what makes music “work” for listeners - melody, “narrative,” familiarity with the kind of music you’re listening to - in the context of contemporary classical, which makes it applicable to “difficult” forms of music in general. (It’s also a Socratic dialogue, which is fun.)
I find this interesting, and:
Jaime: Okay when I said Stravinsky I basically meant the music to the one ballet we saw like five years ago. But this need to posture and pretend to “get” stuff is another thing going on here. I wanted to get Gabriel’s stuff.
AUFWKCCM: Let’s leave the “getting it” for a second, because I think that’s a huge issue that plays out differently for listeners depending on where exactly they’re coming from.
This is something that I sometimes try to make art about.
I’ve been uncertain a lot about whether I like Chris Hadfield’s act—the classic “I’m explaining science” look combined with his specific performance personality/look/sound. He sort of seems like he’s up for anything fun but of course it has this weird not-quite-patronizing thing where he calls things experiments even though he knows exactly what will happen because yeah. Plus of course he is wearing a uniform and space programs have all of this weird nationalistic military baggage.
Anyway I thought I was on to something underneath the last time I reblogged one of his bits but obvs this one is the end of it. He changes the words to make them less sad/more “child friendly” or something/more applicable since he’s not taking drugs to numb the sensations of a disaster but is just coming back to the planet in a civilized way. That might be sadder though.
But yeah it’s pretty great anyway. Honestly just the fact that. It is real.
A very rough calculation (50,000 university students in Alberta paying $10,000 p.a. in tuition) suggests that about half this [provincial funding for research commercialization, etc.] could provide free university education in Alberta ($125 per capita)
Whither the U of A?: The mythical magical Midas Research Institute
“In future, royalties streams could also help fund the budgets of post-secondary institutions”. Thanks Lukaszuk.
The statement I provided for my work at Harcourt House. Yeah it’s weird because the art is 50% text anyway but people galleries expect these things. I just sent another one off to another gallery for a show that is also largely text-based—this time the statement will be on a take-away card, instead of the art.
In 2010 when I moved to Scotland, I felt like I needed a fresh start. Maybe more than ever before, I wanted to be an artist, but my existing work was so Edmonton and worse, was going nowhere. I started to play music, planning durational performances like the one I made here last year at Dirt City:Dream City, only initially inside the gallery. Despite Glasgow’s idealistic spirit and landscape full of young artists and MFA students, I was uncertain—my work was always incomplete, no matter how much of it you saw, and I wanted to refuse the lie of documentation. But to be an artist I needed to show something. These videos, Fantasies, were at first an escape from that trap—bad documentation reinvented as an art object. The incomplete performance is marked by distance.
I also left behind writing in Edmonton. My last sentence, “I’ll miss you, Alberta”, was cut from the harsh-seeming final paragraph it was meant to temper. In hindsight it seems appropriate, those words a sign that my critic’s mask was slipping.
My early reviews were met by an angry response accusing me of being too close to those I wrote about. I was close. But distance is the lie of art criticism. Canada’s artist-run network was founded, according to AA Bronson, because we didn’t have our own magazines—our unusually tight community contains this incompleteness at its core, alongside statements about or against northern isolation and great distances. To be artists we need to show something.
Most of the work I’ve made recently is about suddenly being much further away from an artist whose work I liked a lot. This performance is very different from the critic of 2010.
May 7–June 18 at the Xpace External Space (OCAD Campus, Toronto), and online.
A picturesque park in North Vancouver, in the spring—here you can see a distant footbridge crossing Lynn Creek. Nearby, visitors have built a cairn of stones in memory of beloved dogs who have passed away. The artist celebrates this site in music, over the sound of the rushing stream, even as the rustic local folk enjoy their pastoral lifestyle.
June 29–August 18, 2013
RBC New Works Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta
Adam Waldron-Blain’s practice exists in a space between overwhelming sentimentality and the clinical dissection of the role of the contemporary artist, the art object and—ultimately—heartbreak. Using durational performances, video and text, Waldron-Blain takes his broken heart and sends it up as the object of his art practice. While some may sing a sad song à la Adele, Waldron-Blain stretches it to an absurd end; his is an exhaustingly long operation that points to the packaging of feelings and the hyperbolic emptiness and simultaneous sincerity of sad pop songs. As he places the personal into the public realm, Waldron-Blain draws our attention to the inadequacy of the language of love.
Two-part invention at Harcourt House, until May 24.
UAlberta dean of arts Lesley Cormack came to the BFA show opening last night to do some politics.
I want to pledge to you that this is important work, and it is important to me, and I will defend it.
That was nice. She doesn’t want to get cut.
