This Issue
"This Issue" by Richard Rhodes, Spring 2010, p. 12
The last time Canadian Art connected with the Vancouver artist Althea Thauberger was in a 2007 feature story by Rosemary Heather called “The Witness,” which spoke to the provocative ambivalence of Thauberger’s art. She had just completed a project in Berlin that involved eight young men who had opted out of Germany’s obligatory nine- month military service in favour of a civilian service that allowed them to participate as performers in a Thauberger video production sanctioned by the program. In turning youthful “objectors” into agents for making art, she unmoored their dissent to float in a lighter kind of idealism that nonetheless was heavily weighted with the idea of military service. Deborah Campbell’s current cover story picks up with the flip side. It recounts Thauberger’s recent travels to Kandahar under the auspices of the Canadian Forces Artists Program, where she aimed her camera at some young people who made a choice to opt in to a military life. In her photographs, female soldiers train and pose on location, often smiling at the camera in a way that makes for a destabilizing image that mixes enjoyment and empowerment into a context of lethal force. These aren’t young men in a Berlin theatre but young women in Afghanistan in the midst of a real war. What do the smiles mean? What does the war mean? How do we know what we see? How does it compare with what we do? They are hard questions posed by an artist who is in ever-more-firm control of a realist art that never presses for easy resolution. Something similar might be said about the Paris/London curator Vincent Honoré on the curatorial front. As a visitor to Toronto last year as part of the Canadian Art Foundation’s Anne Lind International Program, Honoré went on a series of studio visits to discover a shared approach in some recent Toronto art that put him in mind of art he was researching in his work at London’s David Roberts Art Foundation. He calls it an art of “withdrawal,” an art of “resistance,” of “retreat, drifting and repetition”; the result is the “written exhibition” included in this issue, which was created with the help of Micah Lexier, who has produced numerous bookwork projects over his career. With other stories on John Will, Ian Wallace and Dan Graham, it is an issue resolutely tied to various types of thoughtful seeing.
Contributors
VINCENT HONORÉ is an independent curator based in Paris and London, where he is Artistic Director and Head of the Collection at the David Roberts Art Foundation. He has been a curator at Palais de Tokyo and at Tate Modern, where he worked with Jeff Wall, Catherine Sullivan, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller and Louise Bourgeois and on the exhibition “Learn to Read.” His recent curatorial projects include “Proposal (Nacht Und Träume) for Stavanger” at Galleri Opdahl in Norway, “Past-Forward,” organized for the Zabludowicz Collection at 176 in London and “From a Distance,” held at Wallspace in New York.
DEBORAH CAMPBELL is the author of This Heated Place: Encounters in the Promised Land, a literary journey inside Israel and the Occupied Territories. A former student of Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, she has written for Harper’s, the Economist, the Walrus, Modern Painters, the Guardian and New Scientist. She teaches narrative non-fiction at the University of British Columbia. Her radio documentaries on international affairs have aired on NPR and CBC Radio.
CHRIS CRAN is a painter and Calgary art-scene leader whose work is in many national and international public, corporate and private collections, including that of the National Gallery of Canada. For many years he has been involved with Calgary’s internationally recognized One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre. He is represented by TrépanierBaer in Calgary and Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto.
JESSICA MORGAN is Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate Modern, where she has organized the exhibitions “Common Wealth,” “Time Zones,” “Martin Kippenberger” and “The World as a Stage” as well as solo retrospectives of John Baldessari and Gabriel Orozco. As Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, she curated exhibitions by Carsten Höller, Olafur Eliasson, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas and others. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, she organized the first U.S. survey of Mona Hatoum. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Parkett, Artforum, ArtReview and the Art Newspaper.
JOSH THORPE is an artist, writer and musician living in Toronto. He has a master’s degree in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In the spring of 2010 he will exhibit his art at the Toronto Sculpture Garden and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. In 2009, Art Metropole published Thorpe’s first book, Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide.
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