Art + Religion Conference April 15-17th

This is looking like it’s going to be really, really interesting….

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Space to be critical

So I’ve been having this long and laborious discussion inside my head and with a small group of people outside it around ideas of what this blog should be in terms of format, content and feel.

On the one hand, I want to promote and encourage art in the city that I am curious about on numerous levels. I feel like the current climate of conservatism felt in the rooms of many organizations and centres (and bedrooms - oh my!!) means that there’s even less space for the promotion and diffusion of visual art.

That in mind, it seems important to use this blog as a vehicle for the positive dissemination of basic information to the general population around art creation. Woah. I am officially turning into Muffy from Today’s Special.

At the same time, film school (animation, specifically) has left deep and lasting pangs of disappointment over the lack of critique I was asked to engage with. In my final thesis class, I sensed that my critical comments were ridiculed and feared, alternatively, by almost everyone around me. This conjures up memories of people muttering “can’t wait until I see YOUR film” under their breaths as I asked them why a pig as a central character instead of a goat? Why watercolour on glass instead of just good old stop motion using your hands?

I don’t think I was ever taught how to be critical, so not only is it hard for me to justify it when I am/want to be, I also don’t think I have it down to a graceful science. Instead of dancing slowly around the room until I have mesmerized myself and everyone else in it, my critical output is metaphorically more akin to a monkey who’s been given high heel tap shoes and then asked to shake it to “the Blue Danube” or something similar. Not a pretty sight.

Another major factor involved is the fact that as the artistic community in Montreal is so small, there are few arenas and places in which to be critical without feeling like perhaps you’re also putting a giant “kick me, I’m an asshole” sign on your back. Which, to be fair,  I’ve done so many times in my life, but still…..

So these three elements then - a) the fact that we aren’t really trained to be positively critical of each other b) the fact that therefore I am very clumsy about it and c) the micro-ness of the art community all contribute to Malo-not-wanting-to-go-there for the most part.

Yet I ache to do so. I am someone very, very, very dedicated to process. That’s the part of visual art I find so fascinating. Not only visual art and the artists that make it, but also for the role of curator, administrator, organization, public. What is the process that is infusing the work like?

As someone so process oriented, it only seems natural that critiquing or exploring that process would be a big part of my interest vis-a-vis writing on art. Yet I feel like I am completely shy around that component of myself. It’s as if the critical side of myself was some hot person at a party leaving me tongue-tied and bashful. It happens to the most verbal of us, trust me.

So here’s a question for folks who’ve read to this point - what’s your perspective on this topic? I think being critical is actually crucial, but how to do it in ways that are invigorating to the subject at hand and that further the discussion or start out a healthy dialogue?

I’d love to get some ideas generating on this one. And if not, well then, I am just going to go ahead and rip into all the work that everyones’ done up until now. All of it. Each and every piece. You know, I’ve got a pretty flexible week this week and vacation time saved up. Shouldn’t take too long.

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It’s not even Thursday…

But here, despite all odds, are two art openings happening back-to-back tonight that you should go to. The first, a group show at the Maison de la Culture Plateau-Mont Royal. It’s called The Tarot of Montreal, and features 22-ish works on paper dedicated to that special pack of cards with the same name.

Or are they really a pack? Are they a fledgling? Or a pod? I am not sure if you call Tarot groups something different than other card groups, similar to owls and ferrets…..oh the mystery!

It’s going to be an interesting exhibition. The curator, Marie-Claude Bouthiller, invited 22 local artists to create works specific to one tarot card each. Max Wyse will be presenting his take on Le Diable while Sophie Jodoin worked with Justice. There’s work by Yann Pocreau and Andrea Szilasi and Mathieu Beausejour oh my! I am truly looking forward to seeing what everyone’s created, and what the exhibition as a whole feels like in terms of potential cohesions.

It’s going to be an earlier opening, perhaps, so go to this one first. 5pm starting time, at 465 Mont-Royal east. The show runs until the beginning of May.

Next, head to articule for the opening of You, Me and You, a week-long video installation by Annie Gautier and Milutin Gubash. I have been looking forward to this show for a long, long time. The video is a real-time encounter with the lives of this artist-couple. Taken over the course of roughly 9 days, You, Me and You,  is an intimate portrait of their everyday comings and goings. Some of the stuff that makes up their days will surely be of the sort I cringe engaging with (i.e. having to do the dishes, opening mail, etc). But when set against a backdrop of deeper encounters and exchanges, I think the whole of the piece is going to be achingly sweet and true to the strange arch known as making do and getting by.

What I find most compelling conceptually about the piece is that the video is really and truly in real time. No looping here. Unlike almost all video works seen in galleries, you cannot sit and wait for the events to unfold again if you’ve come in to the show late, or weren’t paying attention. The video will play through the night and into the day, and like our lives, be representative of so much in every moment, and then disappear, leaving the traces of perhaps some type of subconsciously-felt patterns, but no more.

So if you go tonight you can go tomorrow and then the next day and still never really get to see it in its’ entirety. A way of reinforcing its strange accessibility as it echos the lives each of us lead that no one else can see in full and we can surely never re-live.

Unless you have a time machine. And if you do, please, please get in touch.

Filed under art shows, artists, local, vernissage | Tags: Andrea Szilasi, Annie Gautier, articule, Marie-Claude Bouthiller, Mathieu Beausejour, Max Wyse, Milutin Gubash, sophie jodoin, Yann Pocreau | Comment (0)