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Last year, a trio of Ontario galleries teamed up to mount “do you know what,” a three-venue show that added up to a full-scale survey of the work of the Toronto artist James Carl. From marble “monuments” to obsolete and disposable items to household appliances rendered in packaging materials, Carl’s deceptively simple works trouble the relationships among form, function, use-value and worth in delightfully savvy and perplexing ways. This catalogue features excellent photos of Carl’s work over 20 years; the project as a whole is a model for collaborative exhibition-making.
Despite its iconic status in the history of Canadian art, Michael Snow’s 1966 film Wavelength, the latest work to get the star treatment in Afterall’s “One Work” book series, is notoriously difficult to summarize: it operates between abstraction and representation, between aural and visual. Legge, one of Canada’s foremost Snow scholars, manages to situate the fiercely experimental piece within broader arguments about the status of film work in the art world of the 1960s and 1970s, drawing on the artist’s own writings to attest to Wavelength’s standing as a “touchstone for contemporary art and film studies.”
Van Gogh’s letters show him to be one of the most astute colourists ever to put pen to paper. While his sensitivity to colour was long-running, its expression in the bright, intense paintings we associate with his name came only in the last two years of his life. This book throws those famous sunflowers and high noons into relief by celebrating the nocturnes and twilight scenes that he developed simultaneously, bringing van Gogh’s treatment of colour full circle and onto a 24-hour clock.
This ambitious monograph on the renowned Canadian photographer who has been mythologized as a “painter of modern life” for our times offers an anthology of some of the most fruitful interpretations of Wall—it includes writings by de Duve, Jean-François Chevrier and Boris Groys, among others—alongside interviews with the artist and Wall’s own theoretical writings. The highlight of the compilation, which is generously illustrated with 185 thematically organized photographs, is an insightful new essay by Mark Lewis in which the contemporary filmmaker relates his first encounter with Wall’s work.
This is what I felt when I initially saw...[Jeff Wall’s work]: that I’d never seen anything quite like it before, even though I thought I recognized everything.
— Mark Lewis in Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition
Madoff, who is Senior Critic at Yale University’s School of Art, has pulled together writings by leading artists, curators and theorists for this state-of-the-art overview of art schools and their future. Beginning with the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Bauhaus, he also details notable experiments in art education. Acknowledging the post-Duchampian hybridity of contemporary art, however, he predicts no new radical educational models on the horizon but surveys today’s most influential schools, including Bard College, the Zollverein School of Management and Design and Le Fresnoy. Boris Groys and Ken Lum add playful speculation and frontline reporting, and a conversation between the artists Tania Bruguera and Marina Abramovic is worth a term’s tuition on its own.
In 1969, the American artist Sol LeWitt wrote: “If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.” LeWitt’s now-iconic conceptualist maxim signalled a fundamental shift in 20th-century visual thinking. No longer bound to the ephemeral mystique of object-based modernism, artists increasingly took their cues from the structures and systems of the real world, language and text included. For these artists, a work of art was no longer something to be looked at in awe; rather, it was meant to be thought about, to be engaged with and to be “legible.” That’s a key notion to keep in mind when working through this sturdy volume of text-based art, ranging from the subversive poetics of Dada and Futurism to the conceptual deconstructions of LeWitt and company to present-day concerns with the politics of public and personal space. With richly illustrated chapters on “Text,” “Context,” “Semiotext” and “Textuality” informed by a set of critical essays by Will Hill, Charles Harrison and Dave Beech, the book reaffirms the power of art as text and of language as art.
Wittgenstein stated that to understand a language is to understand a way of life, and it therefore follows that to interrogate language is to interrogate the social and cultural landscape itself. In a word, language is political...an art made of language...draws us into questions about how we think, how we live, how we judge, how we feel...
— Dave Beech in Art and Text
The stellar rise and tragic fall of Alan Jarvis holds a mythical yet often misunderstood place in Canadian art history. This detailed study irons out the facts: Jarvis’s humble Toronto beginnings, his time in England as a Rhodes Scholar and member of the wartime British elite and his directorship of the National Gallery of Canada in 1955 at age 39. But Jarvis’s life was fraught with a self-destructive inner turmoil that ultimately killed him. As one friend put it, he was “the most intelligent, the most charming, the most beautiful, the most talented, the most phoney person I’ve ever met.”
Magenta’s annual digest of new photography, Flash Forward, has become a vibrant venue for the recognition and promotion of emerging photographers from Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. This year’s fifth-anniversary volume comes sleekly leatherbound and, besides showcasing new talent, revisits selected artists featured in past editions. The 300-plus images vary widely but, as Bainbridge observes, share a “search for meaning through authenticity, be it an affirmation or a questioning of the truth.”
A series of fictional psychological case studies of patients suffering from pseudologia fantastica, or pathological lying, creatively reinterprets the video works of the Netherlands-born, London-based artist Saskia Olde Wolbers in this pocket-sized exhibition catalogue. Richly detailed and heavily influenced by film noir, the stories sit well alongside Wolbers’s fantastical scenarios, which are filmed in eerie underwater sets. As Monk puts it in a “postscript” essay, her work “is not only fictional but is about the making of fictions.”
The self-deprecating humour of the title continues inside this charming book by Britain’s best-known contemporary collector. Famously unwilling to be interviewed, Saatchi has structured the book as an interview with an anonymous interlocutor. He seems taken with the format—small type on the last page, included perhaps with an eye to future editions, reads: “If you have questions on any subject you would like Charles Saatchi to answer, send them to pkapublishing@googlemail.com.” So, whether it is his plans for the new Saatchi Gallery in London or his thoughts on Obama’s Nobel Prize, the field is wide open.
Talk to take place January 26 at the Art Gallery of Ontario
Canadian premiere of new Marina Abramović documentary to be fêted February 22 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox
All our best wishes for the new year to come
Talks by Dan Cameron and Annie Cohen-Solal, free gallery programs among highlights of 2011
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Free exhibition at the Power Plant highlights our nation’s emerging painting stars
Award in Portrait Photography category recognizes Donald Weber's artist project in the Fall 2010 issue
More than 300 GTA teens enjoy free downtown-Toronto gallery talks during this fall’s School Hop
In 2010, at the age of 35, Toronto artist/DJ/promoter/activist Will Munro succumbed to brain cancer. Here, David Balzer reviews the first big survey of Munro’s work, which makes apparent how talented, prolific and perceptive this creator was.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery’s recent Group of Seven show was one of the UK museum’s biggest hits ever, drawing 41,000 visitors. The attention was deserved, writes Sarah Milroy, as the exhibition offered new insights even to seasoned Canadian-art observers.
The Occupy movement has galvanized the way we think about haves and have-nots. But where do artists fit in? As Joseph R. Wolin observes in this review of David Altmejd’s show at the Brant Foundation, context can be as powerful as content in determining the split.
What happens to identity when our relationship to land and language is disrupted? This is a key question raised in “A Stake in the Ground,” an exhibition of works by 25 First Nations artists, curated by Nadia Myre, that’s currently at Montreal gallery Art Mûr.
Our education and careers site has just posted more stories and tips to help students achieve a great winter term. Highlights include a profile of internationally renowned fashion designer Jeremy Laing, a Q&A on grad schools and more.
