Articles

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; in Fuses their lovemaking formed the core of a film that remains an enduring expression of both art and love; Tenney created the sound collages for Viet Flakes, 1965, and Snows, 1970, and performed in the New York production of Meat Joy, 1964, Schneemann’s orgiastic celebration of the expressive body.
Dangerous Persuasions

I’ve just finished reading Correspondence Course, An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, edited by the noted art historian Kristine Stiles (Duke University Press, 2010)—a powerful bound sheaf of paper—more than 500 pages filled with letters, mostly written by Carolee Schneemann, with a number written to her. They date from 1956 to 1999 and there are more not included in this volume.
Carolee Schneemann

This an exhibition with an agenda. Carolee Schneemann (born 1939) is famous for her performances and their filmic and photographic records in the period bracketed by Meat Joy, 1964, and Interior Scroll, 1975. The exhibition “Kinetic painting” at Museum Für Moderne Kunst proposes, first, that her work should be seen as expanded painting, thereby challenging the received primacy of medium, and, second, that her whole oeuvre— more than 300 works— should be attended to seriously, from the 1950s through to her current production.
Border Crossings’ Carolee Schneemann Archive

“Since 1986 Border Crossings has been responding to and corresponding with the essential and wondrous feminist artist— dazzling artist — Carolee Schneemann. She was such a significant figure of conscience, courage and invention that we thought her passion was sufficient to sustain her for all eternity. And it was. No one will forget her and no one can vanquish the ground-breaking work she did. What follows is a small archive of the material on and conversations with Carolee Schneemann published in Border Crossings over the years.”
The Bochnerian Not

I can’t begin this introduction to our interview with Mel Bochner by saying, “What interests me about his work is …” because everything about his work interests me. What I’ll address in particular, however, is, for me, the Gordian knot, the conundrum of his repeated assertion that “Language is not transparent.” The statement appeared first as a four-part work in 1969, bearing that phrase as its title.
The Heart of Absence: Patrick Modiano

Fleur Jaeggy is the most accomplished scribe of detachment. In her collections of short stories, I Am the Brother of XX and Last Vanities, and in the novels, SS Proleterka and Sweet Days of Discipline, there is a prevailing sense of isolation—readily recognizable as the epidemic condition of our time—an almost truculent inability to connect, and desperation without surfeit. And here is Patrick Modiano as heartbreakingly accomplished in these unfortunate states as she is, describing the daily coming into being of the abandoned child who builds a person from the sad materials of neglect, lack of regard, of never having been held, or insufficiently—and then overlooked and left behind.
Tracing meaning from Scratch

Rosa Barba doesn’t settle. The Italian-born, Berlin-based artist is constantly shifting her way of thinking about the art she is making. She is primarily a filmmaker and sculptor, and her inclination is to see how much expansive pressure she can put on the formal confinements of the two disciplines.
Angelic Order

Memory’s dark twin is forgetfulness. Because of its presence, history is often obliged to curl back on itself so that it can set in motion a different story. Chuck Smith’s 78-minute-long documentary on the place of Barbara Rubin in New York’s film and music underground in the 1960s is a film that puts memory so unequivocally back into the historical narrative, it is impossible to view the years from 1963 to 1968 in the way they had previously been presented.
Writing the Song of Myself

In the beginning was the word and the word got fleshed out. That would be the opening line in Sean Landers’s version of his Bible, were he to write one. It would be a kind of secular new testimony because, for him, language is the medium and the message. When I say, the word gets “fleshed out,” I mean it literally.
Etching the Language of History

“Memory is the crux of my practice,” says Toronto-based printmaker, sculptor and installation artist Emma Nishimura. When she interrogates how memory functions in her work, a series of questions emerge: “How do we share it, how does it weigh on us, how do we pass it on?” Nishimura, who won the prestigious Queen Sonja Print Award in 2018 from a list of 42 nominated printmakers around the world, is currently one of eight artists included in a compelling exhibition at the ROM called “Being Japanese Canadian: Reflections on a Broken World.”
Cycling the Life of Language

Lois Andison has a particular interest in concrete poetry because it is both visual and textual. Her tree of life is the 11th installation in the smallest and highest art gallery in Canada, the BMO Project Room. Situated on the 68th floor of the Bank of Montreal tower in downtown Toronto, the 8.11 x 17 x 9-foot space was conceived by Dawn Cain, the curator of the bank’s Corporate Art Collection. She also selects each project.
The Unblinkered Vision

In 1952 Akbar Padamsee, a 24-year-old painter from Bombay, was awarded an art prize by André Breton in Paris for his painting Woman with Bird. It was a signal event in a life that took him back to India, where he set about to create a dialogue between artists in his country and the international avant-garde. From 1969 to 1972 in Delhi and Bombay, he established the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) to further that interdisciplinary conversation. It met with mixed results in India, but his naming and vision have been picked up in Canada by curators Catherine Crowston from the Art Gallery of Alberta and Jonathan Shaughnessy from the National Gallery of Canada for “Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada,” an exhibition that opened last September at the AGA and that is currently on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, where it will remain through March 23 of this year. (It will then tour to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and the National Gallery in Ottawa until 2020.)

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