THE SINISTER URGE

(I would also like to add that I had the pleasure of visiting a park where ten thousand polio victims are buried, and a building where little children were burned alive, and they now haunt said building by putting their tiny little hands against the dirty windows in the basement. Also, I had some terrific Earl Grey tea.)

When I arrived in Kingston to work on Modern Fuel’s 9th annual juried exhibition, I was confronted by a varied group of works by an even more varied group of artists. They were young and old, some established, and others still in art school. It was an expansive spectrum of styles and media, from oil paintings to sculpture and video (a heartbreaking reality was the necessity of an annex exhibition of video art, which we could not include in the main gallery due to lack of space). Some of the works were more “traditional”, while others were experimental in nature, so, I wondered, how could we put a show together that was cohesive and compelling while at the same time honoring the pluralism reflected in the works?

I set out to work out this conundrum in collaboration with Michael Davidge, the director of Modern Fuel, in what turned out to be a combination of aesthetic instinct, an interior designer’s eye, curatorial experience and gut instinct in order to pick works for the exhibition.

If there is a modus operandi or discernible strategy in the way the works were picked, it is this: We decided to abandon the traditional curatorial focus on thematic, media or generational specifity in favor of finding the uncanny relationships between disparately different works of art. Like the backward-talking dwarf in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, It was our objective to put together a show were the strange and the familiar coalesce into a slightly unsettling whole.

Faced with such a great variety of works, we abandoned a cohesive dialectic based on the media or thematic message as described above, and focused instead on creating lateral connections between the pieces in order to take the viewer on an oddball romp through the multi-faceted artistic landscape of the region. The works were arranged so that their relationships create a contrapuntal rhythm that is the central theme of the exhibition. Much like the characters in Twin Peaks (or Barbara Streisand’s nose), many of the works evince an offbeat allure that appeals to my sensibility as a curator. Some of the works are eccentric, others more conventional, but they are always filled with the self-assurance that comes with having nothing to prove, and rebelling in their own abandon. The contrast between the two extremes of the conventional and non-conventional is what ultimately makes the show work for me. Like a corpse buried in the flowerbed, there is a sinister quality to the concoction, and I was very fortunate that Michael and I shared the same sensibility with regards to this approach.

On the subject of creating a cohesiveness based on bold aesthetic relationships regardless of the degree of technical “virtuosity” demonstrated in the individual works, I am reminded of a story told by (I think) Brice Marden, in which a curator friend, while visiting the artist’s studio, was asked to help out in selecting the works for Marden’s new show (it seems the artist was having a considerable degree of difficulty in getting the show to “gel”) so the curator pointed at one of the most accomplished works in the grouping and said, “take out that painting over there”. And then, pointing at one of the rejected paintings leaning against a wall, he said: “put this one where the other one used to be,” and suddenly the whole show came to life.

This is what Michael and I were going after: Not to look for stars, but to find a great ensemble cast. Thus James Greatrex’s grey wooden video platform became one of the central foci of the exhibition; this despite the fact that the artist decided to enter it in the show as a joke. But the hulking grey form, in relation with the other works of art, became the equivalent of the black monolith in 2001:A Space Odyssey. We put the monolith on a plinth that consisted of a platform that was already in the space and matched the grey of the wooden form, lending the object a totemic quality so that Greatrex’s grey monolith, like a priest at the ancient temple of the Cult of Minimalism, activates and presides over the space. Next to the monolith is Michelle Larose’s small, beautifully rendered modernist “vase” painting, and it in turn is placed next to Jeremy Mulder’s expressionistic large canvas, with its violent line and texture and it’s “Sodom and Gomorrah comes to Kingston” motif. And suddenly, an overarching contextual framework begins to emerge, characterized by chaos, working in conjunction (and opposition) with order. If Apollo with his methodical orderliness, and Dionysius with his offhanded messiness, where to duke it out in an Olympian version of Dueling Banjos this is what the result of their battle would look like. Like a visual distillation of Donnie and Marie Osmond’s “I’m little bit country, and I’m a little bit rock and roll”, The collective presence of the works in the exhibition takes on the character of a house of cards. Remove one of the pieces, and the whole thing falls apart.

By way of example, I would like to mention a small sampling of the works in the show:
Lisa Figge’s disturbing “Big Mouth” video is another totemic presence in the gallery space. In the video, the artist’s giant lips, projected on the wall at the entrance of the gallery, spew out accusations in a creepy whisper, floating and disembodied in a bluish pallor. It is a sickly Cerberus guarding the gates of hell. Her sculpture of a decrepit palm tree coming out of a carved granite coconut that is precariously balanced on empty laundry detergent bottles that emanate from a carved stone “island” on a sea of dirty grey carpet strips dominates the center of the gallery space.
Maayke Schurer’s Let’s Play House, a video in the aforementioned video art “salon”, was shot entirely at a landfill site. The protagonists of the video are the discarded dolls and toys and scavenging birds as they sing to the soundtrack of a sappy R n’ B track from a mixed tape that was also found at the landfill.
Elisa Paloschi (a photographer who is known for her gorgeous travel shots) offers a murky, creepy landscape. Reminiscent of a nightmare, the photo, shot in Italy’s beautiful Tuscany region, reminds me of the work of Andres Serrano; particularly his Piss Christ. Evil also lurks behind the surface in Irina Skvortsova’s portrait of two women (one of whom is the artist herself) as they regard each other with bedroom eyes. Although the painting appears unfinished, the figures have been exquisitely rendered, in soft hues and sensuous line. But upon close examination one becomes aware of a series of violent lines in the underpainting that are almost ripping through the figures. This is contrasted by Miriam Netten’s painting of a goat. Painted in a highly keyed color scheme with blues and pinks and glitter glue, the goat is reminiscent of the work of a child. But the painting is deceptively simple. There is an overallness and a compositional sophistication to the work that makes it integral to the balance of the show.

The hanging of the works was designed to create a flow within the exhibition space, while at the same time propelling the overarching thematic concept. But where is this concept? It lies in the interaction between the viewer and the gallery space, as if the show itself were an installation piece designed to engulf the viewer and elicit a response. And if the works could be said to have something in common, it would be that all of them are compelling and cause the viewer to react either with pleasure, curiosity or extreme repulsion. If this occurred at all, then our objective was reached. As William Peter Blatty said in reference to his (and William Friedkin’s) film The Exorcist, “Whether you loved it or hated it, at least you knew that during those two hours you were truly alive.”

Death, Bowling With Pigeons and Exploding Furniture

During the afterparty for the opening of Alucine’s Space Invaders group exhibition at Gallery 1313, Jorge Lozano, the artistic director of Alucine mentioned to me that children had reacted positively to my piece. I found his comment surprising, since the piece consists of an altar to revolution and death via Jackie Chan’s The Protector, surrounded by a bloodbath of gutted teddy bears with their faces removed and substituted by the visages of Mexican cadavers. We chatted about how great the show looks, and the caliber of the works presented, and the fact that the show is comprised of an international selection of artists: Taiwanese, Argentinean, Salvadoran, Canadian, Mexican and Colombian, (not to mention the hundreds of film and video works from artists spanning the globe that were being shown in several locations around the city). Jorge also mentioned a recent headline about the festival that read: “WHERE ARE ALL THE LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS IN THE ALUCINE FESTIVAL?” I found this question to be very compelling. Yes, where were the Latin American artists? And just what is a “Latin American artist” anyway?


I mentioned the headline to Guillermina Buzio, the festival coordinator for Alucine, and she replied that “The question has some sense: What does it mean to be Latin? Latin Americans come from so many countries, with different musical styles, accents, socio-economic classes, cultural backgrounds, skin tones, and customs. For instance, I’m from Argentina, but my ancestors were German and Eastern European Jews, Hugo Ares (the coordinator of installations) on the other hand, is of purely Spanish background. Yet we are both Argentineans. We speak with the same accent, we both identify with the Tango. This is our background.”

Guillermina sees the role of festivals such as Alucine as a means of going beyond the stereotype of the salsa-dancing Latin Lover that is constantly portrayed in the media as the hallmark of Latino-ness. “People are confused about what a Latino is” says Guillermina. “Latinos are not a homogeneous group that can be easily packaged. Most Latin Americans are already several removes from a monolithic cultural identity as it is. As I said before, they have different cultures, mores and identities, and coming to a country like Canada highlights these differences.”

So, what is a “Latino Artist?” In my mind, the epitome of a Latin artist is an individual who, having been born to Latin American (or non-Latin for that matter) parents in any number nations, and possibly being black, white, Asian, Aboriginal, South Asian or any combination of the above, sets out to incorporate elements of their already hybridicized culture with elements of the culture of the country that they happen to inhabit at the moment, within a contemporary art context. In this sense, a Latino artist is no different from any other artist. The tendencies in their mode of creation are the same: They are critical of authority, obsessed with identity, or engaged with formal/art historical concerns. Their works are humorous or poignant, centered around specific geo-political issues, or reveling in their own aesthetic beauty. On the other hand, there is a tendency that can be said to be exclusively Expat Latin: The tendency to pine for the chimera of “The old country” whose harsh, cruel reality never matches the imagined or remembered idyllic landscapes in our mind.

During the late sixties and early seventies, the Tropicalistas (the Brazilian avant-garde movement headed by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes and one of the greatest composers of the Twentieth Century, the iconoclast Tom Ze) put forth their theory of “Cultural Cannibalism”. Having been inundated with North American and European pop culture, the Tropicalistas decided to cannibalize these cultural elements, ingesting them, mixing them with Brazilian pop culture and folklore, and vomiting them back at the world. Although the movement was short lived (it was easily and irrevocably crushed by the political dictatorship at the time) the practice of Cultural Cannibalism went on to become the norm for Latin artists everywhere.

But what does a Taiwanese artist like Tsui Kuang-Yu have to do with Latin American art? The answer is, everything. Tsui’s work consists of a series of video vignettes in which the artist is portrayed in a number of ludicrous activities: Running on floating wooden planks in a flooded hallway, rolling bowling balls to scare pigeons, shooting golf balls at incoming traffic, to name a few. All of the above are performed in a perfectly deadpan way. These absurd acts lampoon the futility of contemporary life while taking a stance against conformity. Tsui’s anti-authoritarian stance is echoed in the work of Brazil’s Tom Ze, whose album Todos Os Olhos features a cover made up of a photograph of an eye-like marble inserted inside the artist’s anus. The album was released in 1973, at the height of the military dictatorship in Brazil, when censors would stop any art that was remotely rebellious and composers like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were being imprisoned and exiled to Great Britain. This period in Brazilian history is reminiscent of the “White Terror” period in Taiwan (from May 19, 1949 to July 15, 1987) in which 140,000 Taiwanese suspected of opposing Chiang Kai-shek’s government were sent to prison or executed. During this time in Taiwan, criticism or discussion of the government and its actions were strictly prohibited under martial law. Ze’s album made it past the Brazilian government censors, as the cover with the anal marble resembled the eye of a lovely exotic bird, and the joke was on them.

When I ask Guillermina whether she prefers alternative spaces to galleries (in the past, Alucine has had art shows at Gallery 1313 and Shift Gallery, as well as in alternative spaces like the Portuguese/Latino bar Cervejaria Downtown) she tells me that both types of spaces are great depending on the nature of the installations. “As long as the pieces fit the space, there is no predilection. If you put something great and aesthetic in a non-gallery space, what matters is how you present the work.”

“The context of the gallery is definitely geared for shows, but it limits the audience. Having an art show at a bar limits the gallery audience, but it lends itself to art that is more about perception and less about the intellectual, and it makes the art more accessible to the general public. Art is an important means of expression and if you segregate it to intellectuals, then other people will be alienated and prevented from seeing it. Art cannot be intellectual. It must be done by perception and impression. It must be universal and community-based like radio and television.”

Guillermina’s populist attitude towards art exhibitions is another common trait among Latin American artists. Even though we come from so many different countries and cultures, we have a need to reach beyond our boundaries. Like a group of differing animals holding for dear life to a log that is floating inexorably towards the rapids, we become unlikely allies.

Audience participation is also the focus of Sofian Audry, Miriam Bessette and Jonathan Villeneuve’s whimsical piece entitled Trace. As I was installing my piece, Villeneuve was busy assembling a complex network of wires, lights, miniature speakers and motion sensors. He spoke in French with his colleagues over Ichat as he worked on his laptop. I asked Villeneuve how his piece was coming along, “it is finished”, he said. It looked like a spider’s web of wires and lights. “An interesting sculpture”, I thought. Then someone walked into the room and the whole thing came to life. The motion sensors activated the lights and speakers, creating an instant visual and aural portrait of myself. Brilliant! Trace was the only other piece besides mine that was object- based in a show consisting almost exclusively of video projections.

As I lit my piece with small intimate lamps so that they cast creepy shadows on the teddy bear corpses, a projection of two men talking filled the opposite wall. It was W. Mark Sutherland and Nobuo Kubota’s Slowpokes, in which the artists are shown in profile mouthing sound poetry to one another in slow motion. Their mouths emit absurd, slurred sounds, as they face off in a sort of Dadaist version of Dueling Banjos. The piece is humorous and raises the issue of the lack of connectedness in our society.

The title Space Invaders is highly charged. A play on the name of the popular seventies game whose object is to defend the earth by destroying the invading aliens by means of laser rays, it also refers to the general attitude in the United States towards Hispanic immigrants (legal or otherwise), and to the taking over of the gallery space by the installation works. Guillermina tells me that “with video installations you have to take over the space whether you are exhibiting in a bar or a gallery” and indeed, most works are about the occupation of space. The works are intimate, heartfelt and lyrical, whether they deal with physical space or emotional space.

Colombian artist Andres Garcia de la Rota is a case in point; his piece Campo Abierto - Campo Cerrado (Open Field – Closed Field) features two LCD video screens framed like paintings. One video shows a field as seen from the window of a poor field laborer’s house. The field is shown in a slow zoom spanning several minutes. The other video is also a zooming shot, but this time the field laborer’s house is the subject. It is seen as a white speck in the distance, and as the zoom progresses the house is magnified until it fills the picture plane. Both videos progress at a snail pace in a contemplative fashion so that we see two points of view unraveling simultaneously: Inside looking out and outside looking in. This piece begs a closer look at the merits of the ironic distance that has become the norm in today’s contemporary art.

An Ambitious Plan by Argentinean artist Eugenia Calvo, on the other hand, deals with the alteration of interiors. The installation consists of several single channel videos on monitors placed in close proximity to one another. Each video shows the artist as she barricades herself with furniture inside a house clearly belonging to a well-to-do family in Buenos Aires. The artist breaks up the space within the house by rearranging its furniture in unlikely ways, and finally by blowing up the furniture with explosives. Thus she deconstructs and violently alters our perception of her space, within the space of the gallery.

The show culminates with a work by Kika Nicolela entitled Face to Face, in which over twenty men and women are asked to respond, in camera, to five questions about love. “At times,” Kika tells me, “The responses are lively, and at times, the subject is silent, overcome by sadness, doubt, and sometimes the responses are cynical”. The sound is not synched to the image, so that the audio becomes contrapuntal to the slow motion footage of the subject’s facial expressions.

I ask Kika whether her piece deals with saudade (an exclusively Brazilian term for an emotional state combining longing, nostalgia, and loss) she replies that to a certain extent it does. She tells me that she made this piece as a response to what she was going through during her first marriage, and that listening to her subjects speak so candidly about their loves, frustrations and losses was therapeutic for her. When I ask her how her marriage turned out, she says that it’s a long, painful story, and that she will tell me all about it later on when we’re both drunk. Considering that we have known each other for a total of five minutes, this thought is comforting to me. Here’s an artist who is not afraid to be heartfelt, and who is not reluctant to lay her soul bare. And perhaps this is a more adequate stereotype of Latino-ness. It is certainly one that I can live with.