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“Global Warning” 2009 Installation view Courtesy of Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal / photo Christine Guest |
Art’s alertness to a growing gap between natural behaviour and reality is the broad story of Aquin’s show. He presents a collection of artworks that upend expectations into a new, unresolved complexity. Leon Golub’s American brutes in Mercenaries II are on one level a picture of bonhomie and camaraderie, and it’s this level of their unthinking, indulged self-comfort that seems the scariest aspect of the painting—it reaches over and above the Central American political scenario that travels from newspaper headlines of the 1980s. Golub’s art, like his partner Nancy Spero’s (she is represented by a powerful anti-war drawing couched in terms of gender), takes sour, exploitive politics and puts it under our skin for our own ethical ownership. In another inversion, Quebec’s BGL hangs a sugar-coated skidoo from the ceiling that seems more a carcass of technology than a joy machine.
Perhaps the most compelling work in the show is Roy Arden’s Supernatural of 2005, gifted by the artist to the gallery. It is a video recap of the Vancouver hockey riot of June 14, 1994, when 50,000 hockey fans vandalized the downtown core after a seventh-game loss in the Stanley Cup finals. Working with media footage of the night, Arden isolates a series of moments between cops and rioters that build into a grand, conflicted statement. Stupidity blends with heroism into an image of civil unrest that’s based on no redeeming social subtext—the inverse of ’60s idealism. By drawing attention to an event that’s now 15 years past, Arden sets a wider time frame for the distemper of our times and isolates a self-destructive cultural impulse that is now mirrored by an awareness of widespread environmental damage. We not only make the world we live in; we are the world we live in, embodiers of its faults and its conflicts. This point is underscored by Aquin’s inclusion of Herri met de Bles’ small 16th-century landscape The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is an Old Testament story comfortably and thematically at home with the increasingly Old Testament tenor of the 21st century. All contemporary museum collections should be so thoughtfully staged. (1380 rue Sherbrooke O, Montreal QC)
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