[The following notes were cooked up rather extemporaneously, by way of text for a catalogue for Marlene Bouchard’s 'Analog' show at the Slide Room Gallery (runs through December 12^th) They represent a game correspondence with the works involved, as with Bouchard’s own sensibility as a curator. - J.L.]

Analog(ue) represents the most dramatic use so far of not only the space of the Slide Room Gallery but also its palpable contexts: the parochially-tongue-in-groove-panelled walls of a schoolroom that have become both an exhibition space and a lecture hall. Sculptural works share in common an idiomatic foregrounding of material – inflated fabric, clustered light bulbs, cast wax, spooling magnetic tape, heterogeneously homogenous flotsam and jetsam- with modes of presentation that sag, spill, lean, press, tangle, tip, amass and clump. Each piece subjects its motifs to multiplicity and difference, establishing within its formal economy a circuit of social implications.

Marcia Huyer’s massive, inflated sculpture sets this process in motion with the intrusive spread of the organization (a word my computer’s thesaurus has supplied in place of the rather overused ‘body’), and its many appendages. There is something gothic about its structure, that is to say the logic of a form whose interior has dictated the anomalous and irregular spread of its exterior. Here the inside has been turned out, and in its immediate presence we feel the suspension –like an intake of breath- between spaces, real and virtual.

Nearby, Rebekah Johnson’s arrangement of light bulbs and neon tubing clambers toward the window as if for a literal and figurative frame of reference. Rather than being forbiddingly fragile, the triangular spread of the bulbs reads as sociable, chattily populous in their invitation to counting sameness and difference. The fractious passing around of illumination suggests a party, reflecting our own celebratory, compulsive, delimiting addiction to light.

Megan Dickie’s cantilevered wax forms hover somewhere between confection and confession. The silhouettes of the artists’ body are aspirational, asserting her independence amid clouds of domesticity. The narrative is of the ‘outfit’, a suit of clothes that grants their wearer the momentary wholeness of a profile. Charged with both positive and negative spatial tension, they drift forward into tactility like cartoon tropes for figure and ground. Some are only drifts of parts like pattern remnants; one wonders if it is the clothes that are dreaming, of their ideal body.

A similar feeling of agglomeration governs Scott Evans’ miniature masses. Here a seemingly common currency of fancifully surreal forms in recreationally psychedelic colours is undermined by the facture of the materials themselves: sponginess, stained-ness, absorbency, frangibility…the fragile pomp of the presentations masks the intense passivity of their culture. Dynamically credulous, they assemble a richly germy infancy.

Tyler Hodgins’ floor pieces are lengths of ‘blank time’, empty sixty and ninety-minute audiotape sandwiched between slabs of tempered glass. The contrast between the curls of tape as loose and wayward or pressed and graphically liquid is vaguely uncanny: from loose time to gripped viscera. The ‘tape presses’ succinctly sum a relationship suggested throughout the exhibition: the nostalgic fetish of the analog...The wish or apprehension that forms might animate themselves, in their seeming hypostasis mirroring our own life-force. This shows up in sharp relief against the backdrop of digital relations, as a beauty of duress, of the pain and the ticklish humour of metamorphosis.

Upcoming

Fault Line is seeking submissions of writing on ongoing exhibitions, and we hope to release another bulletin in early December featuring reviews of the AGGV’s Fantastic Frameworks show, as well as Scott Evans’ sculpture (currently on view at the Quadra Street location of Café Fantastico) and Inga Romer’s painting (recently seen at the Slide Room Gallery and now installed at the Fifty-Fifty Arts Collective). As you can see in our ‘Briefly Noted’ segment below, short submissions – particularly in the case of multiple submissions on a single subject- are welcome. They help draw attention to work that might not otherwise receive a broad enough audience, and encourage the kind of informal discussion that so often lays the groundwork for more thorough involvement, here and elsewhere. Thanks for your contribution!

J.L.

Briefly Noted

Robert Hengeveld’s “Farley’s heap: Casper’s keep”

[September 22^nd-Oct 1^st at the Fifty-fifty Arts Collective]

After spending two years with miniature kitchen stoves and installations that provoke the awkward feeling of “unfinished” construction sites combined with the feeling of organized “stages” inside of nice gallery spaces, my visual perception of the everyday surroundings we are all living in, got turned upside down; followed by his specific sense of humour. This humour that takes an important part in contemporary art making and in the perception of life in general.

In this new installation at the fifty-fifty arts collective, the miniature door on the right to the entrance gives me this giggling feeling inside of my throat and I am just thankful to him that he shows me the world in a different less important manner mixed up with his specific sense of humour…supported by the “construction site cave” that evokes this feeling of ambiguity: On one side, I want to get in action, the performance: to crawl inside, but one the other hand the “cave” is made out of construction site materials: raw, cold, unorganized, un-cozy. The viewer gets stuck in this feeling of ambiguity and isn’t really enthusiastic of crawling inside…. Robert Hengeveld mixes up what we think is “eternal”, the structures we live with in our everyday life, the forms, the views, everything we like to surround us and that give us the feeling of ”stability and security”, in our nests...he is playing with those notions of our actual society, breaking up the ceilings, replacing, this ongoing process of demolishing and constructing, renewing. The ongoing process of real life that some of us have lost in their lives because of too much “materialist security” plus the focus on structures that we dismiss and ignore.

[…] I really don't know what to think about his work...it just seems so self-conscious. What it made me think about was the relationship of works of art and the space or environment they are presented in. Because his pieces are primarily made of discarded construction material like a demolition sight [sic] and the space actually looks like it is in the process of being demolished it makes it difficult to recognize what is the art and what isn't. The concept of presenting building materials as discards or garbage and then seeing what they look like as we see them normally do is in some ways interesting. It also made me think of reversed skeletons or seeing on the outside what we normally don't see. Perhaps that is his point or perhaps it is irrelevant...it was just a reaction and it made me ask myself how I would have received this piece had it been in the Art Gallery of Victoria. Am I really that shallow that the space has that much importance [?]… The place is unattractive and not welcoming in any way but I guess that is pretty superficial of me to think it would or should be […]

- Dan MacDougall (in correspondence w. Xane St. Phillip)

Fault Line Vol.1 #3.5, Summer/Fall 2006

Fault Line is an irregularly- produced forum for free contemporary criticism and commentary. The purpose of Fault Line is to encourage interest, argument and pleasure, and comments and complaints are welcome. Fault Line is an online project, which exists as a bulletin sent via attachment (Word or PDF format) to a list of subscribers, and a Blog site to allow for reader feedback and anonymous postings. Future projects may include a broadsheet or magazine. Articles featuring art criticism or arts-related topics are welcome in a variety of formats (including poetry and humour). We favour shorter pieces (typically 250 to 1500 words) and accessible, engaging writing wherever possible. The art discussed needn't be current or local but the sense of occasion should be. To add your name to our subscriber list, or to send submissions, please correspond by e-mail to faultline@telus.net. Post comments at faultlineartjournalvictoria.blogspot.com, or Google Victoria Faultline).

Painting and Failure?

[This essay grew out of responses I had to the challenges posed by a recent call for submissions at Open Space, Dowsing For Failure, curated by Doug Jarvis and Ted Hiebert. Implicit in the essay are reconsiderations of much of the content of the call itself, but I cannot and do not assume that I am sufficiently well-versed in the contextualization of the language being used to see this as anything but a tangential contribution, as opposed to rebuttal. Please refer to Open Space’s website to read this document at http://www.openspace.ca/arts/announce/dowsing.htm.

We will post the call on the site should it become no longer accessible to readers via the Open Space website.]

I.

I choose ‘painting’ rather than ‘art’ in the title of this essay because accidents happen in painting with more fluid spontaneity and with less obvious consequence than in many both more and less materially entrenched media (such as for instance, subtractive sculpture, or video). To go further, painting’s heritage as a descriptive medium, its inevitable involvement in both illusionistic and material propositions, as well as the breadth and prestige of these traditions, make it a medium ideally suited to the difficulty involved in the question of recognizing ‘failure’ as such, not as a rhetorical gesture that is reabsorbed as either a material or pictorial challenge, but as some more fundamental breakdown in the operations of intention, work and communication.

To address the problem of failure from the point of view of painting is to move, like a painter, from the miniature world of the close surface, to the framed view of the work as a whole, to larger questions about whole ways of working, and finally the prospect of the practice of painting itself. There is the point of view of a single incident within the painting, as in a misstep with the brush, a wrong colour put on hastily, both of which can be ‘corrected’ (though sometimes at the cost of freshness), or more gravely, the failure of passages of an oil painting that ‘fall’ over time or flake off, or pigments failing be lightfast. These material disasters are of special interest in the wake of a history of modern painting that has entailed so much experiment with the limits of the medium, but also consequently placed so much importance on the particularities of material behaviour as they relate to form.

Stepping further back from the easel, there is the scrutinizing of the formal whole as something that “works” or “misses”, presenting a unified scheme that affects the viewer’s attention as magnetic, absorbing, resonant, transportive, etc. Looking over the history of painting, one might recognize that a given painting by Velasquez may be said to “work” as surely as one by Barnett Newman, though not certainly with the same result. Looking over the history of an individual painter’s development, most would also probably acknowledge one given work by a given artist is decidedly more successful than another, giving rise to the notion of the ‘masterpiece’. History tends to focus on the defining moments represented by masterpieces, and in the process lesser works – and careers- are forgotten, though insiders and academics are aware of their crucial role in supporting the stars of history, as rehearsals, foils, permissions, agency, the stuff of milieu.

Just as success or failure in a given painting might tend to define a career in the round, so careers define the practice of an era, a generation or a century, and long-term views of these cultural patterns in terms of ‘success’ are prone to readjustment in the rear-view mirror. One generation’s ‘failure of nerve’ can read as another’s ‘subversion’. Observing the rewriting of reputations through history can lead to the impression that ‘success’ is an unstable isotope, projecting its radioactive half-life into the future, wherein it may be read as prophetic, regressive, retroactive, symptomatic or self-fulfilling.

These observations are of constructive and consequential interest to artists. To make more of that earlier gesture of moving “like a painter”, let’s say that this attention to both microcosms and macrocosms, painterly details and the trajectory of careers, is constantly being deranged in this case by a will to find something new in the old, or vice versa, in seeking parallels and permission for one’s own creative impulses. This kind of attention is by its nature opportunistic and incomplete, it tends to skew depth perception and collapse definitive boundaries.

For instance, when newly interested in the work of Mark Rothko, I saw the ‘Harvard Murals’, a suite of paintings by that artist that are now famously losing their pigmentation, moving from their original fiery vermillion to an ashy violet. At that stage in my life, it was impossible not to consider the murals from the point of view of Rothko’s obstinate denial of the sensuous qualities of colour in his paintings as constituting their reason for being. I sympathetically imagined that these paintings were an outcome of that debate, in which the paintings went on ‘living’ past the failure of their colour, as a diagram of possibility that no longer required colour to deliver the impact of its presence.

To make matters worse, I allied this fantasy with the notion of the artists’ suicide in the painting studio, following in the footsteps of other onlookers who have read in Rothko’s last works –dark, flat, black and grey compositions- a renunciation of life and a life’s work. Immature, and restless to see something other’s didn’t see, I convinced myself that the failure of pigment molecules was some kind of trump on Rothko’s part, that he had gone beyond the existential brink that his generation conceptualized and realized something that would have been impossible in life: undead artwork as ‘meta-painting’. I was trying hard in that moment to convert a failure on the level of substances into a revelation I could impose on the posthumous trajectory of a career. Was this an absurd thing to think? Certainly, but also not, if (and who could ever say) such a notion took on life in work I went on to make as a painter, or became recognizable to me in the work of others.

Reread the paragraph above and you’ll find the lapses in logic, and that is the point: a creative endeavour often starts as something patently incorrect, a failure of interpretation, though not one of nerve, and so often it is in the failures of the past that young artists find something sufficiently under-mediated that they can safely impose themselves on it. It’s more factual to say that the way those Rothko paintings really live on, is to provide steady work for the technicians who have to restore them! And it is the museum or public gallery that does this on many levels, to the varied nuances of risk and potential failure in an artwork. In looking at a painting, we may see nothing or something, and our participation in the risk is critical to its outcome, but the message of all of the care and restoration of the art institution is that the work is obviously worthy of care, and the work becomes a prize but also a patient, and a prisoner of its success.

II.

What I have already begun to suggest is that failure is a kind of currency in the making and viewing of art. The currency initially belongs to the artist alone, and eventually may change hands between family, peers, industry professionals and the public at large. Of course the definition of success or failure changes with each possessor of this currency, but success on material terms at least, can be readily quantified. What is more mysterious is how the artist’s definition of failure is defined, because it is never understood completely, not even by the artist. For instance, has the artist internalized notions of failure from parents, authorities, etc., and to what degree is this integrated into an aesthetic outlook hardened by a career a culture in which ‘artist’ may not exist as a stable social role? Success can be a very crude gauge, because the artists’ notion of success may not (and in the ‘tradition’ of western avant gardism does not) correspond with society’s notion of success, but the two may become blurred within the epiphenomenon of a successful career episode. Failure is necessarily a more delicate instrument, as one’s definition of failure, regardless of where it originates from, is one’s own, unknown. Thinking of images of abstract art (in which realistic illustration can’t exist as a measure of achievement), one might recall Mondrian’s painstaking rehearsals of composition using masking tape, or return to Rothko’s late ‘black paintings’, in which the width of white space that ‘framed’ the edges of the paper was rigorously measured and remeasured.

We might read these efforts as a process of elimination, in which –in such pared-down presentations- the all too familiar correspondence must surely be with failure, the sense of drawing a line in shifting sands, rather than the immediate promise of potential transaction, that an apprehension of success in recognizable (and so worldly) terms tends to involve. Instead, some kind of intimate familiarity is being sought, a familiarity whose apprehension has been honed by many hours in the studio, most of which cannot have yielded masterpieces. So in developing a working method, the labours one undertakes as ‘craft’ (a word with multifarious associations in modern painting) are a dowsing for the tug of the familiar that leads to something more, whose first approach will be wrapped in the taste of one’s unique and specific history, that is, of failure.

And so a great disservice is done to the sense of craft in modern painting by the abuse of notions of chance, the “happy accident” that leads to a breakthrough, as if each painting session were a fresh start without the at-hand sense of the past, present in both the body of the artist and the material body of the medium, as exceptionally fluid, rich with subtle but knowable inconsistencies, but fundamentally prone to slippage within the fluctuating limits of optical and tactile perception, athletics, gravity, and time.

It’s worth noting how many artists anecdotally relate how quickly and easily a successful work comes after ages of toiling away on a less effectual effort. Most painters have a small stable of pieces that they have spent inordinate amounts of time on that will never be more than workmanlike. Similarly, painters who make a practice of frequently destroying works in progress often do so early on in the potential timeline for the works’ development. Both of these tendencies reflect the issue of how one learns through failure, developing a sense of, if not self, self-respect. This sounds like a modest claim, as does the one advanced in the name of craft, but in a situation where any outcome is possible, and the acknowledgement of success by ones peers or industry is never certain, they are fundamental to the maintenance of a creative life. From the notion of failure as a trustworthy absolute comes some personal definition –divined through selective negative comparisons- of success.

III.

That this quiet, mostly solitary set of problems takes place within the dynamics of a traditionally social medium is a contradiction most painters adapt to physically, by virtue of the hours required simply tackling the learning curve of the medium. The existential side of the issue is more often appreciated at a distance, as in the inevitable romanticizing of artists’ biographies. Consider the idea that as the risk the work originally possessed as art -the potentially all or nothing gamble of commuted meaning versus incommunicability- has been bled out of the work by decades of critical approval, so that the aura of ‘failure’ -as threatened consequence, or liberating atmosphere- is metastasized into the artist’s biography, as if the difficulty of a life were ordained by the momentary transit of a painting from negation and neglect to acceptance and elevation.

Just the same, let’s never forget the real outcomes of failure in the studio: a sense of incoherence, an aesthetic heaviness, muddiness or confusion resulting in bewilderment, contempt or animosity, an undermining of the logic of past successes, a questioning of purpose and momentum, and a reassessment of the values established as part of a working (read living) routine. To be incoherent to others is frustrating, but to follow one’s instincts to results that seems to oneself incoherent threatens sociability and sanity. But much of modern art’s story seeks to frame just such episodes.

The recent dramatization of the life of Jackson Pollock is an excellent example. The story avoids the problem of mediating an interpretation of the Pollock’s drip paintings by externalizing their potential incoherence in terms of physical absolutes: the inexplicable grace of the act and the opacity of chronic alcoholism. In the specific cultural moment of their first coming across (the moment the film is built on, but can’t resolve), the potential incoherence of Pollock’s drip paintings as a failure wasn’t just local to Pollock, but represented a kind of absolute of failure within a narrow but strategically important art community. The potential failure of Pollock’s work – as that of all works of art- can never be resolved, but culture can enjoy this fact positively, as recreation, or can participate in the prospect mistrustfully, mediating the difficulties using therapeutic language, presenting the narrative of Pollock’s life and death as a sort of bait-and-switch to forestall the question of confronting the pictures with any seriousness.

IV.

This brings us to call for submissions for a show based on the concept of failure. Is the point to depict failure or embody failure? To undertake a work whose outcome is preordained as ‘failed’, is to imitate oneself ‘failing’, an act of such obvious artificiality as to immediately underscore the authenticity of failure as a resource. On the other hand, the extreme argument of an investment in ‘failed’ work is the conviction that the instruments of craft are no longer capable of divining any success within the field of sociability. This leads to abjection, by which I mean the presentation of a work that is so distressed as to suggest – beyond any failure local to its apparent internal logic- that communication is no longer possible, that incoherence is the governing state, not only for this work, but universally.

The problem with an abject presentation is that the institutional environment of the gallery or museum immediately imposes its own kind of order upon the assumed privation, defining it as a work of art, ordering the deranged scraps within the larger gesture of its mission as a place of learning. Abjection then, is not a confrontation with failure as a working absolute, but the offering of localized failure presented within the context of its recuperation by a greater authority, a failure adequate only to its immediate purpose, which is a didactic illustration of the power of placement.

This brings us back to where we started: painting’s saving grace and slippery frustration, in that it offers pluralistic aspects of illusion, illustration, materiality, ‘object-hood’, etc. in its presentation. Questions of whether a painting is finally an abject renunciation of itself or just ‘playing dead’ require a lot of vigilance on the part of the viewer, and we must assume the painter as well. A generation of artists working out of the heritage of abstract painting (Richter, Ryman, Tuttle, Martin, etc.) have in different ways had this problem become part of their works’ perceived content. Earlier abstract painters such as Rothko and Pollock often characterized the struggle with the problem of failure within the context of a single episode of confrontation with a single work, an experience which tends to extend to their viewing, despite both of these artists’ obviously recognizable styles, and which gives resonance to Rothko’s dictate that the artist be able to “reliably perform miracles”. More contemporary artists invoke the possibility of failure for their entire line of inquiry. The point is not -as has been fashionable to assume- a failure for all painting, a “death of painting” for a culture, but - more meaningfully as a testimonial of creative thought and craft - the failure of an individual effort to sustain its view alone and unsupported. Conversely, its subject also becomes a failure of community.

Contemporary painters might be said to work within a now-established ‘poetics’ of these failures. By this, I mean that many artists present their work as a kind of search through repetitive fieldwork in both the visual syntax of pop culture and the history of art (with some significant mingling of these categories), marked by a daily occurrence of slips and losses on the surface of individual paintings. Is there another content of this work, bigger than some thematic sense of fatigue or travail, or the idiosyncratic look of the subjects in their treatment as anomalies? One resource might lie in forming a more comprehensive understanding of failure in its attachments to both the privacy of the studio, and the public corpus of contemporary art history, as something that lives in intimate exchanges, in relations, in comparisons – in short, in community- rather than in the ‘success stories’ offered by official information panels and gallery advertisements. So end here with failure not only as a dowsing rod, but also as a doorstop: as long as a final judgement is forestalled, and all of the possible tools of the artist remain, respected and bewildering as they are.

J.L.

Victoria Fault Line Art Journal is seeking submissions of art criticism dealing with art in Victoria and elsewhere. Victoria Fault Line is an online project, which exists as a (currently) quarterly bulletin sent via attachment (Word or PDF format) to a list of subscribers, and a Blog site to allow for reader feedback and anonymous postings. Future projects may include a broadsheet or magazine...Regrettably, Fault Line currently exists off of sheer enthusiasm, and has no funding to offer remuneration for submissions. On the other hand, we do offer a committed editorial involvement to all serious submissions, and the chance to contribute to a much needed forum for criticism, discussion and debate within Victoria's visual arts community. Articles featuring art criticism or art related topics are welcome in a variety of formats (including poetry and humour). We favour shorter pieces (typically 250 to 1500 words) and accessible, engaging writing wherever possible. The art discussed needn't be current nor local but the sense of occasion should be. To add your name to our subscriber list, or to send submissions, please correspond by e-mail to faultline@telus.net . Response time is typically 1 day to 2 weeks for submissions. Watch for our next Bulletin, due October 30th, featuring an essay in reaction to Open Space's upcoming 'Dowsing for Failure', and comments on Robert Hengeveld's current exhibition at the Fifty-Fifty. Thanks for your involvement with this project, John Luna & Tyler Hodgins, editors. http://faultlineartjournalvictoria.blogspot.com/

Please Come In

Robert Randall at The Ministry of Casual Living

The invitation for Robert Randall’s installation at the MoCL is made up like a realtor’s ad, a dig that wins more mileage in real-estate obsessed Victoria than it might elsewhere, and that is just the point. Randall has been making images culled from real estate photos of houses (mostly blandly ideal 1960’s split-levels) for about twelve years, and to some extent, wondering what to do with them. During that time his interests in the urban landscape, and attendant notions of ‘place’ and personal history have broadened and become richer through exploration and contrast, as indicated at a recent artists’ talk at the Vancouver Island School of Art in which he showed photographs from a recent trip to Europe –notably pastoral, mended battlefields of the First World War- with sites of natural and artificial anomaly within Victoria’s downtown area. Considering the current installation in view of this lecture, as well as Randall’s more recent exhibition history, sheds some light on the possible outcomes of Randall’s subject matter and his treatment of the house pictures in particular.

Randall’s houses have tended to occupy a space between romanticism and irony. The presentation is often dark and a little blurred or soupy, vacillating between opacity (as obstinate, fixed, awkward or dingy) and an ephemeral translucence. The outcome of that struggle has often occurred to me as the mingling of two kinds of lapse: the persistence of places we have known and the oddity of architectures that were once forward-looking, when they’ve begun to fall into the past. Split the difference and you might have the suggestion that pasts laid out on ideal terms are harder to digest on a personal level. Even as bright and impersonal modern utopias suffer an inevitable reduction of scale (reducing in space as they recede in time, as Milan Kundera said of old people) so they resist, their materials not having been designed for a gentle, more naturalistic move into the scenery.

Scale has been important. Part of the enjoyment of Randall’s original house paintings was the fact that a glossy-yet-murky bit of glazing on panel had originated as a minute clipping in a realtor’s paper. The ‘miniature’ feel of many of the paintings has tended to work nicely with their subtle, unexpected heterogeneity in group presentations, as in his grid of paintings on tiny frosted Mylar rectangles at the AGGV’s Interface some years back. I recall Randall discussing alternate presentations at that time (Mylar, mural-sized presentations, a/v components) and his expressed desire to experiment with installation. Some of the challenge has been to avoid the miniature’s preciousness, and Randall has tended to explore the possibilities in a modest rather than arch manner. At last year’s Deluge Christmas show, his landscapes on found wood (also displayed in grid formation, depicting rather featureless European fields that were in fact the aforementioned battlegrounds) succeeded in playing the soft persistence of a heavily knotted grain under paint that was mostly devoid of affect.

At Roy Green’s recent roundup – Domestic Bliss- at Open Space, Randall offered two variations on presentation that I interpreted as largely aesthetic rather than conceptual decisions. On the north wall, the houses were painted on banners of Mylar hung from the ceiling away from a wall with open windows, allowing the pieces to be viewed from a ‘front’ and ‘back’ side of the translucent material, and also resulting in the natural light backlighting the imagery. This latter feature emphasized the ‘existential’ material nature of each brushstroke, underscoring the contradiction of this painterliness as both the tool and enemy of depiction.

On the south wall a larger image of a house had been painted directly on the wall in a very physical manner that included drips running down the surface of the wall. The problem seemed to me at the time that the materials had been denied their sense of distance from the viewer…perceptually, there was no point at which it became difficult to ‘read’ the picture, no interference in the flat-footed frontality of ‘narrative’ (as such) to be engendered by the usual dark tones, slipped lineation, or reflecting gloss. As a result, we were left with the straightforward painting index, which went nowhere because Randall is a great success as a painter of conservative means rather than a virtuoso, and because technique is something that in his work comes across as a private issue rather than a social one. It is the contrary combination of self-effacement and public subject matter that has made his irony rich, and without the former the latter looked flat and stagy.

The Ministry of Casual Living is primarily a window space, with a shallow back gallery that is usually only available to the public during the night of an exhibition’s opening. Randall’s window display consists of long sheets of Mylar hanging in narrowly spaced vertical rows and curling slightly at their lower edges. The Mylar has been block-printed at regular intervals, creating a grid of houses and apartment buildings, not without repetition. Taken together, the grouping looks careful and vaguely curatorial, but closer in the idiosyncrasies of the prints make the mood more convivial. The drawing in the prints is filled with skewed angles and generalized rendering, suggesting a deadpan set-up for a cartoon strip. The graphics are unevenly produced, and the thinly inked ones look like a flicker of the cleaner prints, suggesting a looped scene in old-style animation. The serial quality brought out by the repetitions is not forced (the repetitions occur in no particular order), but it’s hard to miss…one alpine-style peaked roof keeps cropping up, recalling both the architecture of the ‘60’s and Disney’s Snow White, indicating generally how one kind of confusion (such as nostalgia) breeds another.

On the occasion of his opening, Randall had also complimented a window display of house images with a table out front offering the lino and EZ-Cut blocks used to make the prints, still wet with ink. The back gallery featured a computer monitor with a ‘slideshow’ of digital photographs. The images in the slideshow are of apartment building entryways, mostly from the period Randall favours (suppose, the era of his parents’ first family home…), with their host of pretentious names (many of which the artist correctly identifies as ‘Hispanic-kitsch’) and pseudo-heraldic devices. Who hasn’t visited a lapsed parent or ailing family friend in one of these apartments and passed through the doors with their gilt italics (“…Gardens”, “Manor”, “Court” or “Place”), and run the lobby’s gauntlet of false fireplaces and tired furniture? Maybe not so much tired as tiring, since its insistent evocation to a certain notion of hospitality or propriety surely never had any real takers, but wears one out with the sheer possibility.

The pictures are unremarkable and direct, rehashing the same spatial scenarios: the doors, the bit of space beyond the doors not quite visually accessible and therefore shallow, and strips of curve-edged sidewalk or overhang above or below that nudge the eye into the big rectangle of the doorway, encouraging the horizontality of the original aesthetic.

The pictures are pleasurably mesmerizing. Like Randall’s house paintings, difference is a subtle motif, but an attention develops in catching the variations, and one suspects it has been the artists’ experience as well. Unlike Ed Ruscha’s famous photo-book ‘Every Gas Station On The Sunset Strip’, Randall does not declare an exhaustive catalogue, and it’s the sense of curiosity, as well as a suspension of disbelief that the subject might be bottomless, that tickles the viewer’s staying power.

The question I have about the show as a whole is to what degree the rhythm of Randall’s window of lean-looking prints can feel of a piece with his shuffling doorways. There is a question about community and privacy in these presentations, perhaps the way in which models of seclusion (as in the postwar house, all garage and no porch) ultimately become a lived-with encumbrance on both sides of the wall. The more elusive issue is the promise of community as enacted through casual tokens of affection, defined against a ground of uneven familiarity. This brings up certain points that are subtle and open to discussion, and which might become more salient with Randall’s next (or next, next) show: the Ministry’s place as part of a suburban neighbourhood’s storefront strip, it’s odd routine of making work available through the window but only offering occasional access to the space beyond, and Randall’s decision to allow himself for once a glimpse into an opening, if still a façade.

J.L.

NEW SUMMER WORKSHOPS AT THE VANCOUVER ISLAND SCHOOL OF ART

The Vancouver Island School of Art is pleased to present the following previously unannounced weekend workshops taught by our beloved regular instructors:

The Artists’ Signature: Theory and Practice -(ABC252-JL06)

Instructor John Luna

This intensive workshop combines hands-on studio practice with a stimulating overview of the history of the painted signature in the Western Tradition. Lectures examine the work of both traditional and contemporary signaturistes such as Lovis Corinth, J.A.M. Whistler, Robert Ryman and Bob Ross. Class projects will include handwriting analysis and exercises in signature colour, slant, scale, proportion and placement. Historical background and biographies from the period will help create a sense of immediacy and connection with this vital -and too often overlooked- aspect of painting. Some very advanced experience recommended.

Discipline in The Darkroom –(PH200-DD06) instructor d bradley muir

This course is an introduction to traditional black and white film photography methods and techniques, as well as good-old fashioned etiquette, self-respect, and elbow grease. Students learn the technical basics of their camera, film processing, and making prints in the darkroom, as well as receiving a refresher in punctuality and tidiness. Students are encouraged to arrive on time, having done their homework. Stragglers, slackers, and n’ere-do-wells will be given a tour of the newly outfitted VISA Woodshed (see March newsletter) for further discussion. This course is perfect for students who have no previous photography experience, and for whom boot camp has always seemed intriguing.

Found Form Fondling –(SC140-FF06) instructor Megan Dickie

This course is a technical resource embracing a variety of methods of handling any material your roving hands may come across. A number of modes of tactile interface are taught, including tweaking, rubbing, plucking, tickling, and poking. Students will practice with a variety of materials including fur, leather, wax, resin and rubber, before venturing out into the field in search of new sensations. Lectures and slide presentations provide an overview of both traditional and contemporary fondling as well as valuable tips on related issues such as crowded elevators, clothing store security guards and latex allergies.

The Sensually Graduated Edge In the Contemporary Contrasting Field (PA999-XSP06) instructor Xane St. Phillip

This course pays attention to qualities of painting so abstract that they may only exist in theory. Students experiment with the application of paint on a surface to create an atmosphere that simultaneously contrasts the tactile and the sublime. Using historical and contemporary approaches, as well as approaches which have yet to be invented, students look towards light as a point of departure for exploring a range of eyewear options. An understanding about the effectiveness of colour and composition in painting (see Understanding Colour I-XXV) is recommended.

Cave Painting (CV160-FA06) instructor Jan Gates

In this course participants learn to create drawings and paintings after the manner of ancient anonymous masters of Lascaux. Using sections of cave wall imported directly from rural France, students learn the fundamentals of rendering animal fat, burning sticks and smearing dried blood. This is an ideal course for both the beginning and intermediate Neanderthals.

Renaissance Poisons (RX160-JG06) instructor Jan Gates

This weekend workshop provides an introduction to the Renaissance poison-making techniques. Participants have an opportunity to travel in the footsteps of historical figures such as the Borgias and Papacy, learning the basics, as they would have done; preparing meals for infirm relatives, storing powders in trick jewellery, and building up a personal immunity to a wide range of deadly toxins. Some CPR experience is recommended. Class-size is limited to 8 students and numbers may dwindle. Costs include a $50 material fee to cover the cost of materials (payable directly to instructor) and signing of several release forms.

Collaging with Compost: Mystery Excursion (CC111-PU06) instructor Wendy Welch

This one-day collage workshop combines adventure and ‘mixed media’ in the truest sense of the words, using the very versatile and fun medium of found objects in a state of putrescent decay. The instructor takes a group of students to an undisclosed outdoor location (The Heartland Land Fill) within the very ‘activated’ surface of the earth itself! There is a $20 material fee, which includes a hardhat in attractive VISA school colours.

Window Washing: A Contemporary Approach (WW121-WW06) instructor Wendy Welch

This creative water media workshop introduces the methods and processes involved in washing the school’s many beautiful windows. Through exercises and the use of very tall ladders, students learn to understand the basics of cleaner application and squeegee work, creating patterns and designs all the more beautiful for their transient, ephemeral nature. This is an excellent workshop for those looking to work in a more free and expressive way, while washing windows.

J.L.

This spring I noticed that the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective had to issue an announcement limiting crowd capacity for performances at its Douglas Street location, that The Ministry of Casual Living is proactively soliciting patronage for its continued survival, and that a significant creative presence in the Brown House collective (Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie) have left Victoria to settle in Montreal. Finally, at a recent open house for the Vancouver Island School of Art some graduate students and younger instructors were talking very positively about the prospect of staying in Victoria and making it work...somehow.

I suppose this has brought to mind the question about making, exhibiting and selling art in Victoria...especially with regard to artists who have begun participating in local group shows or have had the attention of solo shows, and now wonder about strategies for maintaining a sense of momentum here and presence elsewhere...Putting aside momentarily the mere question of survival, what about the problem of trying to reach an audience past that show at the Lab or Open Space? How do we grow a more sustaining art scene?

J.L.

Daniel Laskarin at Deluge

As I looked at the sculpture Packing The Fleece And Trapping Owls I was reminded of a recent experience I had trying to assemble a small paper cut-out monster truck for my son. With the best of intentions I continually failed to make the truck stay together as flap slid out of slit and axle detached from tire. The planes flew off in states of arrested movement and, if I had known that the experience would inform my later visit to Deluge Contemporary Art to see Laskarin’s show Packing The Fleece and Other Things, perhaps my aggravation would have been tempered. Alas, I reached for the tape to satisfy my need to control the situation and to return the angles and planes to their “monster truck-ness”.

Support or framework plays a crucial role in all four works in this show. Utilitarian objects push and pull, twist and reconfigure, and are placed in a delicate balance upon/against/beside supports. It is the starting point for this viewer, and I would guess for the artist as well. Placed opposite from each other, the four works divide into two pairs, and begin an intersecting conversation about form and balance, expectation and surprise.

Holding Still and Love (Soft Pink) have a deceptively simple elegance that echoes their poetic titles. Here we have the support and the supported, two nests of resin sitting atop their posts. Holding Still captures a moment of frayed fragmentation, and sits on a tripod built to chart, document or survey. The beauty of the wood and metal finish of this object is in contrast to the six by six post of Love (Soft Pink). Laskarin has whittled this lumber down (or should I say up?) to a slight taper, with a mottled accuracy that I particularly enjoyed. The surface of the placed resin nest on top plays nicely in the light, and changes as I move around it. These are subdued voices, yet the interchange between the two pieces can still be heard even when they are challenged by the more raucous exchange created by the remaining two works.

I have to admit to a certain relief in the realization that Packing The Fleece And Trapping Owls and Holds One Feed shared the same number of parts (five), more a reflection of my needs as a viewer than a compositional necessity. Nonetheless it allowed me to move back and forth between the two in a game of visual tag, or call and response.

Packing The Fleece.., was named after a farmer’s table (found in an old catalogue) that provided the starting point for the dominant element in the piece, a geometric congregation of white metal planes that manages to elude focus as I move around it in an attempt to bring the image together. I am left with a suggestion of something I think I might know, but can’t put a finger on. This is in contrast to the relatively organic blue flow of the packing quilt that is bound to the support, and that falls to the floor. (The waves of stitching add nicely to this sense of cascading.) All is industrial and carefully placed, even the rope binding the quilt to the support, except for the last undiscovered element, bound and hooded by the quilt, a rough ball of resin/matter. Is it hiding or trapped? Its presence is felt by the form it creates, but it is discovered only when I search for the missing voice that pairs it with Holds One Feed across the room.

The geometry of Holds One Feed, whatever its origin, has become rough and aggressive. The clean line is replaced with prickly orange, rejecting touch but demanding your eye. I also see transparency and reflection in the form of (once again) cascading sheets of acrylic wrapped around the chromed support (car jack) in two layers. Here I see myself in the sculpture, and the play of light and shadow as I move around it and as it moves around itself. A steel ball in a state of decay is cradled beneath all this light. Perhaps my favourite element of this piece is a small black object off to one side, on the floor. Resembling a tiny wedding cake, it is either supporting the whole, or is hanging off of it. On its own it might suggest the monumental, a tower or building, and as such it throws a sense of scale into the mix.

I find myself thinking of this work as similar to a jazz quartet, (in particular to the “Dutch Swing” of Misha Mengleberg or Han Bennick) where each player is given equal time, and often a known or recognizable theme/form is used as a starting point for composition. This is then twisted and warped to the point of disintegration and collapse through the interaction or competition of the players. There is a risk of things falling apart that keeps the players and the listeners on edge and engaged. There is also humour and play that is facilitated by a strategy and structure. By pairing these works Laskarin has empowered his sculptures through a conversation/competition with themselves.

Tyler Hodgins

Fault Line Vol.1 #1, Issue 1 spring 2006-03-31

Fault Line is an irregularly- produced forum for free contemporary criticism and commentary. The purpose of Fault Line is to encourage interest, argument and pleasure, and comments and complaints are welcome. [Please Note: As this is the first issue of Fault Line, the editors regret that it has been delayed so that the work discussed is no longer on view. For more information on the work described, please contact Deluge Gallery at antimatter@shaw.ca]

Sandra Meigs at Deluge.

This show has been written about in three separate venues (nothing short of a miracle in Victoria), yet little of the critical attention seems to have been focussed on what goes on inside the paintings, how they work. Despite the fact the ‘expressionistic’ (read awkward, grotesque, silly or morose) aspects of Meigs’ subject matter –as well as the artists’ biography- tend to attract attention, there are formal elements to the work that should be talked about. In part because they lead to a fuller understanding of the conventions of expressionistic painting in general, and in part because throughout this installation (of older work that the artist has revisited), there are examples of a thoroughly controlled use of colour, texture and especially space.

There is an old art-historical distinction between ‘optical’ (the view at a distance, as in painting) and ‘tactile’ (touchable, as in sculpture)…in modern times, painters (such as Rothko or Newman) have requested a tactile distance of the viewer -within the ‘personal space of arm’s length- and used the vibration of saturated colour to mark the subtle switch from regarding to touching that takes place as we move closer. Meigs’ work at a distance fulfills the role of a narrative series, as related to their connection to song lyrics. Up close is where they are properly experienced as individual events, about working distance (eighteen inches), so that the supports turn from rectangles to open spaces, the frames dissolve and the colours begin to soften and merge with reflected light.

Colour, space and line (including the texture of the paint body) can’t be separated here. In one piece, for example, a simplified torso appears, as a red field of colour, inside of which is a knotted lump of paint, illegible as chewing gum. The knot is a visual problem, one gets hung up on its texture, while the red field, momentarily ignored- begins to swell and contract. This is a way of creating friction – smooth versus striated space- the smooth space allowing the eye to hover and the striated form attractive but also agitating, granular, like sand in an oyster.

Van Gogh is an accessible example to look at for contrasting the frisson of texture with the radiant effects of embedded, intense colour. A closer reference might be Chaim Soutine, once declared a supremely ‘oral’ painter by Robert Hughes -a description that also fits here- for the curiously cramped-yet-heaving compositions of his paintings of the village of Ceret…A horizon that becomes a figure or vice versa, a drooped, lumpy line that suggests presence by implying mass, like a saddle or a uterus. In terms of the tight fit of a figural image to its immediate space, I’d compare them to the impasto work (such as the ‘hostages’) by Informel painter Jean Fautrier, the way in which the image is not (yet?) clear but hovers in the space where we expect the readable image ought to be. Look for this same occlusion in the abstract pictures of Philip Guston. Meigs uses this device with great control in the Mary paintings: there is a great instinct for scale as it relates to a sense of physical closeness with the viewer, and her colours and forms are deliberate-looking but also atmospheric.

Are the painted frames too intrusive? They look too strict in Deluge’s bright southern light at midday, defaulting to a hard graphic black (only close up, the colour swims a bit and the frames do what they should)…this is not necessarily a problem at other times of day, however. The frame of each piece creates a long (‘landscape’- oriented) picture on the left and a vertical (‘portrait’). The device could look a little contrived at a distance, but is very effective close in at competing for the viewer’s attention by offering two interfaces which, in terms of the usual sympathetic visual scan (the search for a figure to identify with in the picture) are unsatisfactory. The landscape images seem to be scenes in which a tiny figure may be just visible or churned into some mastication of strokes (too far), and the portrait segment gives us something of a face – a chunky silhouette, rope for hair, three orifices- that is more a smudge (too close).

Wendy Welch (writing in Monday Magazine) has suggested that the open expanses of colour in some of Meigs’ compositions recall Minimalist colour field painting. It seems an odd connection at first, except that looking back to seminal statements from that era (like an interview with Frank Stella and Donald Judd from the ‘60’s) one sees that so much of what defined that period was the sense of immediacy that was meant to break with European ‘composing’…The famous insistence on a presentation of ‘wholes’, rather than a representation incorporating parts. This meant no metered introduction into the space, no contrapuntal balancing of hard and soft elements, no narrative tension in the splice between figure and ground. The works demand the space around them and become figures themselves. As such, classic Minimal presentations (such as Stella’s Black Paintings) have a tendency to stare –there is no other word for it –which is to say, direct their mass toward the viewer in a way that can’t be deflected. Meigs has used devices in other work (paintings lined with reflective Mylar, compositions with light bulbs, title placards) that cast her work into the space around it, and her paintings stare as well.

What kind of stare? There is a delay from the recognition of these forms to the sense of their becoming fluent; they are clear but obtuse. This gap belongs to all kinds of indicators of ‘expressionist’ or emotive painting that came after Pop art, as potentially not (or not only) a way of depicting feeling, but its quotation. The nature of Meigs’ characters has often underscored this problem, as figures that don’t amount to identities: ‘resin heads’, ‘orifaces’, ‘Canadians’, and most compellingly, ‘dummies’. The figures are exactly that: projections, quotations, questions, or formulations, like De Chirico’s composite mannequins, tailors’ dummies and statue-shadows, or Guston’s Klansmen…A way to get the figure into the picture and yet not. A blank stare as no feeling is forthcoming. Although these comparisons have already risked being too varied and distracting, one important one is Munch’s foetal nerve-bundle from The Scream. The figure is not a person but an anecdote (“then I heard the scream”), a pictogram for a non-visual phenomenon. Not a reflection of the viewer or a summation of the artist, but a sign stuck between our space and the space of looking, pressed up against the former by the baldness of its facture and appended to the latter by the most passive of painterly drags.

J.L.