Letter from Toronto
"Letter from Toronto" by John Bentley Mays, Winter 2007, pp. 74-79
Toronto—the city, I mean, but also its art world— suffers from a cultural malady that infects everything we do. Its most obvious symptom is self-pity. But, as everyone knows, self-pity is really nothing other than frustrated self-importance—and Toronto’s greedy presumptions to an important place in the globalizing world are real and pernicious. These ambitions make us envious of culture elsewhere—jealous of the architecture, art, shopping, street life, discourse and all the other good things that many other cities appear to enjoy in such abundance. And they balefully incline us to embrace any project—from Nuit Blanche–like extravaganzas to buildings by glamorous star architects such as Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind—that promises to lift us from our presumably pitiable state into the status of a world-class metropolis. By keeping our minds focused on everywhere else, and everything we are not, this ineffectual lust for status blinds us to the peculiarities and the unique contours of Toronto’s cultural history, the shape of our mental geography.
Excavating that history, we discover, for example, that the most remarkable creators who have lived and worked in Toronto during the post-war era have been not originators of novel forms and formats in sculpture or painting—the stars of our local art world—but urgent and strikingly original interpreters of information made elsewhere. Interpreters are, of course, thick on the ground in any city that, like Toronto, is full of schools, institutes and universities. It’s common for some of these people to become well known, at least in professional circles. But for whatever reason—I am inclined to invoke here the old notion of genius loci—Toronto was blessed with a few geniuses of interpretation whose minds ignited here, casting astonishing light that captivated the interest of the creating world.
I am thinking of the critic Northrop Frye, who found William Blake a little-understood, obscure English poet and left him an apocalyptic and radical artist, writer and thinker with messages for our age. (Frye’s new, revolutionary Blake stood with Walt Whitman at the cradle of Allen Ginsberg, and of other American writers who emerged in the 1950s.) A little later, Marshall McLuhan opened a stunning and boundlessly controversial new international discourse on the meaning of technology and telecommunications in the contemporary world. And in the 1960s, the pianist Glenn Gould, working with musical texts everyone thought they knew, famously recreated Bach for a new generation in recordings that have lost none of their original freshness or penetrating intelligence.
Nor was this exegetical impulse limited to Toronto’s professors and musicians. By the early 1970s, in the long shadow of McLuhan’s critique of communications technology, the artist group General Idea was generating installations, publications and more conventional artworks that acutely probed and reinterpreted the social imaginary of modernism, exposing perverse forces at work below the optimistic surfaces of capitalist architectural and artistic culture.
Whatever their means of expression, whatever their topic—and though separated from one another by more than distance—these and other interpreters share a common practice, wonderfully executed (which is the point: anyone can parse a poem). It involves taking texts long thought to be thoroughly understood—the epic poems of Blake, the armature of communications gadgetry, the keyboard works of Bach, the familiar scenography of modernist architecture and urban design—then reframing them in critical and revelatory ways that radically expand their meanings. This, not painting or sculpture, is Toronto’s most suggestive creative tradition of the post-war era. It is about universal facts and themes of culture—not the local, as valuable as preoccupation with the local might be in another city, another context. This tradition is the fertile and celebratory mirror-image of Toronto’s joyless gazing elsewhere—a matter of immensely useful encounters with artifacts of other times and places, an eager embrace of a cultural landscape as wide as Western civilization.
There are surely approaches other than the reinterpretation of elsewhere to doing creative work, to making art that matters deeply. But this way—one that has flourished in Toronto with unusual brilliance, and to world acclaim— deserves greater attention from artists, and the rest of us, than it has received up to now. Such regard might encourage the making of new interpretative art that is strongly engaged with history and free of the easy irony and outraged narcissism that characterizes too much Toronto art at the present moment. Just as important, it might lead to a new understanding of the efforts of contemporary Torontonians who are absorbed in this exegetical practice that stretches back to Frye and McLuhan.
Toronto’s most conspicuous creative personality now working in this manner is Ydessa Hendeles. In the city’s imagination, Hendeles has long been known as a collector of important contemporary art and curator of the work she collects; and, indeed, she has played both roles to applauding audiences in Toronto and abroad. Hendeles’s curatorial projects, shown at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation and, in 2003, at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, have sought to do what all curating does—place works of art together to create cultural meanings larger than any one artwork can communicate. It is not necessary, given Hendeles’s widespread reputation, for me to rehearse these projects in detail: as everyone knows who has seen them, these shows have been demonstrations of acute imagination, and interrogations of contemporary culture undertaken with high levels of passion.
But looking back over these installations—I am thinking particularly of the ones Hendeles mounted between 1988, the year she established the foundation, and the 2003 presentation in Munich—something about them seems clearer now to me than it did at the time. It’s the way in which these exhibitions tend to let the viewer off the conceptual hook. Because of the strong intrinsic merit of each work Hendeles marshalled for her shows—a photograph by Walker Evans here, a sculpture by Giulio Paolini there, a Bruce Nauman videotape—it was always possible for the gallerygoer to approach each piece in the spirit of a connoisseur, simply enjoying each discrete thing in and of itself, and ignoring the cultural message Hendeles was seeking to drive home in the total ensemble.
But with “The Teddy Bear Project,” which preceded the Munich show and was included in it, Hendeles began to present visual information that frustrated the connoisseur yen. This archival work of imagination and obsession was a presentation of thousands of vernacular photographs of people and their teddies from the last century. Considered individually, a given picture held limited sentimental interest. But that very slightness, and the decentred field generated by arraying so many photographs in a small space, deflected attention immediately away from the individual image, and outward to the important cultural facts the show was ultimately about. In the case of “The Teddy Bear Project,” these facts included the yearning of millions in the chaotic 20th century for security, comfort and familiarity, and the doom that befell them when one or another of the competing totalitarianisms of the epoch obliged their desire. (Hendeles has never been one for lighthearted topics.)
In the current shows at the foundation—“Predators & Prey” and “Dead! Dead! Dead!”—Hendeles has largely (though not completely) abandoned exhibiting deluxe artworks of museum quality, and elaborated the strategy that first became visible in “The Teddy Bear Project.” A pair of gleaming, sexy, gold high-heeled shoes, a faintly sinister vampire-killing kit (complete with a pistol and silver bullets), a set of porcelain dishes from the ill-fated Nazi airship Hindenburg— such items in “Predators & Prey” are in themselves souvenirs and curiosities with limited intrinsic interest. In the context provided by the exhibition’s title, however, they become elements in a complex iconography operating on many levels. “Predators & Prey” is the chase of psychoanalysis after elusive neuroses, the battle of the sexes, the hunt for whatever vampires haunt the modern imagination (stereotypes of Jews, capitalists, communists, now terrorists), the pursuit of collectors by dealers, even (in the Hindenburg material) the predatory advances of Nazi Germany and its prey, the nations over which the airship hovers. Hendeles’s gathering of cigarette-pack souvenir landscape photographs snapped aboard the airship—a work of assembly along the lines of “The Teddy Bear Project”—further underscores the political character of “Predators & Prey.”
In “Dead! Dead! Dead!,” similarly, the stuff of popular culture—Punch and Judy puppets recovered from that strange, violent theatrical piece, two charm bracelets that once belonged to Joan Crawford, Victorian-era billy clubs and so on—comes together in a complicated frieze of images about power. The billy clubs recall the new police powers called into existence by the emergence of the unruly urban proletariat in 19th-century Britain. The charm bracelets are a recollection of the sexual power of one of Hollywood’s great femmes fatales. Punch and Judy figure in a drama that illustrates the conflict, frustration and ambiguity stubbornly present in all communications, the seething discontent at the heart of class society.
Like McLuhan’s novel examinations of the telephone and television, Frye’s re-reading of Blake and General Idea’s suggestive reframing of mass-mediated imagery and formats, Hendeles’s recent projects begin with things that, on the surface, seem unpromising as occasions for serious thought, and transform them into luminous icons of modern culture’s pathologies and contradictions. There is a powerfully suggestive Toronto tradition of this kind of work, and Ydessa Hendeles is the latest of its exemplars. Gazing into this recent history, we find a message to Toronto’s artists, critics, writers, curators: go and do likewise.
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