I'm one of those people who sometimes buy cheap prints of famous art at mall stores, but I don't feel so bad because I only buy Van Gogh. I had a large print of that Cafe Terrace scene for ages but then I got tired of it and abandoned it at my parents' house. Now I have the same size print of Vase with Twelve Sunflowers in my bedroom. If I tire of that, I think Wheat Field with Crows will be next. I love this painting.
"I trust you will find the enclosed satisfactory, but please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns." I type this sentence a couple of times a day at least. It would be more efficient to copy and paste it, or dictate it, but I find typing it out to be a strange form of meditation, or of penance.
Toured the brand-new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton the other week. There were five exhibits, with a nice mix of historical (Goya and Degas), Canadiana (Yousuf Karsh), and contemporary (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller), and an extra exhibit on display throughout the lobby of pictures by Edward Burtynsky of the construction of the gallery.
Careful readers will have noticed, as I certainly noticed, that of the six exhibits, only one half is by a female artist. That may be forgivable in the context of historical works -- the gallery can hardly change the fact that women didn't have equal opportunities to make art in previous centuries -- but they could have tried harder to make up for the disparity by featuring more female contemporary artists. It really bothered me as I made my way through the gallery. It bothered me even more when I noticed that the song playing in the gallery giftshop was "I'm Just a Girl" by No Doubt, although that in itself would bother me in any case. For shame, Art Gallery of Alberta, when a fifteen-year-old pop song comes off as more enlightened than your programming.
That complaint aside, I really enjoyed my visit. The Degas exhibit was lovely, showing mainly sculptures of horses, dancers, and bathing women Degas made to study movement for his paintings. Apparently he only showed a few sculptures during his lifetime, and they were met with disdain for being too realistic and thus vulgar.
The Goya exhibit featured dozens of small prints of various scenes of torture and assorted horrors during the French occupation of Spain in the early 19th century. It became a bit repetitive after a while, but I guess that's sort of the point: the endless, numbing evidence of the inhumanity of war.
The Karsh exhibit was my least favorite, although it was kind of neat to see a display on the image-altering techniques photographers used before Photoshop (like scraping, etching, and colouring the negatives to remove imperfections, alter shadows, etc.).
The Burtynsky photographs were gorgeous, stark and bright, framing lines of scaffolding and arcs of the gallery-in-progress against the Edmonton skyline.
My favourite exhibits were the Cardiff-Miller sound works. The first, Storm Room, was a recreation of an installation created in an abandoned dentist's office in Japan. Viewers stand inside a rectangular construction while the sound of a thunderstorm plays and water rushes over the windows. Standing in the "room", you get quite an intense feeling of being inside during an interminable storm. The original, mostly unfurnished room has been replicated to the last detail, including stains on the ceiling and scraps of paper with Japanese script (maybe a calendar?) tacked to the walls. I couldn't place my finger on exactly why, but the whole thing reminded me so, so much of Japan: something about the slight dinginess of the room, the coziness of it, and of the course the sound of the rain...
The second installation, The Murder of Crows, inspired by Goya's war prints, was set up in a large room on the top floor of the gallery, with 98 large speakers scattered through the room, and one old-fashioned megaphone horn in the centre in front of chairs arranged in a semi-circle. A woman's voice describing disturbing dreams and imagery alternated with various sounds such as an army marching, bird noises, traffic, music, all in a wave ebbing from quiet to cacaphony. Apparently each speaker plays a different track, so the experience shifts depending on your location within the room. I think we sat through an entire rotation of the installation, but I'm not sure how long it lasted, maybe about twenty minutes. It was mesmerizing.
1.
Care took sit syllable:
rub desert / sea common
hurt duck / atom them
Fire try, ring something, pick window.
(Were less knew each big most more)
Seat farm afraid how across dress?
We sudden be able sister,
turned which. Question number share,
replace in express.
Continue nine,
but into talk / prevent season.
Large liquid achieve system probable.
Encourage / brought liquid /
ocean ready / followed
Such release able told sun farm.
“Eye identify describe key difficult hurt born into.”
“Mr cool time tree verb”
City sat own -- rather near morning.
Reveal, inform, quiet, prove
(Hear prove fasten major by).
Quick cat supply appear attack verb!
Same, i avoid early born caught party step.
2.
length translates directly
to happiness –
ejaculate like a fountain
Wendy Walgate is the featured artist in the first issue of Branch, a new magazine of "art and words" (via CanCult). I enjoy this work quite a bit. It's so precious, yet so crammed. It fetishizes the darling ceramic animals as the same time as it devalues them. Also the disarray of colours. I dig colourful disarray.
Play at Being, Wendy Walgate
My Little Chair, Wendy Walgate
It's nothing new, but I couldn't resist linking.
And speaking of nothing new, here's my favorite April poem, posted here two Aprils ago.
