Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay often go on away missions together, although the captain isn’t supposed to beam down at all, according to policy—it’s dangerous. But they needed to make sure we knew that she was headstrong and no-nonsense, and of course put her into preventable danger again.
A pretty typical scenario is the time that they retreated into a tunnel to keep warm and alive in a hostile atmosphere and ended up stumbling upon a hatching alien egg which they had to parent. The rocks are made of ugly styrofoam or fibreglass and never look like actual rocks, in drab greenish-grey tones. Before discovering the child, they use their phasers to seal the tunnel entrance in a controlled rockfall—which turns out to be a bad idea. They probably wouldn’t have survived the Northwest Passage.
The New Works gallery also smelled a little like fresh paint, which was a nice touch. Probably won’t last though.
The centrepiece of today’s activities—after introductions, discussion, and a brief chat about publishing led by John Shelling—was an afternoon excursion, in groups, to art galleries and other sites downtown, about which we were to write short review fragments. Here’s one of mine.
Brendan McGillicuddy’s Anthropocene is up at the AGA until July 1.
The episode is actually about Neelix and Tom Paris. I didn’t have wifi in the AGA basement to confirm my vague memories.
It’s a bit of a shadow. I was gesturing with my notebook for some reason at the ARTery on Saturday, at a art-show party (it’s not clear if it was an opening or a one-night show—the Facebook event didn’t say). One of the artists didn’t want me to—I sort of understand; there was some terrible stuff. I might be breaking my word; I don’t remember how I responded. I do remember Kristy saying “do it, do it”.
One of the first things I wrote for Vue Weekly back in 2009 was about a show co-curated by Amelia Aspen, whose drawing is up on the wall this week. I didn’t like it very much and I flatter myself with the idea that there were some ruffled feathers about it. Small circles. Lots of people have asked me if I am writing now though. Or planning on it. I tell them I don’t know—that goes for lots of other questions about the moment too. “We’ll see.” It’s nice when they are enthusiastic.
I thought about it a lot when I first got to Glasgow, assumed that that’s what I would be doing. But it didn’t seem as necessary. I spent lots of time at work complaining about The Skinny, being slightly awkward because of small circles that I hadn’t seen all of. I never met the arts editor/main writer for them (their problems go way deeper though—it would have taken some dramatic format changes to improve), I don’t remember if I slagged his writing in conversation with Jac who writes for them sometimes. But there were lots of writers working in different categories, especially all of the “creative” stuff. I miss it.
I still smile when I think about Edmontonian reactions were to Scott Rogers writing in the Glasgow house style for our show. I never saw the show, it was when I was covering at Latitude 53 “for a couple of weeks” from a distance.
This year was going to be different though, that was the plan: I was sort of comfortable with the place, maybe enough to write too. Before I figured out that I was being an artist I was awkwardly trying to find a justification to write, but I think I just needed some time.
This weekend it sounds like I’m missing a lot of good stuff over there.
Edmonton’s dirty spring is in full swing.
At the ARTery I had another conversation. The space is changing, new owners, who knows what. We talked about how it kind of sucked for visual art anyway, I don’t think it’ll be remembered for that. But I fell into talking about my subject two weeks ago: those complaints of inaccessibility in Vancouver. At least it makes people aim high, I said. Because in poor edmonton they just get Curtis Ross to put up some drawings for some reason. There was something in there about the danger of curating your friends too: “We Are The Golden West” is just some people, you know. I don’t know why you would put up a show if you didn’t want people to talk about it. And if they’re talking, why shouldn’t they write?
That post two weeks ago: someone described it as very Edmonton. I don’t know what to say; I’m aware of something about what I’m performing, partly naïveté. I go back and forth about what it means, though. I miss the feeling of having peers who you can see are working on the same stuff as you but are a little bit ahead (this makes me sound like an asshole).
I just don’t feel very attached here right now. I’m waiting for the summer, I guess—that seems silly though, too. I should make up my mind. I procrastinate about sending applications. But it’s hard to put in the investment to write when I know I’m going to be disappointed, like I have been at almost every show I’ve gone to see here this spring. I actually couldn’t bear to write an article about “We Are The Golden West – New Work Art Exhibition”, or any of the stuff I saw tonight at another artist-run centre. It’d be awful. So everybody sort of wanders about without committing to anything except for complaining about how outrageous it is that the Wildrose party seems to be exactly what we all expected it to be what a surprise. Small circles.
The best bit was the part that felt like a secret.
It seemed like a pretty sad way for the ARTery to go out, anyway.
The obvious one is The Weight of Lives I’m Not Living at Artspeak. There’s a tree from Naufús Ramirez-Figueroa that I don’t know about, but the other two works are dealing with familiar troubles: how to make work about your life, how to make art and be.
But I didn’t entirely love them. Fabiola Carranza is the star, with a tiny jewelry shop selling used engagement rings. Guy Ben-Ner’s video is awkward and full of annoying rhymes, as he shows off the thinness of his own work, making fun of it’s flimsy justification and his own pain and nerdy loneliness. Plus its projector doesn’t have enough lumens to compete with daylight in the storefront gallery.
But the other show…
“Wish you were here”
I keep hearing conversations here about the legacy of the artist-run spaces of the eighties (and before). Places like Artspeak and the Western Front in particular are like huge edifices to my Vancouver peers. Institutions—I missed a lecture about history last week. They feel that they have no spaces of their own. I don’t know for sure what it is like to be here, but although I know that there are specific local concerns, difficulty finding spaces, etc., I still can’t help but feel that it’s partly an illusion. At least, the way I feel now, where I have come from, don’t let me agree with it—despite comments about political realities like access to space and money that I can’t disagree with. Edmonton’s lazy emptiness and Glasgow’s ragged energy made me a believer.
Building space has always been a part of my practice. The other week I gave a presentation about my work and how I found coming out of school to some current students back home, and spent days struggling with Guy Ben-Ner’s question: how should I talk about my personal life. My present is moment the basis of my work now, and it always has been—the way I lost myself in romance last year, overcome with the feeling of being in love. And before that. I wanted to give credit to the ways that I found myself in 2007–2010.
It’s been a question for a while what will become of Institute Parachute. It’s probably not for me to say—but last year I found myself taking up, perhaps against my usual mindset, Instant Coffee’s slogan, “It doesn’t have to be good to be meaningful” when I defended it. When you were wondering if you even wanted to be an artist. It was part of my identity. In hindsight now I can see more clearly what we had started to build, started hosting games and parades and dinner parties just out of school.
Feeling So Much Yet Doing So Little
We were never so aggressive in our lack of content, never advertised it like Instant Coffee does or did. But I remember the cabinet gallery at the start, and my own struggles as I worked on half-finished text-based projects—I didn’t show them in my presentation—which was not so different. I was reassured by Institute Parachute that there was enough there. Not nothing. And it really was something, although I didn’t yet have the confidence to really believe it. The emptiness of forms, the building of air-filled spaces and supports for art.
When Tyler and I were asked if we had advice for about-to-graduate BFAs in Edmonton, he said something improvised about volunteering, finding things out by doing. I said: do better; start your own thing; get people to volunteer for you. It’s easy. Afterwards, the TA asked me if I was the one who made all the steel-sculpture folks angry when I wrote for Vue Weekly.
My games were all empty spaces. To make people uncomfortable in them, provoking a need to fill them up. Telling them that whatever they came up with was probably awesome, so they should just go ahead. For all of my bluster and sometimes acidity in writing I think that I was after the same thing there too: to tell people to try more things, or at least to stop pretending to try the same old things. I keep saying now: Edmonton is changing, but I have less patience than ever for the laziness, for self-hatred and fucked-up illusions of isolation and risk-taking.
I don’t know if Instant Coffee really believes everything they say—specifically, they must know that their things are good, whether or not that helps them to be meaningful. I could never hide that. When they say nothing in bright colours, I remember how for us, too, posters were an angle on our real medium: the feeling of excitement. Their self-deprecation can come off as a defense tactic but it’s better, it’s provocation. And in their statement about “good” there’s just a hint of suggested critique.
The show at Western Front is beautiful, anyway. The empty halo and lit-up blank sign are tucked into the back end, behind the bleachers and the sleep-over-ready front room. The “prospective retrospective” tagline is on target: to me right now, it’s a reminder of all the things we might have done, too.
I ought to have posted this when it was published—the day I left for Glasgow. My last piece for Vue, a review of the Alberta Biennial:
…but by the time you get there you’ve already walked right past Kris Lindskoog’s amazing middle finger to the inattentive, a small circle of painty bottles of water on a low pedestal with a tiny, scratchy background soundtrack which most gallery visitors—especially the frantic masses of new members on opening night—never notice. That’s Alberta art. You’ll find gold in the big works too, among Walter May’s monuments and unfortunate decisions made by Kristin Ivey and Chris Willard. This is Alberta too: Rita McKeough, Paul Bernhardt and Ron Moppett take up the drive for bigness and the province’s strange architectures in crowd-pleasing and funny work.
Back in the first room, despite the press, the real action is in two places: The Cedar Tavern Singers’ sharp but underproduced songs grounded in a bogus conviction that they aren’t actually musicians, and John Will’s huge, ridiculous wall of ugly hyper-masculine paint reaching beyond the province while stuck in its insidery local jokes and paired, self-consciously, with a poster of “NOTHING.”
It originally ended with “I’ll miss you, Alberta” which I think makes me look like less of a jerk. But I will.
One of the two shows I reviewed this week for Vue. I’m writing on the other show at FAB for next week. I like them both, despite some issues in each of them, and it’s a real good thing for the U of A to have brought these people to Edmonton.
The other review I wrote is not so good though.
I was back at Harcourt House this weekend taking another look at the other show there, which I reviewed for this week’s upcoming issue of Vue, and I couldn’t help but overhear the staff complaining about my generally positive article last week in which I described the show as “a long way better than Harcourt House’s inadequate and inaccurate promotional description”.
An awkward moment. But: I went into the show with poorer expectations than I ought to have, mostly based on Harcourt’s little blurb which starts with a statement to the effect that the show is about the role dogs play in everyday life, which is categorically false, and then continues with some irrelevant mumbling about them carrying burdens, which is a terribly reductive, misleading way of describing the sculptures without even hinting at what they actually are.
Anyway, it seems like all I do is complain about galleries these days. Whatever.
An interesting thing on the internet this week is this: “Pop Ate My Heart”: Lady Gaga, Her Videos, and Her Fame Monster, in which Oscar Moralde undertakes a reading of Lady Gaga’s filmmaking techniques.
But the introduction is long, laborious and overworked, because Moralde needs to justify Gaga as an auteur, or so he feels, in order to make his analysis stick. But there is more going on than just that: instead of merely identifying her as a force in the construction of her videos, which actually comes quite easily, Moralde struggles with a rockist construction of authenticity which makes it hard for him to justify Gaga as an individual artist. I think that there’s a thread of underlying misogyny here.
This is a long one →
