Robert Enright

Certain Things in a Certain Way

I can think of few contemporary artists who have been as successful in developing and employing a repertoire of shapes, forms and motifs as the American painter, Jonathan Lasker. Throughout a rigorous and intense practice now in its fourth decade, he has refined a pictorial language and visual syntax that is uniquely his own.
A Man For All Seasons

John Berger is protean, although the seas in which he has been involved are the watchable and readable and not the watery kind. He has been, at various times throughout a richly productive 60-year-long career, a filmmaker, screenwriter, art critic, essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, actor and drawer. The Seasons in Quincy is a 90-minute-long documentary that sets out to reveal the essence of his complicated being through four simple portraits, each one corresponding to a season.
The Continuous Contradiction: Making and Unmaking in the Art of Carlos Bunga

Carlos Bunga is a self-described nomad, peripatetic in every way. In the interview which follows he explains that he doesn’t have a house, travels continually from one place to another, but more importantly he is nomadic in the agility of his mind, his capacity, as he says, to break firmly held impediments to the way he thinks.
Museoddity

Robert Enright reviews Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia: An Elegy for Europe
What’s at Stake? The Canadian Presence at the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition

In his published remarks as the President of the 15th International Venice Architecture Exhibition, Paolo Baratta describes the time in which we live as one “characterized by an increasing disconnection between architecture and civil society.” EXTRACTION, Canada’s entry in the 2016 Exhibition, takes a wide view of the practice of architecture and focuses on the processes and attitudes that have produced some uncivil conditions in Canadian society.
Degrees of Subversion

Nature may play a role in how we look but nurture determines what we become. Fred Wilson grew up in a mixed Caribbean and African American family with a devotion to learning. There are now three generations of educators in his family, so it is not surprising that he would find himself a teacher as well, in public galleries, universities and, most significantly, in his role as one of America’s most persuasive conceptual artists.
Frank as Ever

Don’t Blink, Laura Israel’s feature documentary about photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, makes it easy to forget how unusually close she has taken you to the world’s most influential living photographer, an artist who changed the history of his medium.
Hearing Al Purdy

Al Purdy Was Here…You come away from it with a feeling that you have encountered a writer, a location and a country that are so seamlessly entwined as to be inseparable. In setting his documentary sights on Alfred Wellington Purdy, Johnson has assumed an ambitious task: to tell how a poet who showed remarkably little talent for two decades was able to transform himself into a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry and in finding his own voice, managed to discover a voice for his country as well.
Notes on Fuseology

The painter, performance artist and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann met composer James Tenney in New York in 1955 and they maintained contact with one another until his death in 2006. Their relationship was especially intense in the mid-’60s, during which time they collaborated in a number of ways.
I Like the World and the World Likes Me

Schutz’s paintings are real things, built subjects sometimes surprising her with their own volition and once done—there and actual.
Tal R

That’s when you start to breathe with the painting. You start to let it go into its own pattern, its own repetition, its own kind of music. It’s the most beautiful moment when this happens because that means the painting sails away under its own direction. —Tal R
Pretty Upsetting at the End

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