The Dominion - Max Liboiron

Abundance

hillarybain — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:28:33 +0000

Art and trash in Dawson City

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK–One woman stood on tiptoes, biting through fishing line for a full minute until she ‘released’ the paper raven. Another well-dressed woman bent awkwardly over a hard-to-reach shelf, rummaged around, and then held the garbage she found up to her nose to smell it, smiling in delight. A third person spent half an hour surrounded by garbage, left, came back and pondered the garbage for another twenty minutes before selecting a small part to take home.

Each of these people participated in Abundance: The Dawson City Trash Project in late August. Abundance was a gallery installation of a miniature diorama of Dawson City, Yukon, made entirely out of Dawson City’s trash. The installation was the raw material of a performance: each of the 1,000 pieces in the exhibition was available to be taken away by gallery viewers at any time during the show.

While my project engaged in environmental activism on a material level by moving objects out of the landfill, it also set out to achieve a loftier goal: the redefinition of garbage. If trash is generally defined as unwanted, disgusting, diffuse, useless, and unowned, I aimed to make it desirable, beautiful, unique and popular. My success would be measured by the rate at which my art installation disappeared, piece by piece, when people were invited to take the ‘garbage’ home. Locals were friendly when giving me lifts to the landfill to gather the trash I needed, or when donating their used teabags (post-waste-stream teabags are in pretty rough shape and usually moldy), but I wondered: Would they want their teabags back?

The gallery was concerned that perhaps there would be no art to show after the first few days. I was nervous that the gallery would be full until the end. My dream was an empty gallery. Predictably, something in between happened. During the opening, nothing could be taken to ensure that everyone had a chance to see the installation in its entirety. The next day, the audience could literally do anything they wanted, from taking the art, to playing with it, to damaging it. And they did.

People came in little groups and took three or four items at a time. The biggest and best items went in the first week, but not on the first day. Most participants touched the art, even if they didn’t take anything, and many started conversations with other “shoppers.” People searched, played, regarded the piece like a science display with plenty of pointing and comparison, picked pieces up and carried them around before putting them back, taking them away or just moving them around. Some people made messes. Some people stepped on things. To my knowledge, no one added anything. I made a bet with several people who worked in the gallery that no one would take the little plastic Christmas tree parts remodeled as trees or the bottle caps that represented the rivers because they were not sufficiently transformed into art and still resembled their source as garbage. I lost the bet. An eight year old took some trees — and many other pieces — to remodel a diorama in his room, and a visiting artist took bottle caps to hold glue for her art camp students.

In the end, of 1,000 pieces (not including bottle caps), around 500 were taken. Considering the fact that Dawson City’s population hovers around 1,000 and that the show occurred at the end of the tourist season, I believe solid waste management should reconsider its treatment of trash, in light of the fact that trash can be useful, desirable, and aesthetic material, with the potential of creating positive social interactions. The term ubiquitously used to describe Abundance was “fun.”

There is one aspect of Dawson City that made this project possible and a potential leader in the future of solid waste. Dawson City’s dump is not heavily regulated and scavenging in its landfill is not only viable, but occurs as a matter of course. Things are very expensive in Dawson, and there are plenty of good, free materials at the dump. There is even a “free store” at the Quigley landfill, where people can leave their still-serviceable items for others to use. In every other municipal dump I have visited, even if they have a free store, the gates are closed to scavenging. Dawson City, like many other rural communities, has a culture of scavenging and reuse. In many ways, the residents of Dawson City already know that rubbish is valuable, and Abundance: The Dawson City Trash Project was merely a coordinated and playful effort to make this fact measurably visible.

Abundance: The Dawson City Trash Project was made possible by the generous support of the KIAC Artist in Residence Program, the ODD Gallery, The Canada Council for the Arts, and a New York University Dean’s Grant for Student Research. The installation-performance ran from August 14 to September 23, 2008 at the ODD Gallery in Dawson City, Yukon.

Max Liboiron is an artist and Doctoral Candidate in Visual Culture at New York University. She would like to thank the residents of Dawson City for an informative and inspiring project.

Art&TrashParticipation

Art&TrashQuiggley

Equal Porn for All

Stuart Neatby — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:54:11 +0000

The 2007 Feminist Porn Awards

This past June, the second annual Feminist Porn Awards took place at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, reminding the public that the porn industry has a creative side beyond mainstream expectations. Chanelle Gallant, the manager of Good For Her, a feminist and trans-friendly Toronto workshop centre and sex boutique, spearheaded The Emmas (named after iconic feminist-anarchist Emma Goldman). “We created [the awards] in response to the difficulty we had communicating to our distributors what we wanted when requesting videos that represented actors of color,” explains Gallant. They weren’t looking for films that portrayed minority actors as sexually fetishized objects of desire, which is what they were getting. Contemporary feminism works to privilege the agency and, in this case, the viable and nuanced sexualities of marginalized groups. The staff members at Good For Her were frustrated over their inability to point their customers to a decent variety of “sensitive” queer, transgender, ethnic and even mainstream porn. So in an effort to track down and promote the pornography with positive representations of sexuality, gender, body type and ethnicity that they knew must be out there, they inaugurated the Feminist Porn Awards.

By holding pornography up to certain standards of artistic and representational integrity, The Emmas spotlight it as a form of contemporary cultural production. Because the porn industry is usually an invisible and unpublicized system—that nevertheless fulfils the demand of a large, generally un-polled audience—feedback between producers and viewers is difficult. If an enterprising viewer wants to research made-by-women-for-women porn on her own, for example, productive information is hard to come by. Just try googling "good porn." A viewer has little choice but to muddle through the publicly available options, which tend to be an education in restriction and subjugated gender roles rather than a representation of creative, sensitive, joyful, or empowering sexuality.

Fuelled by the need to establish a standard of ethical representations of women and other minorities in porn, Gallant came up with three criteria for feminist pornography. A film has to meet at least two to be eligible for The Emmas. One: women have to be substantially involved behind the scenes. Two: the film must promote and represent genuine female pleasure. Three: the film must expand on the traditionally accepted range of women’s sexual expression.

As for the opposite of feminist pornography, “any film made with female coercion” would qualify, says Gallant. She stresses that feminist porn is not a genre. You can’t identify it by pointing to certain aspects of storyline, sexual content, or its status as soft or hardcore. Feminist porn does not look like something in particular; it acts like something in particular. Because of this, there really is no “feminist porn community,” and the filmmakers met each other for the first time during the award ceremonies. Gallant hopes the annual event will help foster such a community, or at least collaborations between filmmakers.

For the second annual Emmas, the selections came mainly from Good for Her’s stock, since the store actively seeks pornography that represents minorities without exoticizing them. Gallant says they may post an open call for submissions in the future. The members of Good For Her’s staff, from the cashiers to the manager, served as the judges.

The store’s holistic approach to sexuality also extends beyond its selection of pornography. Not only does it offer transgender and women-only shopping hours, but Good For Her also hosts the largest number of sexuality workshops in Canada. Besides expected topics like “Muff Diving for Men: The Art of Cunnilingus,” you can also find “From Swinging to Polyamory: Guidelines for Open Relationships,” and “Sex for Survivors: Sensuality and Pleasure,” all on a sliding pay scale. Like the crews responsible for the films featured in The Emmas, the staff members at Good For Her make it their business to arm the public in its quest for healthy sexuality.

A Sampling of the Winners:

Hottest Group Sex Scene:
Under the Covers.
Candida Royalle; Femme Productions, USA.

Royalle is the founder of Femme Productions, a member of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), a founding board member of Feminists for Free Expression (FFE), and also works as a mentor for emerging female directors. Under the Covers is a comedy about women who work and inhabit the sex industry.

Hottest Trans Sex Scene:
In Search of the Wild Kingdom
Shine Louise Houston; Blowfish Video, USA.

Houston is a lesbian porn producer, the founder of Pink and White Productions, and the only queer woman of color currently with a distribution deal. She made her first film in 2005 in response to the difficulty she had recommending hot women-on-women sex to lesbian customers that wasn't made for or directed by men while she worked as a sex shop clerk. In Search of the Wild Kingdom is a humorous mockumentary about lesbian sex, complete with a dysfunctional film crew, spoofs on typical “lesbian” porn and “behind the scenes” footage.

Hottest Bisexual Sex Scene:
The Bi Apple
Audacia Ray; Adam and Eve Pictures, USA.

Audacia Ray is a sex-worker-rights advocate, the executive editor of $pread magazine, an art curator, a sex worker, and an academic. The movie’s official tag line is “New York girls like boys doing boys who like to do girls,” and includes a scene that illustrates Gallant’s mandate to expand the range of women’s sexual expression, in which a woman clearly derives voyeuristic pleasure from watching two men together in a shower. Both the depiction of male homoeroticism in a film not specifically meant for gay men and the portrayal of a woman being aroused by male homosexual activity while not physically participating are rare in mainstream pornography.

Hottest Gonzo Sex Scene and Hottest Diverse Cast:
Chemistry 1
Tristan Taormino; Adam and Eve Pictures, USA.

Taormino has a degree in American Studies, co-edited A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World, and wrote The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Pucker Up: A Hands-on Guide to Ecstatic Sex. Chemistry 1 is another genre-bender, this time in the vein of reality TV. The scenario: seven porn stars have a house to themselves for 36 hours. No script, no stunts and no bad “porn acting.” There are even confessionals.

For more information and for a full list of winners, you can visit Good For Her online at www.goodforher.com

Feminist Porn Awards 2007

Picture Perfect

hillarybain — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:42:51 +0000

How images are used to create specific relationships between people and the physical environment

In North American environmentalism, most images, campaigns and programs align with either Conservationism or Preservationism.

Conservationism’s goal is sustainability. It is a use-based approach that focuses on over-development and scarcity as the main problems facing the environment and the resources it provides. Technology and governmental policies are promoted as a means to regulate natural resources so they can be used by future generations. The main criticism of Conservationism is that ecological issues are not seen as the result of industrialization, neocolonial debts or economic structural adjustment policies, but are attributed to unchecked technological progress and patterns of misuse in general; it does not connect “patterns of misuse” with the economic and social structures that cause them. This would not be in the main interest of Conservationists, whose goal is to ensure continued consumer resources. Not surprisingly, this is the narrative upon which former US vice-president Al Gore structures his film An Inconvenient Truth.

Preservationism, on the other hand, focuses on wilderness as a realm of spiritual and aesthetic contemplation, separate from resource-use. It is based on the idea that without human interference, nature tends towards a state of balance, beauty and goodness, and that humans are separate from, rather than part of, the environment.

There are four popular image brands for “the environment”: The Happy Field, the Environmental Apocalypse, the Graph and the Logo.

If it falls into a Preservationist framework, the Happy Field is usually a photograph of “wilderness.” These beautiful, peaceful, humanless landscapes are based in the Romantic tradition of the sublime, which proposed that God could be seen in, or through, nature. This puts nature “over there,” away from humans, cities and pipelines, and does not account for urban nature, local communities, or toxic-nature anomalies (such as the use of genetic engineering to increase an endangered native population of animals).

When the Happy Field leans in the Conservationist direction, “the environment” may look like a child smiling at a tree, instead of a landscape without humans. Conservationism does not put nature “elsewhere” because humans are an integral part of environmental degradation and its solution. Humans are also seen as one of the reasons to overcome environmental problems; the mantra “save the Earth for our children” reinforces the objective that natural settings and resources be sustained for the next generation, so that their offspring can continue patterns of use and consumption similar to their own.

The Happy Field in either ecological narrative is usually an Edenic narrative because of the underlying motivation to “return” to a balanced, more sustainable nature, whose existence and possibility is hinted at in the image. It implies that long ago, things were serene; things were pure and clean. This surmises that at one time, probably before humans or at least before white humans, there was no conflict, no change, and by extension, no environmental history. This is, in fact, a very popular view.

At the other end of the visual spectrum is the Environmental Apocalypse, which frequently doubles as Climate Porn. Spewing volcanoes, billowing smoke, chunks of icebergs as big as cathedrals crashing into the ocean and trees being felled – never saplings, always redwoods – provide the Old Testament version of the sublime. Awe and terror with a hint of guilt are evoked by over-the-top, beautiful, devastating and gratuitous scenes of ecological “ravaging.” Gorgeous, slick images of environmental degradation may seem decadent and even unethical, but David Ingram, an expert in environmental imagery in cinema, notes that, “by presenting ‘worse-case scenarios’ as foregone conclusions, these images constitute a radical attack on the notions of progress held by big business, big government and big science.” Critique notwithstanding, one problem with Environmental Apocalyptic images is the promotion of the message that “we” are terrible and are to blame for climate change or pollution. "We" includes every human equally, when in fact the majority of global pollution is caused by a very specific segment of the human population: Western developed nations. Images of Climate Porn and Apocalypse also frequently depend on the pre-porn, pre-apocalyptic Virgin Earth as a necessary contrast.

Conservationists usually use the Graph, perhaps because the funding for graph-making scientists comes from organizations tied up in resource management, thus having a partisan interest in sustaining resources within current institutional frameworks. In displays like those in An Inconvenient Truth, time-lapse images and points on a graph become more than justrepresentations of a glacier in 1970 and again in 2000; they are images of global warming itself, unavailable to the naked eye. Graphs create visible relationships that implicate humans, time and the physical world in their trajectories, basically making them anti-Preservationist.

The Logo is usually an iconic, graphic representation of Preservationism. Swooping leaves, blue skies, white wind and hands holding tiny Earths all evoke the fragile environmental harmony, serenity and balance that the institution to which the Logo belongs is striving to provide for its clients. Similar Logos may be used for activist groups and international financial institutions, despite mutually exclusive environmental goals, values and programs. This is not to say that “nature” is intrinsically objective and provides common ground, but that “the environment” has become cinematically iconic and inert. It is a buzzword to rally behind and an unspecific anxiety of great import.

This is not to say that the environment is an illegitimate or vague fabrication, but that more critical and nuanced accounts and images of nature and our relationship to it are necessary for a workable model of sustainability.

The "Happy Field" Landscape

The "Environmental Apocalypse" Image

Strong Nudes

Fri, 26 May 2006 14:30:41 +0000

Sexuality and Disability

It should come as no surprise that people with disabilities have healthy sexualities and sex lives – but it does. According to Bob Gutler, a writer for Bent Magazine, this demonstrates "the power of a Culture Machine, which sells Sex while simultaneously limiting Eros to the smallest possible range of expression." Twelve per cent of people in
Canada are living with disabilities – both visible and invisible. Whether it's sex care workers specifically for people with disabilities, Bob's Flanagan's performance art and poetry, or Internet dating forums for people with 'life challenges,' people are speaking and acting out against the Culture Machine that excludes 'sexual minorities.'

One such person is Belinda Mason-Lovering, an artist who complicates the classical view, use, and revere for the classical nude with her photographic essay Intimate Encounters. The men and women Mason-Lovering pictures are people with physical, intellectual, learning, psychiatric and neurological disabilities. The project was collaborative in the sense that Mason-Lovering worked to create sets, compositions and finished images that represent elements significant to each person who posed. The "nude" in each photograph leaves the classical passive-object role prescribed to both nudes in art and people with disabilities. In the words of its creators, "Intimate Encounters explores the myriad connections between disability and sexuality. A sense of our sexual selves is as vital to our existence as the air we breathe. This is the pervading message present in every image in the series. The quest is to create images that 'tell a thousand words' and which reflect sexual diversity without tokenism."

Saul Food
Saul and Anonymous
Sydney NSW, Australia
2000

"Sexual Being is defined by spirit, not body. Exploring ways we best fit together is my career -- a clear choice of pleasure over prejudice."

"Sexual Being is defined by spirit, not body. Exploring ways we best fit together is my career -- a clear choice of pleasure over prejudice."
Saul is a sex worker and sex surrogate who works with men who have disabilities. Saul has been a sex worker for many years. He has worked in New Zealand and Australia. In the tradition of the ancient temple prostitutes, his career is his spiritual vocation -- "If someone told me I couldn't do this work anymore, I'd cry."

The Explorers
Titi Chartay and Carolyn Dearing
Sydney NSW, Australia
2000

"We must understand the past with clarity; there is nothing more heinous than dragging the scourge of fundamentalist belief systems into our future. Oppression in any form is an evolutionary dead-end."

A smiling veteran of Gay Liberation, the Vietnam Moratorium and Women's Liberation, Titi maintains her activism to this day. A Mardi Gras 78'er, she now applies her experience to the area of disability. A writer, musician and theatre artist, she has a strong practical streak that means she is as at ease repairing a car radiator as she is critiquing literary theory. She is a great believer in the subversive value of satire and maintains through her disdain of current dance music that she is not a Luddite. She has been fond of dinosaurs since childhood and of Motown, all her life.

Titi uses crutches in order to be mobile.

Caroline Dearing is a homeopath with a penchant for ballroom dancing. Her commitment to social justice issues and appreciation of the practical strategic thrust now sees her subverting the legal system from within. She believes that the "sledgehammer approach" of law is often the only way that the rights of the marginalized and the ignored can be respected and as such, is a strong advocate of law reform. She loves a groove to a Motown song and tolerates the presence of dinosaurs at home with whimsical forbearance.

Moment
David Toole with his partner Cherylee Houston
Manchester, UK
2002

"Until becoming a performer 10 years ago, I was not really aware of my body as such and the thought of someone finding me sexually attractive would make me laugh.

Recently, however, I have become happier with my body, having spent years giving permission to people to obviously stare when on stage......
Having a good relationship and an opportunity to share intimate moments has been something that has only occurred over the last few years of my life as people with a disability are for some reason not seen as a sexual being......"

David came into dance through workshops with CandoCo Dance Company in 1992. While working with them, he studied for a year at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, receiving a Professional Diploma in Community Dance in 1993. Six years of national and international touring with CandoCo followed, until 1999, when he decided to try new experiences. In 1995, David had his first taste of theatre when he played the part of Puck in Benjamin Britten's opera of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This was followed a year later with an appearance in the Sally Potter film The Tango Lesson, playing the part of the designer.
David's most recent performances have been with Graeae Theatre Company in 2000 and also 2001, playing the parts of Edgar in The Fall of the House of Usher and Deflores in The Changeling respectively. In the summer of 2000, he worked with DV8, creating and performing the piece Can We Afford This for the Sydney Arts Festival prior to the 2000 Olympics. David now works as a freelance dancer, actor and workshop leader.

David has no legs due to complications at birth.

The full series can be found at Intimate Encounters.

A supplementary list of practical guides and resources for sexuality and disability: The Illustrated Guide to Better Sex for People with Chronic Pain by Robert Rothrok and Gabriella D'Amore, 1992, Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability, edited by Victoria A. Brownworth and Susan Raffo, 2000, MS and Intimacy: Managing Specific Issues, by Tanya Radford, 2000, and Sex and Back Pain: Advice on Restoring Comfortable Sex Lost To Back Pain, by Lauren Andrew Hebert, PT, 1997.

For the more scholarly approach, there's The Sexuality and Disability Journal published by Springer-Netherlands. In one issue, articles range from "I Thought I was Less Worthy: Low Sexual and Body Esteem and Increased Vulnerability to Intimate Partner Abuse in Women with Physical Disabilities" to "In Vitro Effect of Ginseng Extract on Sperm Count."

Max Liboiron explores sexuality and disability through Belinda Mason-Lovering's photographic essay Intimate Encounters.

The Life of A Clearcut

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:52:19 +0000

John Haney collaborates with his environment

Ice Formation in Skidder Track, November 2005. copyright John Haney

It was "an especially obscene clearcut, one which came right up to the road," remembers John Haney. "I figured that I could either get mad or deal with it somehow - and there was one way I knew [how to deal with it]. So I started making trips out to this clearcut with my camera."

John Haney, a photographer currently living in St. John's, Newfoundland, has been working on a photographic series whose process is as noteworthy as its images. The process of the project has required a give-and-take between the artist and the life and agency of the project's subject: a New Brunswick clearcut.

"I knew that there had been countless pictures made of clearcutting, but I'm pretty sure nobody else has been stupid enough to haul around a 25-pound camera to do it with." Haney's camera is an Eastman Kodak 11" x 14" view camera dating back to around 1928, complete with focusing cloth.

"My first intention was simple: to document the devastation as blatantly as possible. I wanted to show something sublime — in the original sense of the word — displaying something both gorgeous and terrifying."

Haney was inspired by images he'd seen of the devastated landscape around Mount St. Helens in Washington State after it erupted; images in which all the trees were blown down in the same direction. He quickly realized, however, that his approach would have to be different. "First of all, there weren't any trees." The objects signifying the devastation, "which I had imagined might be lying around, were probably two-by-fours being used to build houses in Mississauga. Secondly, I was immediately attracted to something far less obvious. I kept getting drawn to subtle things, to the evidence of life growing back."

Haney decided to go back to the clearcut three months later to continue to document this process. "I wanted to see if there was some sign that beauty and life were returning. I realized that if I didn't find this, the project would be one-dimensional and would fall flat."

There have been thousands of documentary-style photographs depicting clearcuts and the devastation they cause, and this familiar mode of depiction was Haney's original intention. But the landscape began to show him something else.

Birch Suckers, November 2005. copyright John Haney

"Returning to the clearcut in November was interesting. Many of the leaves of the living trees had yellowed and fallen off, the ferns were brown and dying, and there was ice on the water that filled the skidder tracks. I felt that the place had changed — it was coming back slowly. So if there's an underlying motive to the work, it is to show how fortunate this is. Also humbling. It points to the poignant fact that all the environmental/ecological issues that we are concerned about in regards to the earth ultimately point to us.

"The truth of the matter is that we will only kill ourselves off, and take a handful of species with us. In time, this place is going to keep on going — and, in fact, it will come tothrive — without us. As I thought about this I realized that my original intent had actually been turned on its head. That my pictures weren't an epitaph for a forest, but rather for humans – for us."

It wasn't that Haney's images had become less political – Jacqueline Rose, a feminist film critic, states that all images are political. These images of a clearcut landscape go beyond the already familiar political images of outrage that have no relation to its opposite: the equally ubiquitous and romanticized painterly landscapes of rebirth and salvation. Haney's interaction with this place and an audience's interaction with the images push careful observation into a more nuanced political-geographical-cultural-natural space. This space has an integrity — not borrowed from moralizing "nature," but from a narrative of observation. This space is more complex but also more simple in its decay, growth, re-growth, shift and pull. The space is hybridized by the passage of machines, not destroyed by them or triumphant over them. The space is a collaboration of events that have taken place within it, including Haney's photographing of it. This multiple collaboration is the subject of Haney's work.

Ice Formation in Skidder Track, November 2005. copyright John Haney

"I made a photograph of a skidder track [a skidder is huge, log-hauling machine], whose tires had made a pair of deep trenches in the ground. It was one of the first pictures I made that looks, in some way, like a completely natural landscape. There's even a slight degree of abstraction in the way the ground is divided by a wedge of sky reflected in the water of the trench. " The image achieves a sense of dichotomy that Haney was aiming for. " It looks like a natural landscape, and it doesn't seem to bear any traces of humanity, except for the fact that, in actuality, the whole landscape is a human landscape; it was made that way by machines, and is now left to its own devices. There is no obvious evidence that one is looking at a ruined landscape, except that the entire subject of the picture is a product of that ruining."

Haney hopes these photos will provide a space for studied inspection of a place that usually doesn't get a second look. " I don't necessarily expect people looking at the pictures to go through the same stages of thought that I did, which is to say, to begin with anger, then come to wonder, then arrive at epiphany. However, I do hope that viewers will be able to get a sense of the slow and considered approach of photographing the clearcut with a view camera, and that they will afford the pictures the same consideration, paying attention to the small and interesting details in a huge, chaotic mess of a landscape. I think that there is a quality about the pictures that speaks of process — both the processes of method and thought, and the slow process of renewal."

The first public showing of the work, currently with the working title Clearcut, will be at the Emerson Gallery in Berlin from July 12 to 22, 2006. Images are currently available at www.johnhaney.ca/clearcut.

Max Liboiron speaks to photographer John Haney about the process of art. Slow down and take a second look.

Card Carriers

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 22:20:53 +0000

Artist's Trading Cards (ATCs) are art for everyone

The only rules for ATCs are that they measure the standard card size and that they be exchanged for other cards.

There is a new currency on the market that measures 2 1/2 x 3 1/2" and can be made of anything from ticket stubs to porcelain. This creative currency's value is measured in communication, accessibility, and exchange, and is known as the Artist's Trading Card.

The only rules for ATCs are that they measure the standard card size and that they be exchanged for other cards. There is not money involved, no media restrictions, and sometimes, no Artists. The point of an ATC is that it can be made by anyone and that the exchange of them brings people together; cards are traded by mail, on the internet, or in face-to-face trading sessions organized throughout the world. In fact, if there is an elitism to be found in the practice, it is that some traders consider face-to-face trading to be the "only true" form of ATCs.

Issues of art versus craft, or of artist versus non-artist, or of commercial viability are mixed and defied in trading sessions. If done through the mail, a participant accepts the condition that anyone can make a card anyhow. And when it comes to trading, a similar attitude is adopted. Don Mabie, who is associated with trading sessions at The New Gallery in Calgary, says, "I have never refused to trade with anyone, and, in principle, I would not refuse to trade with anyone. We do get a number of non-artists that regularly attend and make most interesting cards."

The point of an ATC is that it can be made by anyone and that the exchange of them brings people together.

Mabie has collected some 8,000 cards, and keeps them all in binders in plastic sheets to facilitate trading. He stresses the importance of the social exchange of the trade above the material trade. "Traders look forward to attending the sessions to see each other and see what the new cards look like this month, to see what new approaches regarding ATCs have evolved during the past month. I have been trading for some eight years and it never ceases to amaze me regarding the endless creativity."

The movement has similarities to scrap booking, where collage, personal taste, and found materials combine to allow anyone a creative outlet. And like scrap booking, the commercial market has taken notice and slick anthologies and "how to" books as well as commercial starter kits have become available. While these aids do not jeopardize the exchange or loose rules that are the focus of ATC, they do tend to be formulaic in their recommendations for design, and romanticize the cards and the aesthetic.

The "real charm" of ATC is the diversity and freshness that comes from people creating miniature art without commercial or elitist constraints. There are not too many venues where Leonardo could be trading work with an eight year old while discussing the pros and cons of using duct tape versus glue guns in collage. The fun and social emphasis of the cards can make ATC a grassroots public art without the stratifications, elitism, and inaccessibility that more institutionalized forms of art can carry.

For more information or to find a group to trade with check out
Artist's Trading Cards, Artist's Trading Cards Meetup, Canadian Content, and The New Gallery

Max Liboiron looks at the issues raised by creative currency of Artist's Trading Cards.

Revaluing Value

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:01:24 +0000

The Condition of Copyright

The Department of Behavioural Investigation's No Copyright Seal.

Copyright laws have always been a contentious issue. These laws are designed to provide economic protection for persons' and businesses' "intellectual property", which is defined by the World Intellectual Property Organization as "…creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce." Copyright is designed for inventors, artists, writers, and musicians to ensure that they are compensated monetarily when their work is reproduced and/or distributed. As it applies to art, copyright reinforces the value of authenticity. It ensures that a particular image or sound can be designated as the original (i.e. authentic), and that any reproduction of these items will be designated as a copy. This hierarchy establishes the value of the original as the point of reference by which the value of a reproduction is determined. This relies on a scarcity model, which means that if there is more of something, it is less valuable in general. This gives the object a capital and hence economic value. Copyright laws rely on this presumption, and posit that the value of an idea is primarily measured in economic terms.

As tools for the reproduction and distribution of art become more available, this value has to be reformulated to account for the changing needs of artists and their audiences. In many cases artists are producing work in which the copy is of primary importance, or in which there is no original proposed at all. There is a difference in how such a product is valued - rather than valuing it as an object that can be sold, and therefore benefited from monetarily, the object's value lies in how it is distributed and used. If I write a book and I decide that it is more important for people to read the book than to pay for it, I formulate the value of the book as one of information. In a broader sense, I privilege the value of the book's content entering the public sphere rather than the potential monetary gains of its distribution. Copyright as it exists today is unable to account for these different expressions of value. It is diametrically opposed to valuing an object differently because it is designed to formulate value only in terms of ownership and authenticity. Intellectual property must be reevaluated and revalued by the artists whose work challenges its principles.

Artists Revaluing Copyright

by Max Liboiron

For artists who believe that copyrighting their work restricts viewers' access to it, and that accessibility is central to the success of their art, there exists a "No Copyright Seal." The No Copyright Seal can be obtained from a website and once put on a piece of intellectual property, "[ensures] that it cannot be copyrighted by any person, business or organization; not even you."

The seal itself comes from an interesting place: the Department of Behavioural Investigation, whose mission is "to provide everyone the opportunity to voice their dissent, dissatisfaction and disgust with their government, their community, and their daily lives." Sound strange? The DBI is actually a continuing art project that functions as a satirical yet serviceable institution (of the anti-institutional variety). Created by Lawrence Mesich, the DBI operates as a temporary office in art galleries, and sponsors workshops, instructional videos, and activity kits for viewers to use to protest issues such as community garbage, institutional uses of space, or surveillance cameras and privacy infringement. The pieces only operate if "volunteers" are copying and carrying out the plans outlined by the DBI. Not only is the DBI copyright free, it needs to be copyright free in order to function.

There are now multitudes of art and music projects that are based on anti-copyright ideas.
The band Negativland, which is just as much a conceptual art piece as a band, operates by appropriating sound, image, and text in a such a way as to just barely miss the requirement of fair use. They exist in the grey area of copyright laws in order to comment on both the laws themselves and the source materials they have appropriated. The term "culture-jamming" was originally coined by the group to explain their appropriation process. They now have a radio show called "Over the Edge" where listeners can "deposit their programming into the mix" by calling in. Negativland also "manages" the Intellectual property Fund of ®™ark (read: Art Mark). ®™ark an activist institution much like the DBI made by the same people who head The Yes Men (see November 6, 2004 issue), which funds "corporate products sabotage and intellectual property disobedience."

In an atmosphere of art and digital culture that is beginning to blur the boundaries between the gallery and the public sphere, and, more specifically, using appropriation and interaction as some of its primary functions, the idea of strict copyright is not only contradictory and inappropriate, but is also becoming cannon fodder for subject matter.

The DBI currently has a temporary office at The Staller Gallery at Stonybrook University, NY from March 5 to April 9, 2005.
You can get your No Copyright Seal at http://emedia.art.sunysb.edu/lawrence/dbimo.html

Negativland will play at "Open Ears," a festival of music and sound to be held in Kitchener, Ontario, from April 6 to May 1, 2005. Information on how to contribute to Over the Edge can be found at http://www.negativland.com/ote_live/

Max Liboiron looks at the Department of Behavioural Investigation's anti-copyright art movement.

Yes Means No!

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 21:38:21 +0000

The Yes Men dish up artistic critique to straight-faced corporate audiences

Yes-man Andy pitches his golden “leisure suit” control centre to textile executives. Visit the Yes Men website.

Batman and Robin have been replaced. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano have updated crime fighting to fit the times: they steal the identities of the rich and deliver crap burgers to the poor. They call themselves the Yes Men and they have been making some of the freshest, most effective art I’ve ever seen.

The Yes Men started out as an unanticipated addition to their Web site, GATT.org., which is a parody of the World Trade Organization's main Web site. As a result, unobservant people looking to contact representatives of the WTO for public appearances reached the Yes Men instead. And the Yes Men gave them exactly what they wanted: two men in business attire delivering PowerPoint presentations and debates expounding the benefits of an ultra-capitalist world economy.

They state: "Small-time criminals impersonate honest people in order to steal their money. Targets are ordinary folks whose ID numbers fell into the wrong hands. Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else."

In Tampere, Finland, Andy posed as the intended speaker and delivered the keynote address originally intended for GSO textiles representative Hank Hardy Unruh. He claimed that the American Civil War was history's most unprofitable and avoidable war, since slave labour would have eventually and naturally been replaced by cheap sweatshop labour. Andy delivered the lecture wearing a gold unitard "leisure suit," complete with a giant inflatable penis containing a monitor for the control of remote workers. The audience was polite and asked no questions.

In fact, even the most uncompromisingly fascist statements made by the Yes Men in various presentations received little more than well-bred applause. Despite a presentation about selling votes to the highest bidder, a petition to expedite the onset of global warming, and a comment during a debate about how private education will cause the children of anti-globalization protesters to think along the lines of the WTO, no mouths dropped. It seems that political rhetoric, especially in North America, has become perverted so that even an outright call for dictatorship, couched in appropriate corporate lingo, is accepted in stride. Mike and Andy set out to shock their audiences with the WTO's uncensored ideology, but instead were shocked themselves when audience members revealed their Orwellian acceptance.

The only presentation that was heard rather than swallowed by audiences was delivered to a group of economic students in Plattsburg, New York. The crux of the presentation was the WTO's partnership with MacDonald's to end world hunger by recycling Western consumers' feces into new burgers in developing nations. The students recognized the idea as racist, classist and disgusting. The session ended with the budding economists throwing things at the Yes Men. The Yes Men were proud.

In most cases, the Yes Men reveal their "true" identities in press releases following public appearances. After an address in Sydney, Australia, in which Andy informed a roomful of reporters that the WTO had decided to disband because it was doing more harm than good, several thousand notices went to media all over the world. Alliance MP John Duncan even brought the WTO's "newest development" to the floor in Parliament.

Mike Bonnano is a professor of Tactical Art Media in the United States. He has been performing his Identity Correction interventions since the 1990's. An earlier "piece" you might remember was the 1993 Barbie Liberation Organization, in which the BLO bought three hundred talking Barbies and G.I. Joes and switched their voice boxes. On Christmas day, youngsters found their Barbies saying "Dead men don't tell lies," and their G.I. Joe's confessing, "I love to shop!" If the goal of art is to reach the viewer in such as way as to prompt new thoughts and initiate change, then this type of interventionist performance is perhaps the most effective art form currently in use. Most art "sits on its ass in a gallery" and preaches to the converted, whereas the Yes Men present their work to the general public where political art is most needed. This type of art is like an interactive form of graffiti.

Their current target for Identity Correction is, appropriately, the Bush administration, an administration that solicits its support mainly through words and presentations (not to mention tax cuts). The spoof Web site accompanying the campaign against Bush is www.GWBush.com, with the tag line "drug free since 1974." As in their WTO presentations, the rhetoric on their Web sites is not easily identified as parody, since much of the language employed by international businessmen and politicians is empty of real meaning (for example, the concept of pre-emptive self-defense). In a press conference, George W. Bush responded to a question about the Web site by saying "There should be limits to freedom." It seems that the Yes Men are already scripting for the President of the United States.

Many of the Yes Men's adventures and appearances are well-documented on their Web site, www.theyesmen.org. They have also been featured in a new film called The Yes Men, directed by Dan Olman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith, whose previous credits include the 1999 Sundance Winner American Movie. The film has been viewed by audiences in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, as well as those in a number of American cities. If you are able to catch the film, please do - it is both hilarious and deeply disturbing; my favourite artistic combination.

When international gatherings of corporate executives (mistakenly) ask the Yes Men to be their keynote speakers, they are only too happy to oblige. Max Liboiron watches the results.

Drawing a Response

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 21:51:43 +0000

With simpler media, complex work appears

Marcel Dzama, "Untitled"

Mark Manders, "Self Portrait as a Provisonal Floor Plan"

Shary Boyle, "Untitled"

Suddenly, drawing is in. This new artistic trend has been publicized and sanctified by the great determiner of what's hot and who's who, the Whitney Biennial; by galleries across Canada and the US; and by the art sections in independent booksellers. Being excited yet suspicious of fashionable art is only natural. Has drawing become popular because the Art World has announced a new trend in taste, or is there another reason that so many artists are returning to this medium?

The answer is in the forms that many of these new drawings are taking. No longer do they fulfill former roles of sketches, preparatory studies, or documents of action. These drawings are finished pieces of work and show an affinity to popular illustration. Graphic design, architectural plans, scientific illustration, comics, and detailed diagrams are frequently appropriated. A natural assumption to make when artists are returning to a more direct medium such as drawing is that artists are reacting against the rise in the arts of "cold" scientific-electronic mediums. Yet the drawings are more of a hybrid between popular culture, computerized images, and high art than a reaction against computer-driven art. Julie Mehretu's main source material comes from computers and the Internet, for example. The appropriation of popular visual illustration is an appropriate of a language. Laura Hoptman, former assistant curator of The Museum of Modern Art's Department of Drawings, likens drawing to language, as "certain visual conventions are codified by mutual agreement and exist to ease communication." The drawings have something to say, and they use familiar, though distorted, media to communicate.

Mark Lombardi is best known for his attempts to communicate the complexity of corruption. His drawings are diagrams using circles and arrows, which he calls a narrative structure, "because each consists of a network of lines and notations which are meant to convey a story, typically about a recent event...like the collapse of a large international bank." Lombardi's work charts political and financial intrigue in a readable, recognizable map, but its strength comes from the dizzying sense of the flow of power and capital.

Like Lombardi, Julie Mehretu makes a type of map; she uses her computer and architectural samples to make massive drawings of beautifully chaotic cityscapes. Yet, because her source material is not organized geographically or chronologically, her maps are of places anywhere at any time (or no where at no time, depending on whether your glass is half-full or half-empty). Both Mehretu's and Lombardi's drawings use organized chaos to create a sense of vertigo.

Amy Cutler and Shary Boyle turn to alternate heroines in their cartoon-influenced narratives. The characters in these drawings are usually hybrid human-animals, or human-objects, and the accompanying narratives are frequently humorous and subtly ominous. Marcel Dzama's creepy anti-heroes enjoy a semblance to horror movie and pulp romance characters, together at last. All three artists, especially Cutler and Dzama, are enjoying a popularity usually reserved for Star Trek; their narratives depict the grotesquely heroic and the lightheartedly uncanny.

There are also artists such as Matthew Ritchie who use both diagrams and character-narratives. Ritchie's enormous pieces have rules and game strategies that are meant to map an imaginary (though somewhat similar) world from its genesis, and have characters and themes that recur throughout his art. His work encompasses more than a viewer can take in, and his "maps," unlike Lombardi's, are not meant to be easily read, but like Lombardi's give an overarching sense of interdependency and saga.

All of these artists are using the established language of popular illustration to create a rational plan of an alternative world. They are drawing alternative explanations and new mythologies for us. But alternative to what? New to what? Each work sidesteps established myths of normalcy. Lombardi's work runs under the facade prepared by market leaders to retrieve an original lie. Mark Manders, Amy Cutlers, and Shary Boyle tell a tale parallel to reality, but recovered, like Narnia. With our continent's current brand of political turmoil, the drawing trend is well timed.

Julie Mehretu, "Retopistics"

Mark Lombardi, "George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stevens, c. 1979-90"

Suddenly, drawing is in. Hype of the moment or a new art movement? Max Liboiron finds diagrams, computer inspired illustrations, and twists on pop culture in New York.

Zen and the Art of Gender Maintenance

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 03:25:07 +0000

Are you really in love? Does your best friend really hate you? Are you an annoying person? There is now a new quiz on the market to help with an even more important question: What gender are you, really? Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook uses the artistically neglected literary form of the women's magazine quiz to address the realities of gender politics. Since the demographic that magazine quizzes usually address is overwhelmingly female, and a fairly specific spin on female at that, Bornstein's quiz creates a tension within women-focused "literature". She uses a gender-constructed form to deconstruct gender, showing that the gender is completely constructed to begin with. The architecture of her argument is subtle and humorous. Reversing expectations, be they of literary format or gender, is what Kate Bornstein does best.

A sample from the quiz:

Your Gender Aptitude, Section I: Assumptions

Which of the following most accurately describes you?

A. I'm a real man.

B. I'm a real woman.

C. I'm not a real man or a real woman, but I'd like to be.

D. None of the above. I'm something else entirely.

Your Gender Aptitude, Section VI: No Gender

Which of the following statements most nearly matches your idea of gender?

A. Gender simply is. If you don't like yours, get over it.

B. I've been working on my own gender for a long time, and I'm getting to the point where I may actually have made my own.

C. I think there's a lot about gender that we don't know about yet, and I wonder why that might be.

D. Gender is what happens to me when I get dressed in the morning.

Which of the following statements most nearly matches your feelings about gender?

A. My what About gender?

B. I guess my feelings range anywhere from anger and frustration to happiness and exhilaration.

C. Gender confuses me. I don't know why it is the way it is.

D. I feel… I feel… I feel a song coming on!

Have you ever experienced the nature of gender itself?

A. No, it's not polite to question Mother Nature.

B. I question the nature of my own gender, but gender itself? No.

C. I question gender, but I get the spooky feeling that I'm not supposed to do that.

D. The nature of gender? Isn't that an oxymoron?

Have you ever killed off part of yourself you didn't like?

A. There's really nothing about myself I don't like.

B. I've let go of parts of myself I haven't liked, yes.

C. Sometimes. Are you saying that applies to gender?

D. Oh, baby, wanna see where I stashed the bodies?

Why are you reading this book?

A. I certainly didn't choose to read it, that's for sure.

B. I think it's important to try to understand what it is that other people experience.

C. It's been dawning on me that these might sort of be, well, my issues, too.

D. Because nearly everything else about gender has been positively dreary, darling.

At the end of the quiz, you can check your "gender aptitude" score that can range anywhere from "Gender Outlaw" to "You're Captain James T. Kirk!" Yet the quiz is just a vehicle for Kate Bornstein's message and explorations of gender. Transgendered activism is becoming increasingly visible. Sex-change operations have come under attack for staying in the constraining dichotomy of the female or male options, and the link between transgendered people and homosexuality has been all but severed. A call for people to acknowledge a spectrum or pyramid of genders has begun in the transgendered movement, bringing attention to babies born with ambiguous genitalia, Native American berdaches, and other physical hermaphrodites as proof. This spectrum is reflected in Bornstein's quiz (not to mention her own lifestyle); there are four choices per question and an accumulative "grade" at the end. None of the "grades" mention what type of gender you might be acting out, but they do evaluate your comfort and flexibility within that role. My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely was published in 1998, but is still contemporary as Oprah Winfrey is interviewing transgender children; as dozens of AIDS ceremonies and protests were timed with Ronald Reagan's funeral procession; and as the trial for the killing of transsexual teenager Gwen Araujo comes to a close. Yet whether reading the book for a taste of current affairs or for personal interest, you will find yourself asking questions not only about the construction of gender, but about what else might be bogus and spoon-fed to our culture.

As a writer and performance artist, Kate Bornstein's most recent work is a play entitled Strangers in Paradox, which opened in March 2003. She is currently touring and performing various works such as "Too Tall Blondes Do Texas," and "On Men, Women and the Rest of Us," which correspond with informal discussions, lectures, workshops and other innovative educational exchanges.

The quiz mentioned here is just a small part of My Gender Workbook.

If you would like to take the Gender Aptitude Test, go to: http://cydathria.com/ms_donna/ga_test.html

- by Max Liboiron -

Satire Under Attack

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:02:00 +0000

When looking silly is worse than looking evil

Promotional photo for A New War by Gim Hope.

Webster's Dictionary credits literature as the traditional medium to use "trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm to expose and discredit vice or folly." Yet in today's multimedia world, satire has entered the mainstream via theatre, television, music, newspaper cartoons, radio, and the internet. Satire is an important tool for those frustrated by the corporate, sponsorship, and political agendas mixed up in their media. The Toronto Star notes that "Satire is being used by a hungry young generation as a way around the converged mainstream news media -- which often no longer serve as watchdogs."

In Canada and around the world, playwrights and webmasters are the leaders in providing an international audience with new sources of satire. RealStupidNews.com, PaulMartinTime.ca, and TheSweatShopNews.com are all recent satirical e-media sites. A Weapons Inspector Calls, by Justin Butcher (also playwright of The Madness of George Dubaya), A New War, by Gip Hoppe and Right as Ron by Judd Bloch are brand-new plays hitting theaters around the world. Both mediums are receiving their share of flack.

In the arts and in the growing satirical news genre, lines are being drawn by those whose vice or folly are the subject of unwanted wit: PaulMartinTime.ca received threats of lawsuit; Right as Ron has been denounced by the Smart family, whose family history the play satirizes.

Roy Clarke, a Zambia resident of 40 years and Post newspaper employee, is, as of January 6, awaiting the judicial review of the deportation order issued following one of his recent news columns. The piece used jungle animals to satirize a corrupt government. The Telegraph in Clarke's country of origin, Britain, notes that "charges of racism against him are unconvincing, not least because he has been married to a leading black Zambian women rights campaigner, Sara Longwe, for 35 years."

"I have been writing the column for around seven years now and what puzzles me is that this latest piece does not differ greatly in form, style, or content from what I have written before," Roy Clarke said.

Two weeks ago in Mumbai, India, playwright Kedar Shinde's TV satire prodding Deputy Chief Minister Chhagan Bhujbal's alleged scam role was aired. In indignant solidarity with Bhujbal, a group of workers belonging to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) attacked Zee TV's offices and employees. Although he has previously been pressured to resign for many reasons (such as the very dealings being parodied), it was this act of violence on his behalf which finally prompted his resignation "on moral grounds." The Mid-Day Mumbai is hailing the sketch as the "the TV satire that brought Bhujbal down," and its sequel has already aired.

In Texas, "Stop the Madness" is on trial for the third time, now in the Supreme Court. In this mock article, printed November 11, 1999, by the Dallas Observer, a six-year-old girl is arrested for the "terroristic threat" of her report on the picture book Where The Wild Things Are. Fake quotations were attributed to two genuine public officials, court-at-law judge Darlene Whitten and her husband, district attorney Bruce Isaacks, who have taken the paper to court.

The main problem according to Whitten and Isaacks is that the parody could be confused with reality. But when reality can become so bogus and illogical as to be mistaken for farce (with false quotations like "It's time for you to grow up, young lady, and it's time for us to stop treating kids like children"), the problem isn't copyright or liability. It's the panicked and hypocritically illogical power being parodied in the first place.

When looking silly is worse than looking evil
Webster's Dictionary credits literature as the traditional medium to use "trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm to expose and discredit vice or folly." Yet in today's multimedia world, satire has entered the mainstream via theatre, television, music, newspaper cartoons, radio, and the internet. Satire is an important tool for those frustrated by the corporate, sponsorship, and political agendas mixed up in their media.- by Jane Henderson and Max Liboiron -

A Serious Lack

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 21:38:06 +0000

American Visual Artists and Imperialism

None of the "Justice Project" finalists dealt with Bush's conception of justice.

I have to admit that the abundance of American flags bothered me when I first came to New York a few months ago. And the bumpers stickers saying 'God Bless Our Soldiers' didn't ease my mind much, either. But I breathed a sigh of relief whilst walking past the offices of the faculty of my fine arts program; on almost every door was an anti-war poster from the internet. Relieved, I set out to find what the American professional visual arts community was saying about the war. Things went downhill from there.

My search began in the hundred or so galleries in New York City's Chelsea district. No mention of the war anywhere. So I emailed four of the city's galleries known for more 'alternative' shows. No luck there. Was I frustrated? Not yet; almost all of the artists and art educators that I had come into contact with since moving to New York are very critical of Bush's foreign policy. I was sure that some Americans were making art about what was so passionately on their minds. Isn't that what art is?

I came across an outdated call for submissions from The Justice Project, "a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fighting injustice and to creating a more humane and just world".

The website's gallery features the young winners in video, animation, and graphic design medias. Featured are a pro-life animation clip, a lot of anti-gun and anti-nuclear graphics, clips that request the abolishment of the death penalty next to clips demanding that murderers are not let out of jail... And a graphic lamenting the lost American soldiers in the two recent (and continuing) wars. Whether or not there were entries that were critical of Bush's idea of 'justice' is impossible to know; if there were, they were not chosen as finalists by the Justice Project's jury.

My last hope resided in the recent Whitney Museum of American Art's show "The American Effect." The catalogue's forward by Maxwell Anderson was promising: "How those who question our policies and values perceive us is the most urgent question we face in a nation in search for security, and in this exhibition we look at artists to teach us something about ourselves that we cannot learn from isolated introspection." If the New York professional art world was silent on the war issue, at least one can depend on the international artistic community to speak out! Out of forty-seven artists from thirty countries, not one had a direct reference to the war in Afghanistan or Iraq. The gallery tour guide defended this lack by saying that the pieces were chosen before the war on Iraq started. But the situation remains ludicrous: a 'contemporary' exhibit claiming to represent the world's view of America fails utterly to represent the world's most current view of America.

I left feeling enraged at the apparent lack of concern, awareness, and critical thought on the war by American visual artists. When blatant opportunities arouse for commentary, the main issue was left out entirely. I ran to my studio to do something about that.

To be fair, not all American visual artists are skirting the issue; Susan Sontag spoke out against the war in Afghanistan the minute Bush proposed it. She was nearly stripped of her citizenship. There are surely artists in their backroom studios all around the world making art about the wars; the work just isn't easily accessible. And one can never forget the anti-war spoof posters on every faculty member's door; the internet is ultra-public and accessible. As far as the New York professional art world goes, I'll be the first to admit that it is more a business than a Art World, and the fear of losing one's job seems to be a greater issue than real justice projects or looking 'to artists to teach us something about ourselves.'

***

Two websites for anti-war posters: 1, 2

American Visual Artists and Bush's War
I have to admit that the abundance of American flags bothered me when I first came to New York a few months ago. And the bumpers stickers saying 'God Bless Our Soldiers' didn't ease my mind much, either. But I breathed a sigh of relief whilst walking past the offices of the faculty of my fine arts program; on almost every door was an anti-war poster from the internet.

What's the Art For?

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 20:11:28 +0000

Does anyone else find it odd that after 17,000 years of accumulating examples of art, people are still asking, "But is it art... what is art?" Can't we answer that question by now?

Science has been around for as long as art has been, but you never hear anyone ask, "But is it science?" One difference between the two is that while all former forms of art stay valid, only the most current form of science is "right." Renaissance poetry is still valid; measuring someone's head to determine his criminal tendencies is not.

One of the most recent ideas in art is that anything can be art. This was popularized by Marcel Duchamp (whom you might know as the guy who put the urinal in a gallery). His urinal declared that if an artist decides that an object is art and it's placed in an art space, then that object is art. A rebellion emerged (and is still alive and healthy today) against Duchamp's "readymades," but it's too late - the urinal stays. While you may or may not like this, it has been added to the accumulated ideas of what art can be.

So is it art? Yes. But still, what is art? Basically, from the cave paintings until tomorrow, art is a way of relating findings. In science, you investigate your surrounding world -- investigate the tendency for people to fight one another, or how the eye sees the colour blue-- and relate your findings and analysis in charts, essays, and numbers. In art, you investigate the world around you -- the tendency for people to fight one another, or how the eye sees the colour blue-- and relate your findings and analysis in paint, poetry, or sound. Art is an expression of experience: Duchamp expressed his ideas about the power of the artist and the limits of art with his urinal; striped paintings investigate colour relations; randomly pulling words out of a hat to make poetry expresses the subconscious (apparently).

If you find yourself confronted with something that you suspect is art but you aren't sure ("there's this big rusted metal thing in the courtyard at work. It's huge and long and I have to walk all the way around it to get my lunch"), try to figure out what it's investigating. Maybe you'll like it. Maybe you'll find that striped paintings aren't so "pointless" after all.

So it's all art. Whether you like it or not is another question entirely.

After 17,000 years of accumulating examples of art, people are still asking, "But is it art... what is art?" Can't we answer that question by now? - by Max Liboiron -

Photons and Formaldehyde: The New Art-Viewing

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 20:13:05 +0000

photo by Erin Brubacher

In a world where crushed metal, urinals, and stripped paintings all parade under the banner of "fine art", many have cried out against the alienation of the viewer by contemporary art and art-systems. In reaction to this (or maybe just due to a seemingly inevitable historical trend), a new type of art and art-viewing has arrived, based on the all-too-familiar behaviours of consumerism. Some galleries have adjusted to this new style, and others are struggling to control it.

Not surprisingly, the most famous piece of art in the world is also the most consumed. Sliding into fame thanks to mass mention and production of her image, the Mona Lisa receives 1.5 million visitors every year. These visitors come to see the Original Masterpiece in the same way that others flock to Graceland. (Originality is the basis of tourism). They can be seen walking briskly, then jogging, then sprinting (picture it) down the Grande Galerie towards their goal, stopping only when the queue demands it. These visitors display a characteristic behaviour of pilgrims once united with their Object of Reverence; they desire a souvenir or memento that will contain an iota of the experience. Several times a second a flash from a camera goes off, regardless of the signs advising otherwise, the guards outnumbered and ineffective. This act of veneration becomes inappropriate and even grotesque when one stops to consider that every day, billions of powerful photons from the flashes are bludgeoning the Mona Lisa to death. She is looking positively green (the colour of her under-painting showing through) and her cracks are wider and more noticeable than those of her contemporaries. This year is her 500th birthday. I doubt she'll be around for another 500 at this pace.

The Mona Lisa's stardom has been a sort of happy accident for the Louvre, but some galleries base their collections on stardom. London's National Portrait Gallery has the sitter's name --in bold -- on the top of the identification card. The artist's name falls somewhere near the bottom, after the medium and dimensions of the piece, as an afterthought (how shocking!). Also treated as secondary are elements of composition and technique -- all that humdrum stuff. The visitor's energy is focused on how many names she recognizes, and on putting faces to these names. The gallery is Vanity Fair incarnate: it is a market of fame (shop as you please). Wonderfully, there is a portrait of Joan Collins by Andy Warhol done in the same style as his screen-printed "Marilyns". (Incidentally, he also did a screen-print of the Mona Lisa, called "Thirty Are Better than One".) Warhol made these prints in response to the mass packaging of celebrity images and their subsequent de-personalization and commodification. Whether Warhol made these prints as a critique or celebration is anyone's guess. (A man who sorted his mail by smelling the stamps is hard to understand.) Likewise, it is up to the viewer to decide whether the Portrait Gallery as a whole critiques or celebrates.

Cashing in on celebrity status is also the mainstay of the Saatchi Gallery, whose brand-new location places it smack dab in the middle of a tourist strip in London. The gallery houses the stars of the "Sensation" exhibit, which was loudly and publicly branded as scandalous by the delicate US media. Now who wouldn't want to see what America has labelled indecent?! Most visitors pay their eight pounds to see if the art is really as disturbing as it is reputed to be. The Saatchi Gallery realizes where its marketing power rests; it promises "Unreserved Damien Hirst at the Saatchi Gallery" on tickets and flyers. (Damien Hirst does paintings of coloured dots. Luckily for his career, he also cuts up livestock and puts the pieces in formaldehyde.) Visitors are not disappointed. They see the famous cut-up cow, the black Madonna with vaginas and elephant dung, the portrait of a serial killer painted with children's hand-prints.... But they also see less notorious pieces -- good pieces. All of it is quite accessible. The pieces are not in a "white cube", but in a grand old office building, complete with wood panelling; nor are the pieces behind glass (though you can no more touch these celebrity pieces than you can grab the rear end of a movie star -- both have bodyguards). And if you're really feeling alienated by a work, a helpful card beside it will give you justification for its existence. Saatchi, an advertiser and marketer by trade, effectively tricks people into his gallery and then makes them thankful for it.

While these galleries are not collapsing the ranks between "high" and "low" art, they are certainly mixing and matching the traditional audiences that went with those labels. The elite can no longer patronizingly assure the "untutored masses" that the work of the masses is just as good as the work of the elite (no, really, it is. I promise), because now (oh crap!) it's the same work. And those that grumble "my kids could do that" can now take their children to galleries and show them what to aspire to. The elite and the general public may still be resentful of one another when it comes to art, but now they have to do it side by side. The catalyst to this blending, this change in art-viewing, has just been effective marketing. It's all a little bit grotesque and a little bit amazing.

Max Liboiron has spent the last few months travelling in Europe. Along with Jane Henderson, she will be taking on the job of arts editor of The Dominion in September.

In a world where crushed metal, urinals, and stripped paintings all parade under the banner of "fine art", many have cried out against the alienation of the viewer by contemporary art and art-systems. In reaction to this, a new type of art and art-viewing has arrived, based on the all-too-familiar behaviours of consumerism.- by Max Liboiron -

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: Recent Works

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 23:43:01 +0000

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, U.K.

Canada's current Big Shots in the international art world, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, have brought credit, fame and funding to the previously "suspect" genre of sound art. Why? Because they're so dang good. An exhibit of "Recent Works" is running at the illustrious Whitechapel Gallery in London, June 7 to August 24, 2003.

While the exhibit has four pieces, two lag behind as more typical of sound and video art ("House Burning", 2001 and "The Berlin Files", 2003). The other two are strictly audio, and are of the variety that put Cardiff and Miller on the map. "The Missing Voice [Case Study B]" (1999) is an "audio walk": you put on headphones and take a walk as directed to you by the recorded voice, turning left when told to, looking right when told to. Sometimes you even see the people the narrator is describing ("there is a man in a suit in front of you now"), which is both spooky and satisfying. The headphones make street sounds that blend with those in your actual environment. "Forty Part Motet" (2001) is an indoor audio piece billed as a "re-working of Spem in Alium Nunquam habui, 1575, by Thomas Tallis".

Janet Cardiff is the creative force behind the pieces, while her husband, Miller, is the technician. (He is also the person wearing the woman's clickity-clack high heels on the audio walks.) Describing their audio work does not do the experience justice; it would be akin to reviewing an orgasm as "really good". But I can endeavour to describe how the experience comes about.

At the most basic level, art is not about getting it, but about getting "you" in "it." In other words, art doesn't work unless there is a viewer interacting with it. The magic of Cardiff and Miller's work is that they take the effort out of that interaction; actively experiencing sound is much easier than actively experiencing a painting. The work is also temporal. (The audio walk at the Whitechapel is forty minutes long. When was the last time you spent forty minutes on an art piece and still liked it at the end?) The strength that the audio pieces have over the video pieces is that with music or street sounds, you are in the piece, while with video, you are watching something else.

Especially in the audio walk, your reality is blended with Cardiff's. The street sounds on the headphones are difficult to differentiate from the street sounds coming from around you. (On my walk, the police station was playing Arabic festival music.) The narrative the artist/character spins may or may not tickle your fancy, but the experience of following directly in someone else's footsteps, in her experience, is a momentous feeling.

"Forty Part Motet" is by far the most powerful piece in the show. At Whitechapel, speakers are arranged in a circle around the room on stands. (In the Venice Biennial, the speakers were in a chapel.) Each speaker plays the recorded voice of one singer performing "Spem in Alium". You can walk around the room experiencing different aspects of the song. It's a simple concept, but either due to the actual music or due to the intimacy that develops as you stand beside each singer's "mouth", the piece is phenomenal. When the singing ends, the voices begin to clear their throats or gossip about the organist, subtly turning the singers into people who are singing (again, a simple but profound achievement), increasing the sense of intimacy.

It's no small wonder Cardiff and Miller were chosen, new genre and all, to represent Canada in the 2001 Venice Biennial.

Max Liboiron is a visual artist and critic. She has been working and living in Ireland for the past year; in the fall, she will be studying in New York.