Jonas Mekas and the Battle for Film Art
By the time he’d made this incendiary statement, Jonas Mekas was a well-known poet, an established New York filmmaker, curator and creator of an American film culture of the avant-garde. He was an archivist, critic, programmer, distributor and general champion of film as art. His many accomplishments included the founding of Film Culture Magazine, the New York Film-Makers Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives. He coined the term “New American Cinema” to describe the American avant-garde of the 1950s and ’60s, and each appearance of his “Movie Journal” column in the Village Voice was eagerly anticipated by filmmakers, artists, critics and general readers alike. Keep Reading
Annette Messager and Alberto Giacometti
This past winter Annette Messager was a guest artist at the newly opened Institute Giacometti in Paris. This was the first exhibition in the reconstructed building, and I was surprised by the elegance and intimacy of its interior, which was composed of interlocking rooms. The title of the exhibition, “Nos Chambres” (our bedrooms), and the hint of an erotic slant would be in keeping with the surrealism of the site. Keep Reading
Vanessa Brown’s Unlikely Combinations
The Vancouver-based artist Vanessa Brown works in the wonderful world of contradictions and illusions. Like a poet, a jeweller, a stage designer, a couturier, her art centres on the accessories; present in it is a spiritual, feminist tribute to accessories. Her art is there, and not there. Keep Reading
Recent Paintings of Andy Patton
In the last decade senior Toronto artist Andy Patton has turned to China’s 8th-century T’ang poets such as Wang Wei and Su Shi for guidance in a project that focuses on becoming more human. Patton was initially motivated to do this following a collaborative writing project started in 1990 with Canadian poets Roo Borson and Kim Maltman. They called it Pain Not Bread, and they “took apart critical introductions and translators’ forewards to the poems of Wang Wei, reworking them, stitching scraps together, writing new passages or making whole poems sparked off by the scraps we had found … looking for a way of writing that felt always secondary, like standing in a hallway full of echoes.” Through this collaborative process a handful of poems was produced, and then a book titled Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei (2000). Keep Reading
Creating A Scene: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association
By the early ’80s the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London had become a rich incubator of architectural speculation and the gathering place for the liveliest architectural discussions from around the world. The ringmaster of this potent construction was Alvin Boyarsky (1928–90), a Canadian who had studied architecture at McGill University (1946–51) and undertaken graduate studies in urban planning at Cornell University (1957–59). His meticulous and inventive curation of the AA stemmed partly from his critique of architectural education at the time and also from a fascination with how architecture might evolve during a period in which Modernism appeared to have run its course. Keep Reading
Being Architecture: The Passion of Phyllis Lambert
As a student at Vassar College, Phyllis Lambert found the question of influence—as it was then taught—to be superficial. “I disliked that enormously, it was like saying that the wind blows this way so the artist or philosopher did that.” Provoked by simplistic narratives of causality and easy connections that amount to little more than trivia, Lambert readily speaks of the precedents, traditions and especially of the wide range of factors that combine to shape architecture. Keep Reading
“Touch is the taboo of Western-style museums. They are sites of discipline. They demand that individuals control themselves, particularly that we repress touch, taste and smell in order to sharpen vision and imagination […]” David Garneau discusses institutional marginalization. Keep Reading
Tammi Campbell is known for works that look like Modernist hard-edge paintings in progress, with particular focus on the Modernists’ use of tape. Included in this series are meticulous, halffinished greyscales where masked sections are readied for a new application of paint. Other pieces are explicitly based on Frank Stella’s signature stripe paintings but made with what appears to be masking tape alone. The works exist in a state of anticipation, awaiting the application of pigment and the eventual peeling off of all the tape. Keep Reading
On Not Walking With Our Sisters
Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore and Cree curator and critical writer Richard W Hill’s criticisms of “Walking With Our Sisters” reveal perplexing issues in Indigenous cultural politics that are barely discussed in public—the challenge of the secular Native, and Indigenous criticism of Indigenous culture. Keep Reading
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