SideStreet Review Issue 6 "Money" by Sebastian Frye

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THIRD PRINTING

Side Street Review Winter 2010 EDITORIALS UNWRAPPING THE RITUALS OF CHRISTMAS • JAMES GARTLER SPACE AS ADVERTISEMENT • PHIL ROBERTS THE ARTIST LEAVES A MARK • SEBASTIAN FRYE ECONOMICS 101: INVESTING IN ART • CALVIN SCHNURR THE BOHEMIAN LIFESTYLE • AARON W. GRAHAM PROFILES MORTON ROSENGARTEN, ROGUE SCULPTOR • CRYSTAL CHAN YANN MARTEL • MIA HERRARA JUSTIN LALANCETTE • ALAN BOURASSA VIKKY ALEXANDER, LAYERS OF REFLECTION • JES BUSCH JIM HANSEN, PRIVATE I • JESSE WALKER JOHN HALL • LAURA PELLERINE THE REBEL DOLLAR, IN CONVERSATION WITH PHILOSOPHER JOSEPH HEATH • ROBERT WRINGHAM

REVIEWS AN AFTER FOUR CHRISTMAS AFTER FOUR • JIM BREEN

MUSIC AND WATER FOR ALL GERRIT CHRISTIAAN DE GIER, ORGEL • KATHERINE ROCHESTER M.M.V. AUKE VAN DER MERK, TROMPET

FIELD GUIDE TO LONELINESS BEN SURES • JIM BREEN

THE GHOSTWRITER • JOHN GOULD

FOLK TALES MATT LIPSCOMBE • LAURA BREEN

DAYS OF SAND HELENE DORION TRANSLATED BY JONATHAN KAPLANSKY

INVENTIO ERIC QUIST • KATHERINE ROCHESTER

• JOHN GOULD

FROM THE FOUR WINDS HAIM SABATO TRANSLATED FROM HEBREW BY YAACOB DWECK

• SUSAN MERSKEY

MILESTONES INVENTING IDENTITY: THE PERSONAE OF DAVID BOWIE & ANDY WARHOL • REID McCARTER

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: SEBASTIAN FRYE • CONTENT EDITOR: CHANCY GRAIN • REVIEWS EDITOR: JOHN GOULD COVER PHOTOGRAPH OF MORTON ROSENGARTEN BY CHANCY GRAIN SIDESTREET REVIEW IS PROOFREAD BY: NADINE BACHAN

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

Unwrapping the Rituals of Christmas James Gartler

Montreal native James Gartler writes out of an instinctive passion for all things arts related. His thoughts on animation, theatre, film, television, opera and comics can be found in the pages of Side Street Review, C&G Monthly, Lucid Forge and at the Rover Arts website

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (1966)

A VERY WISE PERSON ONCE TOLD me “If you want to know what someone’s intentions are, look at their feet.” It took me a moment to process exactly what that was supposed to mean, but the expression has served me well in the years since. For instance, as much as someone may talk about quitting smoking, if they keep buying cigarettes, you know they’re just not there yet. Or, if they continually reschedule your plans to meet for coffee, they’re probably not as game as they claim to be. Bottom line: it’s not what you say but what you do that really counts. At this time of year, then, as we slip into our winter boots and point our feet directly towards the nearest mall, lists in hand and budgets weighing heavily on our minds, I can’t help but wonder if the notion of “goodwill towards men” is just more lip-service, however well-intentioned. Has December devolved into a mad month of dangerous over-indulgence, at the cost of our own happiness? The jaded, knee-jerk response would be an emphatic “Yes!”, but let’s not rag on Christmas just for the sake of it. I’m not embarrassed to admit I love the holiday and all its rituals, from the lights, music and tree right down to the shopping. But there comes a point

in one’s life when you start to question the traditions you were brought up with, especially when what you observe with your eyes contradicts what you’re being told. Somewhere, somehow, the message is being lost. I blame How The Grinch Stole Christmas! We’ve all happily watched the Chuck Jones-animated classic year after year and committed most of the narration to memory. Recall then, if you will, the moment when the titular villain sees the villagers of Whoville joyfully embracing the arrival of Christmas morning in spite of having had all their presents, food and decorations pilfered the night before. It is in that moment that Mr. Grinch supposedly realizes the spirit of the season “doesn’t come from a store” and ultimately “means a little bit more”. Curiously, before that “little bit more” – depicted as a glowing beacon of light emanating from the town - can be defined in more precise terms, the Grinch returns all the goods and then everyone proceeds to “feast, feast, feast” in traditional holiday fashion, roll credits. Bit of a cop-out, don’t you think? If the lesson there was that Christmas could exist without the usual trimmings and trappings, they didn’t exactly paint a clear picture of how. In

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fact, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single example of yuletide entertainment that offers a stripped-down look at how Christmas can be enjoyed while forgoing the accessories and overkill (I don’t believe for a second that the Peanuts gang skipped out on their presents that year). Since everyone is quick to criticize it, though, why aren’t we breaking the annual cycle of over-consumption and hyperactivity? What’s stopping us from remaking the 25th into something more manageable? Perhaps the ego is to blame. You can’t deny an element of pride comes into play when trying to find the “perfect” present or preparing a meal that would put Martha Stewart to shame. We convince ourselves that we take on these Sisyphean challenges in an effort to bring joy to one another when our real motivations may not be quite so noble. I have this one friend, for instance, who feels obligated to spend at least five hundred dollars on his parents and sibling every year regardless of the fact that he lives off a modest income. He knows his family will shell out just as much to surprise him with the latest gadgets, concert tickets and clothes, so in his eyes, his generosity must equal theirs. Clearly, when it comes to Christmas gift giving,

no one wants to look like the cheapskate. This may be why another friend’s family has opted in recent years to adopt a Secret Santa approach. Everyone picks a name out of a hat in mid-November, and buys that person one gift under forty dollars in value. Nobody ends up with a laptop on December 25th, but then nobody goes in expecting one. Still, try being responsible for the only gift your sibling gets this Christmas and see how quickly you buckle under the pressure. High expectations and stress around the holidays aren’t just limited to presents, though. Dare to serve a light meal to your Christmas Eve guests and you’ll never hear the end of it. Sitting around a table and stuffing ourselves until we burst is a ritual that predates even the gift exchange. In our modern times, however, when we can easily go to the grocery store during winter and stock up on whatever items we need, is it really necessary to pack on the pounds as though nourishment will be scarce until the spring? It’s all done in the name of spoiling those “faithful friends who are dear to us”, but there again, our reasoning is flawed. I don’t know about you, but the people I spend most of my holidays with are the people I see the least of the rest

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Left to Right: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (1966), Cornelius Krieghoff, The Blacksmith (1895), Norman Rockwell, Freedom From Want (1943)

of the year. And that’s not for a lack of wanting too, but again: watch the feet. If the only time of year our loved ones make an effort to be with us is the one time of year they’re expected to, how can that honestly be viewed as a true expression of love? Yes, everyone has busy social calendars and responsibilities, but aren’t the people who matter most to us the ones who make the time to be there regardless of the date on the calendar? Shouldn’t we all be reaching out to these friends on a weekly or even monthly basis? Many would argue “Christmas is the perfect excuse” for all these things, but therein lies the real heart of the matter: why is an excuse even necessary? Because, I’d wager, in spite of all the cell-phones and email accounts we have at our disposal, we aren’t really as interconnected as we might think. If we were, malls wouldn’t suddenly fill up come December with shoppers hoping to find a gift that makes up for the emotional distance created during the other eleven months of the year. So, let’s take a moment now and consider what it would look like if we reversed our position on Christmas. Imagine, if you will, what your feet would be doing if they weren’t transporting you from store to store or from six-course

meal to six-course meal. A December 25th without presents under the tree would negate much of the underlying competitiveness, expectations and resentment that can come with them, not to mention the credit card debt, stress and money spent on gas. Losing the tree altogether would certainly have a positive impact on our environment and probably spare an aching back or two the trouble of getting that accursed star positioned correctly at the top. Skip the six-course meal and suddenly people might have the energy to actually engage in conversation. Imagine – a day spent purely focused on our loved ones and the pleasure of being in their company! If this model sounds drastic, consider the phrase “live every day as though it were Christmas” and things can be taken a step further. If we did as this saying suggests in keeping with our present-day traditions, we’d all surely fall prey to financial ruin and suffer heart attacks within a couple of weeks. So readjust the picture and follow this logic: if the true meaning of the season is loving others – and that’s what we should be doing on a daily basis anyway – then maybe channeling all our attention into one 24-hour period negates the very ideals Christmas exists to promote. Maybe

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instead, December 25th should be a day like any other, stripped of all artificial niceties, expensive rituals and trumpedup meaning. Could it be that the end of Christmas would actually usher in an era where the spirit of the season is evenly maintained all year long? Consider: if not for your Uncle’s Christmas card (complete with an unsolicited, largely-fabricated summary of his children’s academic achievements and perfect marriage) you might actually grow curious enough about his life to pick up the phone or arrange a visit. The money saved on pointless Christmas office party gift exchanges could instead be put towards swapping out the cherry icecream-scented hand soap in the washrooms for something significantly less nauseating. Workaholic parents might make a greater effort to spend quality time with their children, who won’t be measuring their self-worth by the size of the pile of packages under the tree. Communities would likely donate more money to charity drives taking place in the late fall, rather than pinching their pennies for the sake of the holiday spending spree. And best of all – there would be no tacky Christmas carol remixes clogging the airwaves for two agonizing months.

Oh, yes, a world without Christmas could truly be a magical place. No more landfills crammed with red-andgreen, non-recyclable wrapping paper. No more desperate hook-ups between lonely singletons trying to avoid another round of “haven’t you met somebody yet?” questioning by relatives. No more shopping mall rampages or airports crammed with weary travelers. In it’s place, a more genuine, daily, do-it-yourself approach to good cheer and mutual respect without all the “noise, noise, noise, NOISE…!” Okay. Maybe that’s not the most realistic of expectations. But then again, it is the time of year to dream big. Until these new ideas gather some momentum, though, perhaps we’d better get ourselves over to the nearest shopping center and check out some gift ideas, just to play it safe. As a matter of fact, I seem to recall seeing a reasonably well-priced Canadian arts magazine at Chapters that looked interesting.

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

Space As Advertisement Phil Roberts

Phil Roberts is a 4th year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, majoring in Architectural Studies. He has travelled across Canada documenting the architecture and urban environments of the country’s most vibrant cities, which allowed him to create sixty7architectureroad.com, a site devoted to Canadian architecture and urbanism. His reading habits include books that cover a wide scope of topics and personalities. His main interest is the interconnectedness of architecture, media, politics and entertai ment in society.

WHEN SHOPPING, IT IS TEMPTING to become transfixed by discounts and new products, while relegating forms, shapes, openings and light to a “white noise” background. That background contributes to the subtle enjoyment of a space. Lingering in a space for a moment causes sounds, smells, vibrations and materials to influence the decisions and meanings created in that space. When one is aware of a space, one realizes that the architecture is in fact advertising that space. The prices and the products are not the only things there to capture your attention – the space itself is too. Regardless of the use of a given space, the point of transaction is not the physical exchange of money, but the acceptance of the branded lifestyle being offered. Thus, advertisement is the means to communicate a lifestyle which is echoed throughout all aspects of the space. Space is contrived to provide an experience to the customer. For example, Hollister provides a Southern Californian lifestyle. The exterior of the store extends from the wall of the mall corridor in order to look like a beach house on Santa Monica Beach. It even has wood shutters and Spanish roof tiles over the awning. As you enter the store, you are hit with burst of cool

wind from small fans right before being hit with the loud surf music. Two chairs are placed at the entrance allowing you to face the waves of people walking in the mall corridor, as if you were watching the tides of the Pacific Ocean. Before fully entering the store, it is clear the design is meant to demarcate between the corridor and the atmosphere of the store. The interior is decorated with surf boards, surf magazines, tropical plants, and references to‘dudes’ and ‘bettys.’ The grey wood flooring, rustic mats and the use of shutters over the shelving, provide continuity for the beach house theme. The staff are all dressed in similar clothing to what fits the Southern Californian image – even on a cold Canadian day. Furthermore, even the personalities of the staff, of diverse backgrounds, seemed to be closer to Santa Monica than the South Bronx or Rexdale. This lifestyle construction struck me before I even noticed a single product. Geography seems to play a major role in lifestyle construction. Richtree Market Restaurant is another example of a geographic lifestyle or location designed into a space. Awnings surround the exterior as if the retail space were an actual market in the Mediterranean. A large fake tree rises in the middle of the

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‘market’, with its top breaching the open ceiling and its bottom-branches offering low hanging fake fruit. The walls are painted to resemble the colourful adjacent buildings which enclose market spaces. Wood shutters attached to the wall allude to fenestration and occasionally small roofs adorned with Spanish tiles extend from the walls. The space is meant to feel quaint, tucked away between townhouses in the Iberian Peninsula. The floors are cobble stone, while wood and hay baskets filled with fruits and vegetables hang on the walls. Even the process for cooking and preparing the food makes customers feel involved. The whole restaurant sells the idea of home-made, non-chemical, fresh food, cooked and prepared in plain sight. Another example of a space as advertisement would be Garage. An outlet in the Eaton Centre was so reclusive, I could barely locate it. A sign with tacky typeface lets customers know the store can be found by making a sharp turn into what looks like a maintenance area. There are tall, brown doors which look like they should be on an airplane hanger separating the store from the mall corridor. According to one of the employees, the store is representative of a girl’s room, which is apparently hidden

and private. The store is selling the idea that girls know something others – like their parents – don’t know and only those privileged enough – the desired 16 to 21 female customer – can become intimate with the space. This would explain why the entrance of the store was so inconspicuous. Telecommunications companies such as Bell and Rogers, tend to go for a more simplified look in order to connote simplicity of use, reliability of service and logic of contracts. These retail spaces normally have open floor plans and bright lighting, making the brand seem open, approaching and customer friendly. Apple’s store is different from other retailers mentioned above, because it is all about the experience of playing with the products. The overall design is bland modernity with a curve of playfulness. People of all ages and demographics can find a toy which they can amuse themselves with and imagine the many ways in which they can use the products. The main idea behind the store is to sell the brand as a simple to-use and fun addition to a busy life. The space imparts the effect of simplicity to its customers, immersing them in a pleasant subjective experience.

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

Hollister in the Eaton Centre, Toronto, Ontario Sketch by Sebastian Frye

What makes examples of Hollister, Richtree Market, Garage, Bell, Rogers and Apple unique, is their ability to communicate messages about their brands through design. Many brands coexist in a mall, with entrances designed to create thresholds between the mall corridor and the experience inside, such as with Hollister. Some stores, like Bell, have wide entrances which span the entire width of the retail space. In contrast, other stores, such as Garage, are more cunning with how customers enter the store leading them into a scripted environment. A narrow entrance enhances and reinforces the idea that a special world of experience is within. Other stores, like Apple, use costumer activation to sell the implicit idea behind the space, so that the store sells the product which is reinforced in the message behind the space. In effect, if the details of a given space incite desire in the clientele, a customer is acquired. This underlying moti-

vation is what some experts call “brand seeding”, which means to plant a brand in the mind of the customer. Billboards and commercials are superficial and easily detected by a public feeling increasing aversion towards explicit forms of advertising, yet it goes un-noticed: advertisement is explicitly tied to the architecture of a space. The main desire of the design is to create a fascination with a brand or lifestyle in order to get the customer, in all its demographics, to identify with it. Advertising is about inserting ideas into the minds of people. I believe architecture as advertisement plays the same role, but on numerous levels, from explicit, as with a whole building or implicit, as with the lighting above a table. The architecture is ‘in’ on the advertisement, it is not a passive element of the store, nor is it an accessory to the products, but it is meant to connect with your lifestyle as a consumer.

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Richtree Market Restaurant in the Eaton Centre, Toronto, Ontario Sketch by Sebastian Frye

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

The Artist Leaves a Mark Sebastian Frye

Sebastian Frye is the current editor of SideStreet Review. He holds a BFA in studio arts and art history from NSCAD University. He publishes books and maintains an independent artistic practice.

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God (2007) • Courtesy of White Cube Gallery, London

ON THE WEEKEND OF OCTOBER 30th the 11th International Toronto Art Fair occupied the upper floor of the spacious Toronto Metro Convention Center. Galleries from across Canada, and a spattering of International galleries, filled the floor with booths of white walls and hanging pictures. The Art Fair is an excellent opportunity to scour the annals of contemporary art and find patterns, trends, or locate a surprise or two. This 2010 visit brought me face-to-face with Damien Hirst for the very first time. I am not a detractor of Hirst by any means, in-fact, I find his artistic strategy extremely appealing and consider it an extension of Andy Warhol and his factory model. I have read Calvin Tomkins’s profile of Hirst, and admire Hirst’s insight into Francis Bacon. However, it is difficult to ignore Hirst’s indulgences, which seem more sinister than a Ponzi scheme. His latest piece is a diamond encrusted human skull entitled: For the Love of God. Each diamond, some believe blooddiamonds number amongst them, is genuine and meticulously set in place by expert jewellers. For many the piece looks more like a publicity stunt, but

at the Galerie de Bellefeuille it was intriguing to see the skull reprinted on pearly-lustre sparkling paper as a print for sale. Also on view in the gallery booth were several other pieces including butterfly pieces, medicine cabinet pieces, and a dot painting. I didn’t see the prices, but I overhead a conversation, the gist of which was: “I couldn’t possibly afford that, what with...” Slightly amiss, I wondered who wanted to afford one? Before me, the work looked unassuming, quietly opting not to be recognized. What were the lights really shining on? and why were the gallery attendants wearing such nice suits? Butterfly prints speckled the walls, each signed with a similar signature at the bottom. Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni were two artists who isolated the signature as a factor in the argument of whether or not something was in-fact a “work of art”. It was an argument which had been going on for years prior to Duchamp & Manzoni’s time among the cognoscenti of the art establishment: “what is a work of art?”, they asked. Few were pleased to announce Manet’s Olympia a work of

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art, and even fewer actively sought to praise the work of Cezanne, for two examples. It was simply unfeasible for some paint put to canvas to be called art. By the the time 1917 rolled around minds had changed and revolutions in perception had been steadily accruing. Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism all knocked loudly on the door of posterity—and the science of perception was introducing itself—but underneath these perceptual investigations was a much more cynical and skeptical perceptual shift: Dadaism, which brought to the forefront of the art-world a kind of mischievousness, threatening to dismantle the artifice of art entirely. Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist investigations are most notorious for a 1917 exhibition held by the Society of Independent Artists. The exhibition was an open call for artists of any sort to submit work, especially work which would typically be refused by the Salon of the era. Marcel Duchamp, alongside Joseph Stella and Walter Arensberg, submitted a work entitled The Fountain The piece was simply a J. L. Mott Iron Works mass produced white porcelain urinal turned flat, rested on a pedestal,

and signed “R. MUTT 1917”. It was considered outrageous and was hidden when the exhibition was opened to the public. Duchamp, director of the Society, resigned and retreated from the art-scene, fleeing the hypocrisy of his collaborators. Now, in our evaluation of art history, Duchamp’s urinal ranks as one of the greatest artistic gestures of the century, rivalling hand-crafted works in painting, sculpture, and craft. However, it is less a piece of art, than an idea of what art is. In essence, Duchamp’s piece chimes: art is about our cultivation of the concept of art, it has very little to do with incontestable truths reigning from Plato’s world of Forms, or eternal qualities of beauty. If I say it is art, it is art. The Fountain was one of many gestures Duchamp facilitated which stemmed from the idea of the “Ready Made”: a found object which functions as a useless product capable of unique artistic merit. The subtleties of this gesture have caused exceptional theorists and artists to reevaluate art, because after-all, it is still just a urinal resting flat. At the heart of the ready-made is the intention to integrate life into

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

Above: Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain (1917), photograph by Alfred Steiglitz Right: Piero Manzoni signing a model

art, or better yet, engage more fully with life itself rather than the construct of art. The art/life debate stems from the belief in an artistic avant-garde, but avant-garde means something quite different today then it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. The word has gained an elitist mystification which proliferates amongst ignorant individuals. It requires books to explain the concept, and in practice it is difficult to identify. In-short, most wouldn’t be able to explain something “avant-garde” from something financially suspicious. Hirst’s skull might be considered ‘avant-garde’ because it transcends our conventional notions of expensive objects. Meanwhile it is entirely complicit with the dominant financial system. In an effort to confirm the value of the piece, Hirst sold the work to an “anonymous consortium”, which included himself. Let’s face it, it would be difficult for Hirst to accept that such a seemingly priceless object is worth only what it is made of. Yet, so is a urinal. In other words, the piece is valuable because it is valuable, not because it emits significant artistic merit. Walter Benjamin encounters an

aura when he is faced with an artwork, and Duchamp’s piece, an historical artifact, contains something of the man himself —his choice— but Hirst’s piece is excessive in an age of excess; it just is, and contributes nothing but it’s glimmering presence. Italian artist Piero Manzoni used the gesture of mark making as a way to complicate the legitimacy of art objects. He was deeply inspired by Yves Klein, a French artist most famous for patenting his own colour, International Klein Blue (IKB) and using it for monochromatic paintings, sculptures, and on nude woman who were instructed by Klein to press themselves against paper and canvas. The self-made universe of the artist attracted Manzoni, inspiring him to develop a conceptual paradigm which was, in effect, a criticism of the society of mass production and consumerism in Italy during the preliminary years of the 1960s. Manzoni constructed what he called ‘Achromes’–a play on the monochromes of Klein–which were colourless. His most notorious artistic gesture however is Merda d’Artista (Artist’s Shit) which is simply a labelled

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can, sealed and signed, sold as a unique artistic object. Some speculate upon the contents of the can, but to open the object would be to devalue it, rendering it worthless. Manzoni was an artist with a light touch. He saw the art world as a set of rules to be broken, or bent out of shape. One of his gestures was to sign individuals and declare them authentic works of art gratis. (Umberto Eco is a famous example.) It was as if his signature, his ability to lay claim to something, would in effect make it an authentic work of art. Absurdity is clearly visible in the action, but art audiences fetishize an artist’s signature and so Manzoni used it as a playful means to critique society. The artist’s signature is not simply a reminder of who made the work, or even the final touch for an artist to endow a piece of art with. The artist’s signature is considered a key to authenticity, and it is the idea of authenticity which renders an artwork priceless or worthless. Authenticity, as an idea, has been bedfellows with the idea of Art since art became a cultural institution. The artist’s signature is the seal

of artistry, once the artist lays claim to a piece of work, it is not only of a time and place, but of a person. With such an immense amount of admiration, bordering on adoration, of art and artists, the person becomes a symbol and so does the signature. The signature is a device for other people to recognize, but it means very little to the artist. The work itself is valuable. The experience of the work, the reward of the work, the struggle and success of the work, are all valuable and meaningful activities for an artist to engage in, but the signature is so other people can claim to own a verifiable product of an artist. The artist as brand, if you will. The woman who was staring at the large Hirst medicine cabinet print and speaking with the gallery attendant walked away and in her absence left a silence only pictures are capable of. For someone so preoccupied with living and dying, Hirst’s signature—his unique mark—is decidly abstract and dead. It silently affirms authenticity and consoles collectors that: yes, this artwork was a good choice, it is after all a Hirst. Which, to some, is enough.

Signature of Damien Hirst

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

Economics 101: Investing In Art Calvin Schnurr

Calvin Schnurr is a writer in Toronto. He has written for Toro Magazine and other publications about sports and lifestyle, in addition to arts and culture. He has degrees in English and Religion from the University of Toronto. He interviewed author Mauricio Segura about his novel Black Alley for the September edition of Side Street Review.

Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and a Bust (1932)

THE WORLD’S MOST EXPENSIVE artist is Pablo Picasso, the deceased Spaniard who shows no signs of relenting his grip on the international art market. Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, a 1932 painting that is five feet tall and coloured with lilac and blue, sold for $106.5 million dollars at Christie’s New York on May 4, 2010, setting a new record for the largest sum ever paid for a painting at auction. Perhaps even Marie-Thérèse Walter, the mistress lounging in the centre, would blush at the news. Aesthetically, the painting is a marvel and the expression of a permanent resident of the canon; however, a painting can be viewed in a number of other ways if one steps back from preconceived ideas. In spark literal terms, it’s some oil on some canvas; from the view of spiritual belief, the painting affirms the existence of something profound in humanity; and to an economist, the painting is an extremely rare commodity. If the art market operated like any other other – like the international markets for oil, gold, or stocks, for example – then one might anticipate that supply and demand play an important role in determining value. On the surface, this is true: familiar economic principles can be ap-

plied to the art market to explain certain behaviour, like the rising sums that buyers are willing to pay for a painting with provenance by a deceased artist like van Gogh or Warhol. Jeremy Tabarrok is a ScotiaMcLeod wealth advisor in Toronto with expertise in managing fine art assets as part of a financial portfolio. With a degree in photography and connections across both industries, Tabarrok confidently bridges the gap between the artistic and financial communities. “Supply is limited and the demand will always be there,” he said. “In fact, what’s happening with supply is it’s actually decreasing.” Why supply is decreasing relates to private versus public art collections. Paintings by the members of the Group of Seven, for example, which are often of a high aesthetic calibre, historically significant and stoutly Canadian, are highly sought after by museums across the country. Private collectors who are gracious enough to donate an A. Y. Jackson or Tom Thomson will almost always stipulate that the piece remains in public hands. Once donated to a museum such pieces are effectively unsellable, and over time this causes permanent attrition to the remaining private supply. It’s no coincidence that Lawren Harris’s Bylot Island I, an Arctic landscape of triangu-

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lar mountains rising above a calm bay, sold for $2.8 million on May 26, 2010, fetching the fourth-highest price ever for a Canadian painting sold at auction. While the concepts of supply and demand illuminate some aspects of the art market, if one starts to look deeper, applying the entire model of the stock market to the art market is misleading. “Art is extremely illiquid,” said Tabarrock, who went on to explain the term. By and large, an investor could sell his or her IBM stocks with relative ease at any time, which makes those stocks liquid assets. The comprehensive infrastructure of the financial services industry makes selling stocks a straightforward process and there are many people at any given time willing to buy. Quickly turning an antique Byzantine vase into cash would be a different story all together. The pool of potential buyers for such an unusual and expensive item could be comically small, maybe only four or five people. For the vase to sell at or above its appraised value, an auction should be arranged in New York or London. Even if that and other logistical hurdles were cleared, the vase still might not sell, for any number of reasons. Buyers might know if the seller is in dire financial straits and decide to hold off and wait for the asking

price to drop – art is difficult to sell at value during a financial emergency. For similar reasons, “flipping” art is exceptionally rare. To see financial gain from buying and selling art work, an investor needs to commit for the long term. In fact, “investing in art” is a misconception; “collecting” is a better word, with its connotations of passion and enthusiasm. “My [personal] collection is not an investment,” said Tabarrok. “I don’t think of it as an investment. I buy it because I love it. And I don’t plan on selling it. And when I’m 75 maybe it will be worth something, maybe over these years it will start increasing. I buy my art for art.” Tabarrok has served clients with million-dollar collections, and while he can advise them on how to use a collection as a strategic financial asset, for tax purposes, for example, the art simply never loses its spiritual and emotional power, even in these discussions. “I’ve had people cry in my office,” he said, “Then you find out that the piece is not a painting of northern Canada – ‘It’s the room I used to have to go into to show my father my report card.’” Mark Zadorozny has an unassuming presence but a single-minded drive. After interning at the Peggy Guggenheim

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Museum in Venice and earning a master’s degree in art history at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, Zadorozny returned to Toronto and reoriented himself with the local scene. In 2007 he founded the Mark Christopher Gallery (his middle name is “Christopher”) without any prior business experience. On a streetside patio close to his gallery of contemporary art, Zadorozny explained how for artists and gallery owners, as well as collectors, passion drives the industry. “What I do is I find the people who live, breath, eat art,” he said. “Even if they didn’t become famous, or even if they don’t go anywhere, they’re going to do it. Why? Because? They don’t even know. They wake up and they do it.” The compulsion of artists, a cryptic, occasionally irrational thing, is the cornerstone of the whole industry.

To run a successful gallery without believing in the artists showing would be very difficult. Personal motivation would be a constant problem for an owner. And while they may not be buying art as a strict “investment”, collectors, and especially new ones, can be anxious about a purchase. “As a gallery owner that sells emerging artists,” said Zadorozny, “You’re also selling to young professionals who are in the same sort of boat. They don’t want to spend too much, but they also want good quality … You always give them a reason as to why you believe this artist is the real deal, and why he or she should be collected.” He added that this sentiment tends to ring true in Canada, when compared to the world’s major art centres. “Unfortunately, people have to be sort of told what’s good and what’s not. You go to New York and

people, collectors, know. They feel safe. They don’t mind dishing out $20,000 for a painting. Here it’s almost like you’ve got to – not convince them – but you’ve got to really do your homework.” Twenty thousand dollars could buy a lot of shares in IBM (about 140 at $140 apiece), so doing your homework might be a wise choice for collectors and gallery owners alike. Artists, on the other hand, need not feel left out of the investment game entirely. The Artist Pension Trust is a financial services firm that caters to artists, who, as a rule, tend to have unique assets (their own pieces) and worrisome longterms needs (no pensions). The for-profit APT was founded in 2004 and operates by managing trusts in eight cities around the world, including London, Berlin and Beijing. Over the course of their careers,

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artists are required to give some of their work to the trust they join, which then holds the art for the long-term and monitors its financial value. (Artists must first apply to be accepted.) Collectively and over time, the 250 members in a city trust will share in the appreciating value of each others’ work. When pieces are sold, 40 per cent of the proceeds go to the individual artist, 32 per cent is spread amongst the artists in a specific trust, and 28 per cent is retained by the APT to cover operating costs, according to the company’s website. The APT is not operating a Canadian branch; however, Toronto artist Nicholas Di Genova is working as a member of the New York trust. In theory, other Canadian artists could apply to join the New York or Los Angeles trusts, but the former has reached full partici-

pation and latter is very near to it, said the APT’s collection manager by email. “There are also future plans for an ‘Americas Trust’ which would also encompass Canada,” she added, in essence opening a door for future membership. The APT is a valuable new tool for emerging artists, whether they are aware of its existence or not. There is a lot of evidence to support the stereotype of the starving artist, and much of the financial value of art is passed on to the next generation; Picasso, however, didn’t reap any profit from the recent sale of Nude, Green Leaves and Bust. From an economic perspective, the motivations of artists are strange and maybe incomprehensible, but an economic perspective has sharp limitations in this discussion. Economics can convincingly explain some of the behaviour

and transactions, but the ultimate meaning of art is better explained by other disciplines like psychology, aesthetics or anthropology. Even so, in its own way the art market, like any other, tries to satisfy the different needs and desires of people within its community. “An artist needs a director or a dealer, and a dealer needs an artist,” said Zadorozny, “And the critics they need to write about something, so it’s this family.”

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The Bohemian Lifestyle Aaron W. Graham

Aaron W. Graham is a freelance writer and screenwriters currently residing in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He writes predominantly on film, and is currently working on a book of interviews with genre screenwriter. He was born on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

LOOKING BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS through the storied origins and current incarnations of Bohemianism through this modern-day prism of 2010 is a curious phenomenon. Is this loaded (and— perhaps then as now— vague) term still applicable in regards to today’s lifestyles, or has much of its impact been mitigated due to a certain inferior (and mostly dreaded) H-word? Still, Bohemian is a word that’s not uttered as much as it once was, even though all of the myriad traits are still out there in society, recognizable to those still looking. It’s reductive to suggest that Bohemianism has merely morphed into the much more style-conscious trend of what’s come to be declared Hipsterdom -- that catch-all euphemism pontificated and ridiculed by so many critical thinkers in op-ed pieces the last several years (mostly decrying that the word should simply be put out of its misery). It appears more to me that Bohemians and Hipsters are now—maybe unknowingly—at opposite ends of the spectrum, despite the words once being somewhat synonymous, as when Norman Mailer wrote his influential essay, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” way back in 1957.

To be sure, bohemianism has always been an elusive rather than concrete concept, a feeling or attitude of impoverished-based casualness married with a preoccupation on the arts; another key component is a dollop of Weltschmerz, perhaps first solidified through the literature of the 1920s Lost Generation ex-pat authors taking refuge in Paris, or the 1950s Beat Generation who behaved madly in order to repudiate the restlessness experienced en masse following World War II. The term originates from the Czech Republic region of Bohemia, but would enter more common parlance after the word was altered in 19th century France to describe the outlook of many of its immigrants. It was here that this vibrant approach of disregarding straight-laced social mores and behaving more impulsively or unconventionally gained traction. Pursuing artistic expression even without the benefit of financial means became de rigeur (a necessary aspect that’s obviously been bequeathed through the years). Painters, musicians, sculptors and authors were soon clamoring to articulate their newly awakened, enlightened viewpoints, hoping to show the world important works in the hopes of reinvigorating the docile masses. The

artists themselves were content to remain within the fringes. The Bohemian tag caught fire, given a push via a mention in William Makepeace Thackerey’s “Vanity Fair”, but even more so when Puccini dedicated an opera to these newfangled types of carefree gypsies and vagabonds: “La bohème”. Since then, the Lost, Beat and Hippie countercultures have all taken on the mantle, sharing characteristics of their 19th century forebears while expanding or redefining what exactly it means to be free, hip and chock full of illumination. This last trait particularly applies to the Lost generation, as Norman Podhoretz writes in his infamous denouncement of the Beats (and, conversely, his championing of earlier writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald), “The KnowNothing Bohemians”: “Bohemia, in other words, was a movement created in the name of civilization: its ideals were intelligence, cultivation, spiritual refinement.” As wrongheaded as Podhoretz’s contentious essay may seem today (the rest is spent condemning Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as nothing but empty-headed thrill-seeking philistines), a better explanation of what the Bohemian ethos is may not exist.

What are the key signs of bohemianism? Low rent, of course. Supporting yourself while being a coffee barista or being unsure where the next paycheque is coming from is a difficult proposition, but inherent in the lifestyle. Unless you’re the benefiter of a trust-fund, in which case, have at it. And even then, the style tends to be heavy with thrift store tossoffs, leading to another crucial distinction between the Bohemians of old – who dressed in more somber colours and a basic approach – to the hipster as we define him today: as ridiculous an outfit as you can possibly put together. Also, does youth play a large part in Bohemianism? Is it a way of life only to be indulged when time is on your side? And is it noble or pathetic to be aging and still hold these precepts near and dear to your heart? I think it may all boil down to whether you believed in the cause or your art in the first place, ensuring it’s glaringly separate from any sort of mock stance merely adopted to attract the opposite sex. Which leads to a perfect opportunity to discuss just this very topic. Freedom in sexuality has always seemed to be a large concern in bohemia. The physical act has been equated both spiritually—the beatific glorification of

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Poster of Cabaret owner and performer Aristide Bruant

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the orgasm – but also been relegated to being Not a Big Deal (an attitude shared, in alternate measures, by The Beats to the free-love ethos as promulgated by Hippies). They can even occupy the same space: Take a closer look at the Buddhist-infused underpinnings of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums in which the symbol of Yabyum – one of sexual union between man and woman – is bandied about by Japhy, the Dean Moriarty of the piece who has a strange hold over Ray Smith, the Kerouacderived stand-in. All at once the spiritual is combined with everyday promiscuity, both coexisting and ceasing to cause any problems of remorse for any of the characters. Representation in film of Bohemianism has always strayed more towards the stereotypical, spoofing and parodying in broadstrokes, particularly of the Beat and Hippie eras (we all know at least one example of each, mostly from bad sitcoms). There’s the period-accurate goateed Maynard G. Kreb (Bob Denver) in the late 50s television series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis or the more recent example of Pia Zadora’s hip Baltimore beatnik crooning “Day-O” in John Waters’ first PG affair, Hairspray. It seems the epitome of bohemian is to be dressed in impossibly dark clothing, with shaggy hair for men and black bangs for women, Chinos or casual jeans, and beads of some variety for both sexes. A hip patois of nonsensical phrases is also worked into the mix in these faulty, if sometimes amusing characterizations.

One of my favourites is smuggled inside Roger Corman’s little-seen hour-long cheapie, Rock All Night. For me, it stands as a great example of early criticism brought forth against the stereotype, actually allowing for one of the leads – portrayed by Dick Miller – to condescend to detected fringe phonies. Set entirely in a trendy nightspot, we pay witness to bemused bar patrons being held up, an aspiring singer unexpectedly called to audition, and a fat-cat Lord Buckley type pathetically called to task for behaving in an “inauthentic” fashion. It’s not incendiary by any means, but a better indicator, along with the blacklycomic A Bucket of Blood, than Hollywood films that tackled the same subject (the less the said about Hollywood’s stab at Kerouac – The Subterraneans – the better). Truthfully, if one were to wait for a better representation of the Bohemian lifestyle, you would have to wait until at least the early 1960s – where Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World and John Cassavetes’s Shadows stand at the forefront even today. Moving on from The Beats (though several of their central figures remained), the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco was another such densely populated area that saw a high activity of creativity in the 1960s: The Grateful Dead in rock music circles, to a thriving art culture. Films such as Psych-Out and The Trip depicted the counterculture with a degree of versatility: they’re not deadbeats, but taken on their own terms.

The Wild Angels, a biker picture that initiated another run of biker pics not seen since Marlon Brando in The Wild One ten years earlier. Since the 1970s? Not a hell of a lot when it comes to Bohemia. It’s taken on new guises, new trends, but the reality remains. People, in the end, are people: You are who you’ve always been. Bohemianism can be an affectation only briefly adopted before “selling out” (those pesky questions and allegations of authenticity). Your parents may have been Bohemians, themselves the children of flower-children turned passive, eternally understanding parents that see no problem in setting out to “find yourself” as a young adult, coasting along in the interest of Art with a capital A. Through it all, Bohemianism remains an increasingly seductive lifestyle choice for young adults, one that elevates culture and art, an exploratory, impulsive approach to sexuality, the ability to pursue lofty ambitions that may or may not pay off; in the end, you may only have the journey, but the ride’s the best part.s

PROFILES

Morton Rosengarten

Crystal Chan is a writer and editor who specializes in arts coverage. She lives in Montreal and works for the La SCENA magazines.

Yann Martel

Mia Herrera is a freelance writer contributing to a variety of online and print publications, including Live in Limbo, Nerd Girl Pinups, and C&G Monthly. A lover of social media, Mia may be found online at MiaHerrera.com, blogging on her off days from her home in Markham, Ontario

Justin Lalancette

Alan Bourassa lives in Montreal and teaches English at Concordia University. His book Deleuze and American Literature was published last year by Palgrave-Macmillan. You can read his blogs at http://whoweare.ca/blog/author/alan-bourassa. You can also read his personal blog at www.workingtheory.org. He is currently working on a study of Lacan, fantasy and American Literature and on a book of poems on a subject that is still a mystery, even to him.

Vikky Alexander

Jes Busch is a Vancouver based freelance writer, artist and yogi. Trained in Film, Acting, Fashion and Design, she has written for publications including Qlix-Emerging Fashion Found, The RAGE Project, Gonzo Magazine, ECO CHIC International and her personal blog Scarletseal.

Jim Hansen

Jesse Walker is a Newfoundland based artist and writer. He graduated with a BFA from NSCAD University and maintains an independent art practice. He is an active member in the Eastern Canadian arts community.

John Hall

Joseph Heath

Laura Pellerine is a proud Bluenoser who moved out west to follow her dream of writing professionally in 2005. After starting her career in the magazine industry as an editorial intern at Where Calgary, in less than two years, she became the Editor. She also works as a freelance writer and copy editor for several magazines, online publications, and publishing companies across the country, and has been published in Canadian Family, Enterprise and Progress Magazine. She enjoys experiencing the dining, shopping and arts scene Calgary has to offer, and greatly looks forward to researching Whereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s annual spa issue. Robert Wringham is a humourist, performer and ideas man from Great Britain. He is the editor of New Escapologist magazine, a publication for office workers with escape on the brain. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s written for a plethora of print and online publications including the Idler, Meat Magazine and the British Comedy Guide. He is currently writing a history book about stand-up comedy and lives between Montreal and Glasgow, Scotland. www.wringham.co.uk

Photograph by Chancy Grain

Morton Rosengarten Rogue Sculptor Crystal Chan

A LACK OF MONEY PRODUCED one of the most unique artistic voices to hail from Canada. The set of monetary restrictions most artists face pushed Morton Rosengarten to make a choice nearly 50 years ago, which many at the time warned would ruin his career: he moved out of the city. Far from putting an end to his artistic output, moving to the Eastern Townships allowed him to both continue sculpting (and sometimes print-making) as well as fostered an environment where his earlier influences could freely mix with new interests and ideas, and, uninhibited or uninfluenced, were allowed to materialize into “Rosengartens.” “The only thing I would put up / On one of my beloved bare walls … [is] a Rosengarten,” writes Leonard Cohen, tenderly celebrating the work of one of his closest friends and artistic comrades in the foreword to a biography on Rosengarten to be launched by the spring of 2011. He continues: “A Rosengarten celebrates the wood it stands on / ...You would have to live with a Rosengarten / To know how useful it is / …In a Rosengarten / There is no extra volume /... It is as it is / Respectful of the tradition from which it arises / But independent of it too.” Cohen speaks of a respect for tradition as well as utilitarianism when he speaks of Rosengarten’s work. Both elements are often picked up by those who dismiss Rosengarten’s work as anachronistic from “contemporary art.” They say “his works are figurative and thus old-fashioned; sculpture is a utilitarian art, associated with bric-à-brac and commissioned pieces standing outside financial or government buildings; he has not turned his back completely on traditional techniques and materials.” They say so out of disregard. Why then, would Cohen— who is obviously conveying sentiments full of praise rather than disdain—bring up these elements? Because the figurative and utilitarian nature of Rosengarten’s works is in fact meant to be wholly revolutionary rather than wholly conventional. Some, like Cohen, realize and celebrate this. A Rosengarten’s recognizable form, its allusion to useful objects (used especially for ritual)—these are acts of defiance.

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Morton Rosengarten, Nancy (1963), bronze • Courtesy of the artist

SCULPTURE WAS A LATE-BLOOMING INTEREST for Rosengarten. Born in 1933, a “really conventional childhood” in Westmount didn’t hold much in the way of preparation for avant-garde artistry. Finally, after having “spent many years in college specializing in nothing” at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University (which eventually became Concordia University’s downtown campus), he enrolled in a studio course in his last year in order to avoid another academic course. He started enjoying it. So what else was there to do but to take off on a boat to Europe to continue studying art? Bold and sure of himself, he arrived at the doorstep of none other than London’s Royal College in 1956, only to be curtly dismissed. However, subsequently turning to a lesser-known school with lacklustre studio resources turned out to be fortuitous; the two years he eventually spent at St. Martin’s School of Arts were highly influential. “It wasn’t an especially well-equipped or well-known school for sculpture, but it was quite open,” said Rosengarten. More importantly, some of the teachers with whom he studied went on to become some of the most well-known and influential names in the field: Elizabeth Frink, Anthony Caro, Eduardo Paolozzi. As a result of these academic alumni, the school itself has become a familiar and prestigious name since then. A year later, he began taking technical studies courses in bronze casting at the Central School in London. This was an important building block to his selfproclaimed cross-career obsession: the “search and preoccupation with technical solution and materials.”

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London was also where Rosengarten started hanging out at the museums. On top of the avant-garde art shows, Tate Museum round-ups, and Paris gallery self-tours that are unspoken requisites for art students, Rosengarten started hanging out at the history museums—the British Museum was a personal favourite. He was introduced to African, Ancient Egyptian, and Greco-Roman artifacts: the start to a life-long affinity. He marvelled at their forms wherever he could. In 1958, Rosengarten left behind the “village-like, pretty conservative life” in the Hampstead area of London to find himself back in “beautiful and very vibrant” Montreal. The scene was flooded with artists. Retreating to the heart of the Plateau in the Little Portugal area, Rosengarten was quickly surrounded by old and new friends, a pack of Bohemian castaways from Westmount or elsewhere, all finding refuge from the oppression of high rents and staid lifestyles in the otherwise immigrant area. Although plenty of these included other artists working in several genres, including the visual and the theatrical, Rosengarten was also linked to a literary crowd: Cohen above all. The crowd included cohorts of Cohen’s who lived outside of the Plateau. A usual night would include a trip to Irving Layton’s Côte SaintLuc residence, where Cohen and Rosengarten would also meet up with the likes of A.M. Klein, Louis Dudek, and Henry Moscovitch. The interchange between these literary and visual artists was fruitful, and both parties found their challenges similar. In that vein, Cohen and Rosengarten set up the Four Penny Gallery on downtown’s Stanley Street. It promised to be the springboard for contemporary Canadian poetry and art. “There were very few galleries then,” said Rosengarten. “Very few showing contemporary art especially. Mainly they were just showing landscape paintings and such.” The gallery eventually burned down; but not before the likes of Armand Vaillancourt, Louise Scott and Kitty Bruneau (the closest to a muse Rosengarten claims to have had—Bruneau posed for him on several occasions) had passed through. The artistic community was thriving. But Rosengarten faced a hurdle none of his other compatriots did: Montreal, and in fact all of Canada, had no sculpture foundries. And they were far and few between in the States. “It used to be that you had to send work to Italy or some such place to get it done,” said Rosengarten. “There was no sculpting tradition here—or elsewhere in North America.”

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Forced to branch out, Rosengarten became involved with wax and other casting on a DIY basis. This was a period where he experimented with a lot of modelling. He caught a break when offered access to the August Laflamme Foundry in Old Montreal. This was an industrial foundry, however, and its lack of a burnout kiln forced the sculptor to piggyback on the clothing manufacturers who shared the same building as his studio. At the end of the day, after everyone else had left, Rosengarten would sneak in to the boiler room where the manufacturers set the incinerator going on their waste clippings. Using this to fire his wax molds, he was able to have them ready for the foundry the next day. One night, when the boiler started dying down before his mold was finished, Rosengarten threw in three of his own large elm carvings out of desperation. Anything to keep the fire going. Crescent Street’s Simon Dresner Gallery started exhibiting his work. But that proved, in some ways, also disenchanting. “There was obviously no real market in sculpture,” he said. It became clear to Rosengarten that this was not sustainable. But the alternative was something seemingly unthinkable: leaving Montreal. “There was a dilemma vis-à-vis making sculpture,” said Rosengarten. “Sculpture’s really expensive to make.” “To stay in the city would mean having a studio, being able to pay for it and paying for the sculpture to be made wherever it was being made. But you’d be on the scene,” he continued. “The other choice was to go to the country and be more independent, financially and technically, but be removed from the market. You

Morton Rosengarten, Mary II (1963), bronze and steel • Courtesy of the artist 30

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pay a big price when you remove yourself. You become excluded from whatever activity there is. But I could always still carry on working.” Add that ultimatum to a growing “disillusionment” with the city, which slowly took hold as Rosengarten witnessed the colourful immigrant—and soon artistic culture—trickle out of his new beloved neighbourhood, and the choice— nay the necessity—to move on started to seem clearer and clearer. In 1962, Rosengarten moved first to Bonaventure Island and then permanently to Way’s Mills. About 20 homes made up the tiny town in the Eastern Townships. As luck would have it, one of the former residents was none other than Orson Wheeler, Rosengarten’s first sculpting teacher from all the way back during his time at Sir George. As a result the town had a complete respect for the métier of the sculptor, considering it one as useful as that of baker or doctor. Rosengarten purchased an unused creamery and converted it into the country’s first foundry dedicated to sculpture. “Moving away was the key choice in my life,” said Rosengarten. “Had I been living in some centre doing this, like in New York, I would never have been able to keep doing this. But because I was isolated, I was able to keep going on.” ISOLATED, ROSENGARTEN WAS RELATIVELY UNSWAYED by anyone else: not by other working artists, nor by agents, nor by the timelines and capabilities of sculpture foundries thousands of miles away. His limits were as far as his creative mind and his technical problem-solving skills could take him. In 1967, Rosengarten hit the Montreal scene again during a short visit back (he had kept, and still owns, his Plateau residence on Rue Saint-Dominique). There, he was featured in a competition exposition at the Contemporary Art Museum, and serendipitously, an eventually solo show at the Old Port’s LoyolaBonsecours Gallery when all the other artists coincidentally dropped out. In the city, he noticed that what had been a fringe and emerging style had now become gospel: “There was something happening on the contemporary scene: Abstraction. A Modernist approach to art. My work didn’t fit into that because it was figured,” explained Rosengarten. Because of his isolation, his influences and inspirations were hard to relate to movements or other artists. This makes it difficult to describe and pigeon-hole the man’s works in comparison to other artists or categorize them in genres and sub-genres—something which the art critic today seems unable to do without. In Montreal, no one knew how to fit Rosengarten into the schema. Although critics and fellow artists alike respected his work (Montreal Star critic Michael Ballantyne claimed Rosengarten’s art was of the “rare” breed that “makes you sit up and take notice.”) it was tempting for all to assume the work had a “throwback” nature. The roots of such portrait sculptures seemed to spring exclusively from nineteenth-century soil. At the same time that it was being deemed exciting, his work was also being classified as traditional, classical and even staid.

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“For a while it became tough because Modernism became so prominent,” said Rosengarten. “It became the rule. And figurative art was just not tolerated. It was completely dismissed: it was passé, it was irrelevant. So the pieces weren’t leaving the house. The more sensational of my early expos was at Charles Egan’s gallery in New York City. It was his last show—the last at one of the most important galleries of the twentieth century. But even there, they didn’t leave the house. That was around 1960 to 1980. Modernism had to be thrown over by postmodernism.” What seemed passé, if highly admired, was actually a contrarian voice. The themes and shapes of Rosengarten’s sculptures—including the experiments with techniques and materials he engaged in on a self-sustaining personal foundry isolated in a small town—altogether resulted in an output of work that is ahead rather than behind its time. Its appropriation and mixing of older styles is always a push to move forward, in rejection of Modernism; a “throw over” of the constraints he felt that artistic doctrine presented. There was nothing more out of favour than portraits. But by presenting or referring to recognizable figures and forms, he is able to signal their degradation or evolution. “They think I am a nineteenth-century guy because I do bronze heads,” said Rosengarten. But take a closer look at these heads: they are, like a lot of his work, fragmented, decaying. The heads look like some giant has taken a bite straight from the scalp; features look bombed; figures more closely resemble burn victims than pretty parlour portraits of ladies with parasols. It has often been noted that sculpture occupies the same space as us in ways that most other types of visual art cannot. Rosengarten’s structures seem to be decomposing in the world, as if interaction with the air we breathe is slowly eating away at them. It changes the space around it, and the space around it changes the sculptures. His experiments led him to innovate and personalize the otherwise traditional practice of figurative portraits. When a specially-made rubber used for molds was no longer available, Rosengarten created one-of-a-kind plaster ones which resulted in entirely novel finishes to his products. In 1981, when commissioned to create portraits of Canadian literati—including Margaret Atwood—for a book, he had a “big breakthrough—sculpting to create ‘drawings.’” He used wooden hair combs from Chinatown as if they were multiple wooden pens, creating images on stones off of which the lithograph images of the poets were branded. “Has anyone else done that? I don’t think so. It was thrilling; you never knew what you were going to get,” he said. One might say that the randomness in this process here even links Rosengarten to Abstract Expressionism. This celebration of chance has little tie to the Classical figurines of the nineteenth-century world of sculpture. If there is an earlier era that Rosengarten most frequently evokes, it is much earlier than the nineteenth-century. The ancient cultures, the tribal cultures—all the civilizations whose works Rosengarten was fascinated by at the British Museum: their artwork is fêted by him as a form of self-adopted heresy, an artistic-

Morton Rosengarten, Aviva Layton (1960), bronze • Courtesy of the artist 33

Morton Rosengarten, Left to Right: Life Drawing (1998); (1999); (1999); (1999), ink on paper â&#x20AC;˘ Courtesy of the artist

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political statement against contemporary art’s doing away with the form. “I’ve never really been interested in Western sculpture except for Rodin or the Renaissance,” said Rosengarten. “But African, Ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman were big inspirations.” “The modernist rules were very strict,” Rosengarten continued. “They were laws. You couldn’t refer to emotions, to figures. A lot of people condemn what they call “art that is preoccupied with the object.” It was widespread. It was really puritanical, really. The quiet revolution happened in the 1960s. With it came a definition of art—it is very Modernist, pseudo-scientific, etc. I had these huge exhibitions that were not accepted.” “I made it into a game. I had never thought that art was some kind of scientific study that evolved, where the past is irrelevant. I began to sense a kind of religiosity, the view of the anti-figure attitude had such an intensity.” What Rosengarten is referring to here is the Western religious tradition of forbidding of graven images. There is a significant parallel between the sculptor and god; creating the shapes of men from clay, metal and dirt is, closer than painting or drawing or any other art, taking the place of god himself: heresy in the highest degree. Ritual figures have always been held sacred, on the other hand, by other civilizations. Sculptures and other ritual figures were literally created to activate the space it was placed within, while at the same time to be reanimated by those around it through their presence and worship. In this way, ritual sculptures outside the Christian and Western tradition sought to break down the barrier between deity and human, rather than reinforce it. His clearest nod to ritual figures was his collection of Asherah sculptures. Based on an ancient goddess worshipped by Jews before both religious sculptures and female deities became frowned upon, Asherah figures have been traced to Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. The aluminum used in some of these figures also gives it the appearance of an appliance. This highlights the functionality of ritual sculptures, created as something as useful as tools or furniture. Art, in this sense, is not mere decoration. Rosengarten did not forego the figure because he was lagging behind the artistic avant-garde ideas of the time; he did so as a protest against what he saw as a “new Puritanism” under the guise of Modernism. Working mostly isolated from the artists, critics, and theorists who promoted this movement allowed him to remain uncompromising. ROSENGARTENS SEEM TO EXIST WITH forces from the past, present and future embodied through them all at once. They emulate ancient figures from antiquity or tribal cultures in theme or shape, but also through the “degradation” that some of his sculptures seem to have suffered through, this pieces mirror the

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effect of time on human artefacts. At the same time, the use of nails, metal scrap, shiny aluminum and other industrial parts juxtaposing with the more ancient images and states of his sculptures add elements from the present and even future into the mix. The result, one could almost say, has some place—if a unique and not quite classifiable one—within the Postmodern tradition. But that is, in some ways, the “point.” Rosengarten’s solo studio space and unchecked creativity enable him to produce works with such contradictions and such indefinable qualities. And he owes that to moving where not another soul earned his or her trade through so-called “high art.” A move made for a simple lack of funds, in the end, was the best decision he made. Perhaps it is unique visions like his that will eventually reinvigorate the art. “Sculpture has really little relevance in our society,” lamented Rosengarten. “People are not really taken with it, or experiencing it. Sculpture in general—you don’t see much of it around. It doesn’t get much notice. It’s not something that people feel they really need. A lot of galleries don’t even show sculpture. People have tons of things from Pier 1, or third-world knick knacks. But not sculpture. “That can change.”

Morton Rosengarten, Above Left to Right: Silver Goddess (1988), lacquered wood; Kouros Goddess (1987), lacquered wood; Hehpaestian (1988), cast iron; Guitarone (1998), bronze and granite • Courtesy of the artist

Yann Martel Mia Herrara

I DIDN’T KNOW VERY MUCH about Yann Martel before speaking with him. In fact, from what I did know of him, I didn’t really like him. All I knew was that he wrote an award-winning bestseller and, after that, took a hiatus from writing during which he seemed to be keeping himself ever-present in the Canadian literary scene by writing Stephen Harper biweekly book reviews. The Harper project seemed to go on for ages with no response and, frankly, I felt like it was a project that was undertaken to ensure the man and his book remained present in the public eye, just to keep the royalties rolling. I suppose you could say that if I thought of Martel at all, I thought of him with a negative—at best, indifferent—point of view. After speaking to Martel, however, not just as a reporter who wanted to write a profile about him but as a person who actually enjoys writing fiction herself, I was quickly convinced that Martel was not what I had first assumed. Early Life and Writing PERHAPS IT WASN’T SO PROMISING speaking to Martel and hearing that he didn’t even plan on being a writer. In fact, when Martel was a teenager, he dreamed about becoming involved in politics and public policy, but eventually realized that it was the theatre of politics, not politics itself, that drew his attention. He went on to obtain his BA in Philosophy from Trent University, though he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with his life. Martel wasn’t in any rush, however, and worked at various odd jobs after graduating, including tree planting, dishwashing, and security work. Eventually Martel went back to university to obtain his Honours in Philosophy. Ultimately, Martel was waiting for something to grab him; he was waiting for his life to start. In the meantime, Martel wrote. Writing was something he loved investing his time and energy in. He’d spend hours thinking of characters, plots and settings for fun. The first creative thing he wrote was in his second year of univer-

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sity when he was nineteen years old. “I wrote a really bad play,” Martel confesses. “It was terrible, but I loved writing it.” After the first play, Martel wrote another, but quickly realized that moving plot through dialogue was very difficult. “So I switched to prose and wrote a whole series of bad short stories.” Upon returning to university, Martel decided to study part-time so he could work on a novel. At this time, however, he still didn’t consider writing as a profession. “The link between something I’d written and something published just seemed unbelievable. Scribbling something on a piece of paper seemed universes apart from a book. Writing was something I was doing to pass the time until I chose a profession.” Even though he wasn’t seriously considering writing as a profession, when it came down to choosing between school and his novel, Martel chose his novel. “I found I couldn’t work on my Honours and work on my novel at the same time. Something had to go, so I failed my Honours year and worked on my novel.” After leaving school, Martel moved to Paris to live with his parents while he finished his first novel. This novel was never published. “I sent it to one publisher who turned it down politely, as they always do,” says Martel, “but it wasn’t published because it just wasn’t good.” After completing his first unpublished novel, Martel continued writing short stories. His first publication was in the University of Victoria’s The Malahat Review. “I didn’t do much dreaming,” says Martel, “I just started writing and everything just happened. I eventually got better, got published, got awards, and then got an agent. There was some talent there, but I was also lucky.” After his first publication in The Malahat Review, Martel’s short stories were published in various other literary reviews. He eventually won the Journey prize, which led to a contract with a literary agent. Martel’s early work comprised his first book—a collection of short stories named after the Journey prize-winning story, “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios”. I’m not going to lie. Upon hearing that Martel hadn’t really planned on being a writer—that the profession had practically fallen into his lap—the little green monster in me made an appearance. How is it fair for a person to have the whole writing career fall into place for him when he doesn’t even plan on being a writer, while so many others who want to be writers struggle so hard, and sometimes never obtain, the first break? What I soon realized, however, was that Martel’s lack of planning didn’t mean he lacked skill. When I talked to him about Life of Pi, What is Stephen Harper Reading? and Beatrice and Virgil, he was clearly hyper aware of what he intended with each work. The passion he had for art and literature and the advice he gave was inspiring. His outlook on life in general was uplifting. It’s amazing to speak to someone who is so passionate and who knows so much about what they do. In today’s society, you meet hundreds and thousands of people who live without really knowing or caring for what they do 40-60 hours a week. Martel isn’t that kind of person and it is his outlook on life and his ability to say “Go and

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pursue your dreams” that makes me see that he isn’t just some guy fooling around with words. Choosing Passion MARTEL’S CHOICE BETWEEN SCHOOL AND writing is especially striking. Today, the choice between passion and education almost always ends in favour of staying in school. Whereas an education eventually earns, art notoriously doesn’t. Martel definitely doesn’t share this opinion though, arguing warmly in favour of following one’s dreams. “When you’re 20 or 21 you can’t be worrying about your pension. You can’t be worrying about if you can carry a mortgage.” Martel certainly didn’t. He traveled widely and wrote vicariously. Two years before completing Life of Pi, Martel settled in Montreal where he lived with roommates. There, he paid a monthly rent of $260 and had a declared annual income of $6000. “I had very little money,” says Martel, “but I was living like a prince because I was doing what I wanted to do.” Though he admits he didn’t think carefully about abandoning his studies, he argues that “you can’t continue doing something you’re absolutely miserable at. At that age, I had no commitments whatsoever. I didn’t have children. I didn’t even have a girlfriend. I could do whatever I wanted as long as I had enough food and a roof over my head.” Martel warns that the choice is a dangerous one though. Being young and living your dreams is one thing, “but at one point, poverty sucks”. As you get older, especially when you have a family, things can become difficult. “I was lucky,” says Martel. “It would be interesting to see what would have happened if Life of Pi had been a complete failure. It could’ve been a miserable situation. It’s a huge risk, but it’s a risk worth taking. You can’t not live your dreams. If you don’t live your dreams, you don’t try ... and you miss the whole point of life.” Talking to Martel allowed me to talk to the type of person I wanted to be. People have an impression of writers as meek people who hide behind books, pens and computer screens. But the truth is that the real writers—the writers that make it and make a difference—are in fact among the bravest because they are the ones who are strong enough to take a leap into uncertainty for something they love. Just as Martel did when he chose to write his novel, writers are the ones who are able to assert themselves when the odds are pointing to No. Martel’s Success MARTEL’S BRAVERY WAS WELL REWARDED. He was right in following his dreams. The first two books he wrote had good reviews but very poor sales. “That’s the life of most literary fiction,” says Martel. By the time Martel wrote Life of Pi, he had no expectation that he’d have such success. “I loved Life of Pi. It thrilled me, which is what a novel should do. I thought it would do the same as my other two books, but it did really well. I was lucky.”

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Life of Pi was a huge success. It soared to the bestseller lists after being published in the United States in 2002, sold more than 185,000 copies in hardcover— over two million copies in paperback—and won the Man Booker Prize. As successful as Martel has been, however, he hasn’t allowed the success get to his head. The basic fact, according to Martel, is that every novel is different and presents different challenges. Whether a book is unpublished or wins a prize, the individuality of each book’s writing process is the same. Furthermore, Martel believes the books are what attain success. Meanwhile, the author lives at home and has his or her own life. In Martel’s case, his life is a very quiet one “in the middle of nowhere in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan”. The only difference Martel can detect since his success with Life of Pi is in a growing confidence with his writing and a busier schedule. He is careful not to become overconfident or complacent, though, nor to believe that everything he writes is good. Indeed, Beatrice and Virgil received some incredibly negative reviews. “Success doesn’t change me,” says Martel, “because success is fickle.” Martel is a strong proponent of what the Buddhists call “passionate detachment”. “Give yourself over passionately to what you do,” says Martel, “and then detach yourself from it. Whether what you’ve written sells, you’ve still done something. You’ve created something that remains. A book will remain in libraries and archives for decades and centuries. Whether someone reads what you’ve written or not, you’ve still made your mark more than most of humanity. It’s something worth doing. Art is the greatest achievement.” After Life of Pi, Towards Beatrice and Virgil JUST AS THE SUCCESS HASN’T changed Martel’s views as a writer, neither has it altered his output and writing process. Although nine years have passed between Life of Pi and Martel’s fourth book, Beatrice and Virgil, it’s not due to lack of activity. For the first couple of years after Life of Pi was published, Martel was busy with the book’s success. After winning the Man Booker Prize, Martel visited almost every country in Europe, visited Hong Kong and toured the United States several times. A lover of traveling, Martel set out to enjoy his book’s success. “To have success where everyone wants to see you and meet you ... It’s wonderful. And it’s nice to engage in your book with others. It’s really gratifying.” After two years of publicity for Life of Pi, Martel began writing Beatrice and Virgil. “I’ve always been interested in the Holocaust,” says Martel. “It’s always been a dramatic tragedy that struck me.” Writing about the Holocaust, however, presented a host of challenges. As someone who wasn’t Jewish, European or even remotely descended from anyone involved in the Holocaust, Martel felt inauthentic and uncomfortable approaching the topic. Furthermore, it was difficult to approach the Holocaust with tools of literature. “Genocide is story- and art-re-

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sistant,” says Martel, “which is why most of the narratives about the Holocaust are very factual and historical.” After writing Life of Pi, Martel realized that if he felt nervous about approaching the Holocaust with human characters, he might be better able to approach it through animal allegory. After this revelatory moment, Martel started researching, reading, writing and rewriting until reaching the final draft of Beatrice and Virgil. Beatrice and Virgil AS MARTEL MENTIONED, BEATRICE AND VIRGIL was not as well received as Life of Pi. Personally, when I first read it, I wasn’t the biggest fan of it. I felt that I somewhat understood the message that Martel was trying to convey, but that it wasn’t solidly delivered in the book. Beatrice and Virgil is certainly a rich novel in meaning and symbolism and is ambitious in trying to depict the Holocaust through literary devices. Only after talking to Martel, however, did I gain a deep seated appreciation for the book. One of the more attention-grabbing aspects of the novel is Beatrice and Virgil’s main character, Henry, a writer who seems very similar to Martel. Though the character of Henry seems to parallel Martel in some ways, Martel is quick to point out that Henry was mainly constructed as an allegorical figure to parallel the history of the Jews before the Holocaust. By drawing similarities between Henry and the Jews, Martel recreates the ambiguity of the present moment. Even if the Holocaust comes to us with crystal clarity now, at the time of its occurrence there was “a nebulousness to the present moment” that Martel tries to reproduce. Furthermore, Beatrice and Virgil is a novel about writing a novel. “It’s a story about trying to come to a story,” says Martel. “Henry, the main character, is a writer because I didn’t want the teller of the tale separate from the tale. I wanted the storyteller to be involved in the story, because that’s how we read history. We are in dialogue with history. History isn’t some objective thing happening. How we see the past is relevant in every moment. It will affect how we see the present and the future.” Martel manages to take the story beyond the Holocaust by setting it in an unnamed city with somewhat vague main characters. The vagueness of setting and character may have somewhat detracted from readers’ ability to relate to the story, but Martel points out that he “didn’t want the reader to project anything onto the characters. I didn’t want to locate the story in any particular spot. The problem with the Holocaust is that people think of it in very strict, historical and geographic terms. People think of the Holocaust as 1933-1945 Germany and Eastern Europe. It’s ‘over there,’ ‘those people’. It has nothing to do with me. But we forget that the capital city of the Holocaust is the human heart—the radical disrespect of someone else.” Though the disrespect varies depending on where you are, it is universal.

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What is Stephen Harper Reading? MARTEL’S WORK IS VERY SOCIALLY conscious. All of his work reflects this. Martel’s recent non-fiction book What is Stephen Harper Reading? especially reflects great attention and concern with today’s society. What is Stephen Harper Reading? is a compilation of letters Martel sent on a biweekly basis to Harper over the span of three years. As I mentioned earlier, it was Martel’s insistence on sending Harper books without any sign of response or interest that made me doubtful of the man. Today the world is filled with celebrities and semi-celebrities alike who are seeking to keep themselves relevant, present and within the scope of society’s radar through stunts of drug abuse, rehab, marriage, divorce and involvement with issues or people that don’t really concern them. I thought the latter was what Martel was doing. When I began interviewing him, I had every intention of sniffing out the true—most probably sleazy—reasons behind his insistence with Harper. By the time I could mention What is Stephen Harper Reading? however, Martel had already shown himself to be a different creature than the one I’d first envisioned. His passion was enchanting and, as with everything else Martel did, his letters to Harper were written out of passion for a cause close to his heart. “Art is the great form to discuss what it means to be alive,” says Martel. “Nothing better represents reality than a novel. Do we want a political lead that is non-literate?” Whereas history books offer facts, novels offer a sense of time and place. As Martel points out, when you have a child, you want your child to read because reading stimulates imagination. “A whole generation is being formed now by Harry Potter. Why do we want that? Because it makes kids dream, and when they dream they have better imaginations, and they come up with better ideas, and it makes for a better world.” Furthermore, novels create empathy. “There’s no determinism to the human sensibility, but when you read a lot of books, you become more empathetic. I’m not saying that if you read you’ll be a great leader, but it’s certainly a case for the idea that if you want to lead, you have to be a reader. Otherwise I don’t know how your heart has been nourished.” Up Next NOW, AFTER THE COMPLETION OF Beatrice and Virgil and What is Stephen Harper Reading?, Martel has already moved on to his next book. Set in Portugal in three different time periods, Martel’s next novel is a novel in three parts. Martel had actually started working on this novel when he was in third year university. At the beginning of Life of Pi, the author even mentions that he was working on a novel set in Portugal, which he has abandoned. “I had this novel in my head for a long, long time,” says Martel, “and I didn’t know how to tell it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. But now I think I’ve finally figured it out. Novels never really disappear.”

Justin Lalancette Alan Bourassa

FIRST, THERE ARE THE DOGS, strange photographic creatures that emerge from great swaths of white paint. Then there is the white paint itself, dominating the canvas, spreading across its space in a gradation of shades. Indeed, if we were to name all the variations of white in these paintings, we would need as many names as there are colours: “1920s white,” “husky white,” “tragic clown white,” “spectral white.” The work of Quebec artist Justin Lalancette is a kind of winter dreamscape in which strange figures emerge from the blizzard: There are the everpresent canine images, sometimes drawing our eye insistently and sometimes showing up at the edge of the canvas, like ghostly photobombers who have crossed the space between film and paint and wandered unknowingly into the frame. There are elongated bodies, human, animal or animated; simple line figures and figures exploding with the energy of the paint and the brushstroke; half-hidden words and text; bits of newspaper, posters, photographic images and miles of tape; and always a shock of blue, yellow or red that emerges from the squall. It comes as no surprise to me when Justin tells me that his first mentor in Cégep, the artist Aurelio Sandonato, advised him: “Justin, il faut que tu s’amuse!”1 He is an artist who finds an energy that can only be found in joy, in play, in the willingness to confront the image of world without fear. But within these images—the clowns, the children, the preening admirals, the Disney figures—there is something happening in deadly earnest. I hope to get to the heart of this odd mixture of the hilarious and the troubling in Justin’s work. I MET JUSTIN AT THE Galerie Dominique Bouffard (along with the eponymous owner) just south of the Gay Village in Montreal, a small art gallery punching above its weight in the quality and daring of its artists. We sat surrounded by a number of Justin’s canvases and as we spoke and as more titles came up, Dominique would disappear into the back and emerge with yet another painting, including one of my favorites, the mad-eyed husky Apache. When you first meet Justin, it is hard to decide if he is the last man you would imagine as a painter or 1 “Justin, you have to have fun!”

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as someone who embodies all the qualities of an archetypical artist: a man with much to say, yet slightly ruffled by the effort of saying it. A kayak instructor, an outdoor adventure guide, a trainer of sled dogs: Justin has the look of a man who has met and conquered the hard conditions of such occupations, and who has found some secret delight in doing so. Born in Montreal, Justin spent the first 28 years of his life in the city. But always there was the journey into the wilds of northern Quebec. With family in Sacré-Coeur and the chance to escape Montreal, Justin soon understood the powerful attraction of wood, mountain and especially water. His dreams of becoming a naturalist and studying whales were derailed by less than stellar grades in high school—the artist’s daemon was clearly already pushing him in a different direction—and at 17, he went north on his mother’s advice, and later studied art at Cégep de Saint-Laurent. Today, he has balanced his artistic life and his life as an outdoorsman by dividing his year between his studio work and the work that takes him beyond the studio’s confines and into the world of snow and water and dogs that must be tamed. These 53 huskies, which Justin cannot speak of without affection, are the most obvious meeting place between his rural life and the still-urban (and urbane) artist that he is. They appear in painting after painting, almost always as enlarged photographic images. In Festin à Trafalgar, five self-important nineteenth-century admirals preen in black and white while a winged dog sniffs one

Justin Lalancette, Festin à Trafalgar (2009), oil and collage on canvas • Courtesy of Galerie Dominique Bouffard

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of the only splashes of colour—a meaty red—in the canvas. In Delire d’automne an antlered black-and-white (but pink-socked) husky howls on the left side of the canvas, leaving the space on the right open for Justin’s characteristic white-, beige- and cream-shaded field. In Le temps d’un vermifuge, a simple line-drawn figure—rare enough in Justin’s work—of a man stands pensively while, at his feet, a dog so dark that it is like a hole in the painting stands with its back to us as if it is looking into the very void that its presence has opened in the picture. These and other canine images are not symbols. They are not allegories, nor statements, nor metaphors. Justin is adamant on this point, and it is no wonder. This is not an art of messaging, of proclamations, but is rather an art of half-hidden figures, of relationships between embryonic forces. It is built on the working of light and texture that gives form to what is seemingly only at the margins of thought. It is always about the mixture, the melting pot. Justin’s images will not stand still long enough to be translated into statements or agendas. The kind of the work (and reworking) that goes into his canvases bespeaks this refusal of easy meaning or simple interpretation. Standing before Festin à Trafalgar, Justin takes me through his technique, explaining each new level, each new layer. His process is as rough and ready as the final image. He begins with white—or in Justin’s case it is better to say “whites”—on a canvas. “Je trip sur le blanc!”1 Justin tells me. He is able to pull a whole palette out of white paint. His next step is to stain and dirty up the canvas with black; he is striving for the opposite of purity. When the surface has achieved the proper balance between white and the dark that properly besmirches it, Justin glues poster fragments onto the canvas. One reason that Justin loves to return to Montreal on a regular basis is because the city is such a treasure-trove of wall advertisements and posters that he can tear down and transform. He works at speed to create “an effect”, as he says, almost of a graffiti artist, who must make his mark quickly and move on, almost as if he is himself afraid that some psychic policeman or moral censor might order him to stop if he stands still for too long. The next step is to draw the figure he will be working with. Justin is very modest, indeed overly modest, about his drawing skills. His figures are certainly not pictorially flawless, yet their very roughness is what integrates them into the energy of the composition. After the drawing, to my surprise, comes the tape. A closer look at Justin’s canvases will reveal layers and layers of thick criss-crossing tape, which, like the paint, is not of uniform whiteness, but is used as another way to tint the ground of the canvas. The last stage brings in pencil drawing, pastels and a sparing but strategic use of red or pink. What is most striking to me as Justin explains his technique is the layering effect of the technique. One painting can have ten, fifteen or even twenty layers. It is, for me, a true jewel of insight when Justin explains that he is trying to create the effect of another person, of multiple others, in his paintings. Not, mind you, the effect that there are multiple others in the painting, but that a 1 “I get off on white!”

Justin Lalancette, Above Left to Right: Apache (2009), oil and collage on canvas; Le temps d’un vermifuge (2009), oil and collage on canvas; Delire d’automne (2009), oil and collage on canvas; Chien de tête (2009), oil and collage on canvas • Courtesy of Galerie Dominique Bouffard

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group—I am tempted to say “a gang”—of other artists has actually worked on the painting. “Il y a plusiers gens,” Justin explains, “qui sont passé, qui ont laissé un trace, qui a été effacé…ce que je veux faire avec mon travail c’est souvent il y a dix, quinze, vingt couches du stock que je refasse volontairement... je reviens par la suite comme si on avait sept, huit personnes travailler dessus.”1 This insight is so crucial because it is the multiplicity of Justin’s work that so characterizes it. It is a multiplicity that must be created through technique. The artist has to approach the work from multiple vectors, has to, in effect, break himself up into numerous effects, each of which can make its mark on the canvas. The multilayered painting can only come from the multilayered artist, and the unifying effect of the layering can only come from the skill of the artist drawing these disparate forces and elements together. It cannot be an easy task, to be one and many at the same time, and it is surely a task that requires energy, which Justin has in abundance. He is also aware, however, of those moments when he must reach beyond himself, when the task is too great for him. He is, after all, an adult, a responsible parent and partner, a man in business for himself in more ways than one. With all this, he must also be an artist that can tap into the energy and the spontaneity of childhood. As we stand in the horseshoe of his paintings, many of which were part of his Chien de tête exhibit last year, Justin shows me that throughout the series there is always a horizontal line in each of the paintings, a line that can be followed from canvas to canvas. It is “le geste incontrôlé…c’est la premier ligne qu’un enfant va faire. C’est tellement un geste difficile. Tu ne peux pas savoir.”2 This is a hard line to draw when you are an adult, when something has been lost already, even in the most spontaneous artist, the loss which must somehow be made up for with energy, with joy, with courage. Or, sometimes with the help of an actual child! When the line is just too hard to make he may call his son. “Il y a des traits que je ne peux pas faire. Et des fois je lui disais, ‘Alors Jules, essaie de m’amener un coup de crayon noir, fais-en un pour papa, fais.’”3 When I point out to him that this is quite literally making the painting the work of more than one person, he smiles and says “La seule chose c’est qu’il n’a pas son nom dans le bas … pendant qu’il mange des croûtes!”4

1 “It’s like many people have passed by, who have left traces that have been erased …What I do with my work is that often there are ten, fifteen, twenty layers of stuff that I rework deliberately. When I come back to it, it’s as if one had seven or eight people working on it.” 2 “The uncontrolled gesture … it’s the first line that a child will draw. It is an extremely difficult gesture to make. You have no idea!” 3 “There are lines that I can’t draw. And sometimes I say to him, ‘Come on, Jules. Try to make a black line with the pencil, make one for your dad.’” 4 “The only thing is, he doesn’t have his name at the bottom of the canvas … he has to settle for crumbs!”

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IT BEGINS TO BECOME CLEAR what is at stake in Justin’s work. It is the ability to filter and channel embryonic energies, energies that cross from images to words, to bodies and to colours. It is no coincidence that the artist’s talent is both challenged by and comprised of these energies. It also makes sense that Justin has chosen the mentors and models he has. The artist Aurelio Sandonato—whose terra cotta wall sculpture in the Du Collège Métro Station in Montreal and his beautifully elongated and curved concrete sculpture at Cégep de Saint-Laurent bespeak an energy of his own—was the first to make the link for a young Justin between art and joy. Sandonato made sure that Justin understood that “à la second qu’on casse la tête sur une composition, il faut tiens dehors du cours … il fallait que je me mettre en marche. Et ca, ça restait … tout te fait chier, ça marche pas, va t’en. Il faut que ca reste un plaisir.”5 But more than just the joy of art it was the controlled madness, la folie, that Justin was searching for and that he found in his friend Sasha, a young artist from Matane with a large personality and a mania for art and performance that would, sadly, be his undoing. But that time with Sasha left its trace in Justin’s life and in his relationship to art. He says of Sasha: “Il est rentré en cegep avec cette espece de folie. Il vidait des gallons de peinture, il criait, il mettait de feux à tout … pis, il avait fun … c’etait un clown … et je me suis dit ‘Oui … c’est ça s’amuser, c’est ça faire de l’art. Je veux faire comme lui!’”6 He credits Sasha with giving him the spark and the daring to work with large formats, with new materials like tape and silicone, and with giving him the courage to push himself to new places. For Justin, the artist is—like his canvases—a meeting place of the traces, the marks, the signs and the half-forgotten influences of a life lived. A life that is not just private but also cultural, open to the influences of what has been done. The artist, Justin argues, is like a DJ. We know everything has been done, but it is in the combinations, the reworkings, the recastings of all the details and fragments of culture that something new—a new effect—is created. “On réinvent en utilisant ce qui a déjà était fait. C’est correct comme ça, c’est comme ça qu’on évolue, c’est comme ça que la musique a evolué, c’est comme ça que la peinture va évoluer aussi” 7 What this all amounts to in Justin’s work—the philosophy of joyful folly, the concern with the spontaneity, with the fragmentary, with layering, with the materiality of the canvas, with the half-erased trace—is a psychology of art that 5 “The second you start to feel like you’re losing your mind over a piece, get out … I have to get myself going. And that stuck with me. If everything is pissing you off, if it’s not working, just get away. It has to remain a pleasure.” 6 “He came to Cégep with a kind of madness. He used up gallons of paint, he shouted and cried out, he set everything ablaze … and he had fun … he was a clown. And I said to myself, ‘Yeah, that’s what it means to enjoy yourself. That’s doing art. I want to be like this guy!’” 7 “We reinvent by using what has already been done. And that’s okay … that’s how music has evolved. That’s how painting will evolve too.”

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is indistinguishable from a philosophy of art. Allergic to art-as-statement, Justin creates the art that is an embodiment of the forces, the virtualities and the unmeaning gestures that precede and ground all meanings. His works are impossible to interpret because they are made of what must come before interpretation. This commitment to what silently and ineffably founds meaning (and this is, in fact, exactly what Freud meant by “the unconscious”) is what gives Justin’s work its almost spectral quality and its ability to amuse and to disconcert simultaneously. The uncanny effect of Justin’s white paint springs from the way it is able to capture light from many angles and its ability to obscure (or partially obscure) the underlying layer of work. White paint has this crucial quality: it is a failed gesture of repression; it announces its own inability to hide what it seems intent on keeping from out gaze. The 2009 work Cut the Clown Darling is a case in point. It features one of the most frightening-looking clowns in art history. With white-out eye sockets, a nose that swirls like a hypnotic disk and an almost tumorous blot of black paint filling the space of its mouth, the clown points at us in a gesture that alludes to the iconic “Uncle Sam Wants You” recruitment posters of 1917. But much of what makes this image so stunning is the fact that the clown has no lower body. It swims out from a chaos of white paint and bits of barely visible text, wads of painted tape and streaks of grimy reds, yellows and oranges that give a singularly sullying effect to the whole work. The clown’s head is half covered with a blot of paint, paper and tape—a kind of aesthetic lobotomy that makes the face all the more inhuman. The words that hover over the clown—“alive,” “vie,” “vitalité”—are surely not there to signify any idea (no appearance of a word or a word fragment in Justin’s work is meant to do anything of the kind) but are themselves taken up in the obscene vitality of the painting. In the 2008 Autoportrait de moi, a work Justin calls his bête noire, a painting that he reworked again and again, a photographic figure of the artist takes center stage in the canvas, but the image is tinted with light streaks of blue. Most of the torso is obscured by a large white panel, and, most strikingly, the artist’s face above the mouth has been replaced by the upper face of Mickey Mouse attached to the canvas by an almost cruel row of staples that recall nothing more than the machinations of a Dr. Frankenstein. This singular effect is further enhanced by the pink wings that spring from the shoulders of the image, and the explosive halo of red and black that flames around the head of Mickey Mouse. And always, grounding yet invading the image is the layered white field of paint, tape, paper and other substances only to be guessed at by the smitten viewer. It is no wonder that Justin jokingly (or perhaps only half-jokingly) calls this work his Mona Lisa. The economy of these painting is not just, in the Freudian sense, an economy and arrangement of forces and energies, a careful channeling of what threatens to spill over the limits of the canvas. It is also, quite literally, an economy of materials. Although Justin has cultivated a careful distance from money—he often

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Justin Lalancette, Autoportrait de moi (2008), oil and collage on canvas • Courtesy of Galerie Dominique Bouffard

goes out with empty pockets, and relies on his girlfriend to deal with financial issues—he is very aware of the value of his materials, and indeed, the value inherent in the fact that they are more often than not, recuperated from leftover construction materials, canvas, fencing, paint, tape, anything that comes to hand on his salvage adventures in the derelict spaces of Montreal. “C’est des bijoux, là!”1 Justin exults. For Justin, the only materials that count are those imbued with energy, and the only energies that count are those that can be embodied in materials that always push toward and beyond their limits. They are materials that always seem about to break down, to decay, to consume themselves. Justin Lalancette will never be a “polished” artist. He is too fascinated by the messy process of the work, the resistance and decrepit beauty of his materials, the body itself as it insists in its broken and decaying splendour. His work in the future will push farther into unknown territory. His fascination with the animal will continue but he will explore new areas of human-animal interaction, of the animal as a kind of virtual outline or rough draft of the human. There will still be an irreverent and disconcerting humour to his work (he is currently working on a portrait involving an emaciated trapper, the trapper’s emu and—somehow—the blind terror the trapper feels for this emu). But we may expect that this artist will generate many new aesthetic problems for each problem he solves, and that he will not tire of asking new questions. What can white paint do? How does the animal accompany the human? How do the unknown regions of a human life find their way into the raw and beautiful materials—both physical and psychic—that the artist rescues from oblivion?

1 “These things are gems!”

Photograph by Michelle Allard

“The great thing about art is it’s layers. The more you start to really see that it is not just visual, the more it becomes about the subject matter and those numerous layers. It will change why you love it.” Vikky Alexander

Vikky Alexander Layers of Reflection Jes Busch

VIKKY ALEXANDER IS KNOWN FOR not only seeing but for creating art through layers. The idea of a static, fixed or one-dimensional design does not exist in the vocabulary that she has defined for herself. Within these layers we find the depth that allows us to delve so much deeper into the art, a depth that removes us from surface reflection and places us into a realm of excitement and realization. After my brief yet satisfying first meeting with Alexander, the idea of “natural sensation” and how it originates through the use of layered dimensions becomes much clearer and nearer to my appreciation of her art. Confined by the restraints of a mid-town apartment, Alexander’s work fills up every inch of an otherwise minimal space. The images that are hung stretch limitlessly beyond the walls that have accepted their role in supporting such heavy composition. Landscapes built of trees, water, mountains and skies are awkwardly reflected into a manipulated modernist environment. The natural elements within these images fight to maintain their place amongst their synthetic surroundings. Each piece creates a sense of boundless space even where competing structure would rather not allow that doubled horizon supporting Alexander’s continually underlying directive, “nature versus architecture.” Sitting in this room, surrounded by such heightened design, the striking dimensions of Alexander’s work cannot be ignored. The artist is equally as luminous as her creations. The images provoke the question of motivation and intention. Though aware of the perplexity that her art often reveals, Alexander remains reserved and humbled by her reality. “I have always wanted to make art, simply for the sake of making art.” BORN IN VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, Alexander was raised on the West Coast and later moved to the East to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. In 1979 she graduated with her BFA and wasted little time settling in before reconsidering her surroundings. With ambition large enough to outshine any hint of inhibition, she established herself in what may be the Mecca of North American art and culture: New York City. At only 23 and fresh to the scene of

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Vikky Alexander, Clockwise: Zacatitos Sunset Reflected (2008), digital print on aluminum, Edition of 3 Punta Gorda Reflected (2008), digital print on aluminum, Edition of 3 Cabo Pomo Reflected (2008), digital print on aluminum, Edition of 3 Baja Landscape Reflected (2008), digital print on aluminum, Edition of 3 • Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery

1980s pop art—with its reversal and reactions to the fames of abstract expressionism—Alexander exhibited her first public show. “It was a small show, put on by A&M Artworks. The exhibits were run by a lawyer, only on occasion, out of his loft in Manhattan. It was my first show and it was reviewed by The New York Times.” This earlier work has been quoted as “informing the movement of Appropriation art for which she is recognized as the youngest innovator of the tendency.” At a time when numerous artists (Warhol, Levine, Prince...) were experimenting within the realms of adopted and re-evaluated imagery, Alexander became increasingly aware of the power of consumerism, media and pop culture, hence using her work as an external expression of this reality. As a form of “culturalborrowing,” Appropriation remains a key element in conveying already-existing ideas and philosophies in social, cultural and media-related matter. Due to the occasional criticism received on the basis of its originality, it becomes essential as an artist to maintain a high level of engagement with the audience and an element of authenticity. Alexander’s choice to convey the idea of a natural world trapped by the direct constraints of a man-made structural utopia are befitting to the terms of Appropriation Art. She is consistently experimenting with the illusions of a material world, allowing her work to carry through this theme. The beauty and mystery of the imagery on the walls is obvious, however, the real surmise lies more within the individual experience that those images allow for both the creator and the observer. As much as we might think we know why art is what it is, the truth will always shift back to the artist. It is here that the space where a story can be told is established. On this occasion, that space could also be described as a 3-foot-wide coffee table separating Alexander and I, the surface of the table reflecting the towering West Coast red maples outside the window, competing for occupancy between their observers and themselves. Not only are we surrounded by images and depictions of this very battle of contention, we are now also existing within it, one form of nature watching another as we both strive to hold our space. Is it occasions like this that trigger the initial interest within the artist’s imagination? At what point does the focus shift from awareness into a reaction? For Alexander, the reaction comes at virtually the same time as the awareness sets in. “I first began to understand and take an interest in art when I was really young. It didn’t take me long to figure out that a horse was a horse no matter which way I drew it. I was always looking for ways to be creative, to experiment, to learn. Even now, I am continually trying to learn something new. I’ll come up with different ideas and projects. The art evolves depending on the medium I choose to express and execute those ideas. The presentation is necessary to convey meaning. I play with the idea of reflections as they exist in my mind ... The reflection depicts my understanding of what we as a society have done to our environment as we keep building, keep clearing and keep trying to take over where nature once existed.”

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This idea can be described as a constant exploration and revealing of the parallel relationship that has come to exist between nature, art and architecture. It presents an “alluring falsity as a norm of contemporary seeing.” It is within this realm of realism and fantasy, structure and transformation, luxury and necessity, that she invites the public eye to contemplate the concrete playground that our exterior environments have become. “My interest in landscape and how it intertwines with architecture started near the end of the 1980s. I was always intrigued by how our architecture attempts to control nature. Culture tries to manipulate such landscapes and architecture becomes the grid by which we align our surroundings to fit into it. It is a very utopian and illusory idea. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to control it—in the end, the natural world will always take over. It is an observation of the natural world versus desire and consumption. I think this is just something that we as people generally try to make sense of and rationalize. Nature will always define its own path and yet we still try to control it. It is something that we can’t align with a ruler and pencil though through architecture we continually attempt to. I think it all goes back to [the works of] The Group of Seven, one person versus the landscape.” The presentation of these concepts—and the unnatural relation of the two worlds competing as one—has remained a constant reminder and indication to the obstruction that our societies have created with the injection of such mass production into a slowly disintegrating environment. By incorporating the use of photography, sculpture, mirrors and collage, Vikky presents the dynamic of such “doubled horizons,” the “claustrophobia” that our intrusive proceedings have now contrived. Most often recognized for her work as a photographer, Alexander has been designated one of the leading practitioners of photo-conceptualism. The collective talent, which started in Vancouver in the early 1980s, are known for placing the emphasis of their work on the subject rather than the matter where the “execution is a perfunctory affair,” where the idea dictates the art. “When I went to school in the 1970s, photography always had to be about an idea, an intellectual process and that’s the way that I have always thought of it. There is a history of it on the West Coast but there is also a broader and deeper understanding of it that is international. Photo-conceptualism can look like a lot of different things to different people so you can’t really classify it into one thing. It can be small and black and white or it can be big, bold and colourful.” Having since worked through numerous mediums, Alexander feels most at ease with lens and shutter in hand. In her most recent compilation, Alexander continues to explore these physical and natural boundaries. Through mirrored snapshots, she places her viewers inside the walls of some intriguingly ostentatious Parisian showrooms. For a city that has become known for its ability to make all things appear of a flawlessly chic nature, the chaos of these rooms became incomprehensible. “I had a residency in Paris about 12 years ago through the Canadian Council. I used to walk by these showrooms near the Bastille and I always felt that they

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were such an anomaly and incredibly tasteless in comparison to how chic everything in Paris was. They looked like they were on steroids, completely contrived to what one would expect to see. I went back this summer, 12 years later, and they were still there. I was amazed. I had to shoot them. I shot them at different times, waiting for the right light, the right feel. The final shots were done at around four in the afternoon, when the light and colour was so rich. They had amazing reflections and it felt like the whole city was coming into the room, into the scene. Not only were there the mirrors in the showroom but the glass of the windows as well, all the reflections created such intense layers. “In a way, as a viewer, I became a consumer consumed by myself, my thoughts. It’s a hard cycle to understand. As chaotic as it was, at the same time it seemed like the most honest thing I had seen. It became something less about the style and rather about something bigger, bigger than just the excess. Everything else in Paris is very over-determined, expected and perfected. Paris can be a very

Vikky Alexander, Paris Showrooms: Cream Sectional (2009), digital print on metallic paper, Edition of 3 • Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery

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Vikky Alexander, Paris Showrooms: Etam (2009), Digital print on metallic paper, Edition of 3 • Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery

rigid place at times. Everyone seems to have the same sort of look down, the same ideas and means of expressing them. This was so completely out of the norm and it fascinated me ... It seemed so appropriate for what it is I strive to capture in my work. I am always trying to learn something, coming up with ideas, and the method by which I express this is different with every project. This time it was photography. The composition was so excessive, just so many layers.” Alexander’s interpretation of the world around her, a world in which she strives to experience in a genuinely unbiased way, has allowed her to receive stimulation from all angles. “The admiration of my work and of other artists evolves because it is always a learning process. Contemporary art allows you to continually observe it; ‘Why didn’t I see that before? Why am I seeing it now?’ It’s important as an artist or as an observer to allow yourself the pleasure of constantly re-evaluating the work. The interpretations are endless ... You can’t just look at art and say whether you think it is good or bad. It requires judging it from a

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different level, by the depth with which someone clarifies and does their research. From that place you can then decide whether you think it is good or bad. The system of galleries in Vancouver can make that a little tricky sometimes. We are so limited within the gallery system and so our exposure to a lot of art is limited. It’s sad because there is some incredible talent here that goes unnoticed. It is a culture and everyone has to contribute in some way. Fine art and the arts in general are appreciated to a much greater degree in Europe and the United States. Here, we have sports.” In our desire to build bigger homes, taller towers and larger landscapes, the art depicts society’s unnatural desires to consistently require more despite depletion of nature’s existence. There develops a subtle fear that excess will never become extinct. “For a lot of people it is about the currency, the exchange. If you have a certain artist in your collection it becomes like a Mercedes—it is your collateral feeding into your status. There are also those that purchase art, store it and it becomes more or less like stocks and bonds. There becomes an unnatural intensity. The art auctions have become so intense. To me, it is a little appalling and I don’t see it as really helping anyone, even the artist. I am aware of the need and the significance, but I feel like I am in a little bit of a bubble and I get to think of art in a different way. I am not one for excess. Just having my own art on my walls is more than excessive enough for me!” With knowledge and desire for progression Alexander’s art remains as prominent now as it has throughout the 30 years that she has been considered one of Canada’s leading photo-conceptualist and installation artists. Despite obstacles that may have hindered her in this time, she remains ardent in her desire to create art simply for art’s sake. “Being a successful artist has allowed me to continue creating and making projects. I think it is the same for most people in the ‘cultural’ industry. It can’t just be an ends unto itself, it has to remain fluid. Obviously the generation of income is important and necessary but so is that desire to just create with no expectation. I never have any preconceived outcomes for my work. It always filters back to the artistic practice. I think the real blocks for an artist are the ones that you set for yourself. You set out on a challenge and sometimes it takes a long time to solve it, other times it comes quickly. You have to learn to accept and accommodate the uncontrollable factors. It can be frustrating sometimes, but from it comes something greater than you could have imagined. It is an ongoing learning experience and you have to have the vision.” As she continues to push forward, creating statements as well as questions to challenge our minds and defy our society, the simplicity of it all still remains. “I just want to keep working and enjoying it for as long as I can. To me, art comes naturally, honestly. Sometimes I think that I really don’t know how to do this at all. The learning will never end and I guess I am just figuring it out along the way, just like everyone else!”

Jim Hansen, Artfreekey (1996), manipulated digital photograph

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Life is full of words and pictures that have love and power and humor and sexuality and indifference and evil. That is the content of my work. I am the content of my workâ&#x20AC;?. Jim Hansen

Jim Hansen Private I Jesse Walker

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH the man beWalker would like to thank Jim Hansen, Bruce Johnson, Noreen Golfman and the art gallery of NL hind the Muppets,( Jim Hensen,) or with the en(The Rooms) as well as Memorial University for the vironmentalist that dominates a Google search assistance/ground work and additional quotes that of the Jim Hansen name, The Private Eye, in life, greatly contributed to this article. is very much that, a private Individual. After 40 *-Hansen’s interviews with Walker. years of art making in North America’s eastern †- Hansen’s personal correspondence with Memorial University throughout the 1980’s most city, he is one of Newfoundland’s best kept secrets, continuing a practice and life that has remained inconspicuous if not obscure even to the artists of the St. John’s NL community. That being said, Jim is in the habit of making himself quite vulnerable in his work. The private I becomes public only able to be viewed by one person at a time, bringing the viewing down to him and one other in an intimate experience. As is with one who engages in making work that is generally incompatible with the popular art market, Jim’s work is not to be found in any commercial gallery or boutique, and tends to be overshadowed by the digestible and safe art that occupies so much of the happy civility of “culture and tourism”. When asked if he was interested in this profile, Jim responded that he doesn’t usually like to engage in interviews or the Art Speak, but that he would give this a try as we are old acquaintances. It is an honour to be writing this profile of Jim Hansen. In my opinion he is one of the foremost artists in this part of the world. His work is interesting, funny, engaging, personal, about the world and it reflects his exuberant and youthful spirit. When asked about the role of the critic, he said he felt this is up to them to connect to the work and to come to their own ideas. Hansen respects writers who really like to write about art. “You can always tell if someone really enjoys what they’re doing and they just like to write, whether it’s art, or some story from their past. First, they’re writers although they may write a critical piece. Then there are writers who make their bones on being cynical and nasty and it doesn’t get me anywhere.” *

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Jim Hansen, True Romance (2006), manipulated digital photograph

JIM HANSEN WAS BORN IN Ohio in 1939. His parents, both painters apart from their careers as an engineer and a teacher, gave Hansen a creative life and exposed him to all the art of the classics and contemporary post-war modern era. At an early age Hansen preferred his comics to the “ash can” browns of the Renaissance and it wasn’t until the bold colours of Matisse, and then of the Abstract Expressionist works of the 50’s that Hansen’s interest in Art was aroused. Uninterested with pursuing a 3rd generation NY School approach, Hansen followed the lineage of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Duchamp and the rise of photography and prominent advertising methods. “I sort of knew early on that there wouldn’t be a real place for me as a professional artist — capital ‘P’ — there was no way. You’d have to teach art, whatever, give talks, write — all the things you could imagine. So I knew that right off... and sure enough…” * Two experiences early on in Hansen’s career contributed profoundly to the ethics and philosophy that were to guide his self centred creative investigations. The first was in 1959, when Hansen collaborated with Lyle Linville to produce a 250 edition, self-published journal of photographs and poetry called “Tiger”. The book was an account of black and white children from Warren, Ohio playing together in wooded areas near Hiram, Ohio. The book was a unique view at a time when social and racial turmoil exploded with riots breaking out in nearly every black ghetto of the region. “This was around the time when dogs, police and white mothers were chewing up the black children trying to integrate the schools in Mississippi.” †

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Although not a commercial success and not able to find a potential publisher, “Tiger” was found by the novelist Lillian Smith who wrote “Strange Fruit”. She purchased 20 copies of Tiger and gave one to her friend M.O.M.A. curator Dorothy Miller. Radio DJ/record producer Bill Randall, who was pursuing a PhD in religious music at the time, also bought copies. This led to the second formative development of Hansen’s career: he was invited by Randall to photograph a small Christian sect known for their occasional handling of copperheads and rattle snakes in dramatic tests of faith. Having spent time living in the community, and realizing the value of this practice in their lives, Hansen chose to destroy his photographs rather than let them be capitalized on in a sensational spectacle that he realized was profoundly unethical. Still to this day Hansen becomes disturbed at the tendencies of some people to use others in what might be categorized as psychologically aberrant behavior that feeds the popular desire for exploitation. “In spite of the popular press, ‘snake handling’ I came to understand, had a real and valuable significance in the hard and often tragic lives of these people. If they could face up to the danger of the poisonous snakes in their hand on Saturday night they knew their faith would carry them through the week” † It was at this juncture when Hansen realized that without any commercial photo galleries to support his practice, and rather than be drafted to serve in Vietnam with a rifle, that he best join the military service and be able to choose his area of focus. Hansen served in the US Army Medical Corps from 1962-65 and graduated from the Kent State University in 1969 with a major in studio arts and a double minor in biology and chemistry. When he went to Kent State he had most of his credits, so he relied on the GI bill and the US government to pay his way while he completed an art major. Jim spent a year and a half in an intensive studio environment. Concentrating mostly on films, Hansen had his shorts sent out to various festivals but soon realized that he wasn’t interested in the human organizational manipulations needed to produce work in the field. Hansen’s final army service placement was in Hawaii, in the labs of a large hospital, where he later became head of the labs at night. Hansen had to find his own voice quickly and in the meantime secure a day job. Fortunately for Hansen when he began working in medicine it enabled him to survive. There was never a time he had to scrape by and do the art he didn’t want to do. “Everything I’ve done in the way of making art, was what I really wanted to do, because I wasn’t trying to make any money from it.” * Some artists will appreciate the fact that Jim is not worried about his retirement. After moving to Newfoundland in 1970 he became a senior technician at the school of medicine in Memorial University. In the earliest days of the medical school in Newfoundland, he was one of the first employees. He could have gone in a number of directions - even been the head of the start up audio visual dept - but

he didn’t want to compromise. Doing graphic work or photography at the school was too close to the bone. Hansen wanted to manage his own creative development and he couldn’t see himself doing graphic work for anyone else. Soon after arriving in Newfoundland Jim embarked on ‘The Newfoundland album.’ Numbering at over 160 prints. This work has strong illustrative qualities and possesses little or no images of the artist himself. There are vast expanses of unoccupied paper and the hand is very much present with writing and handdrawn diagrams. The work shows his influence from the pop art aesthetic of Warhol and Rauschenberg in the use of silkscreen prints and bold colours. Numbered, but following no strict linear hierarchy, ‘The Newfoundland album’ stands as a sort of journal of words, drawings and photographs that resemble the spontaneity and elasticity of thoughts and memories that refuse to be ordered or organized rationally. Hansen refers to these prints as thought machines and bits-o-photos that for him resembled ads more than a ‘painted window on the world’. This body of work as a whole could be considered and viewed as an array or collection (which could also be said of his work in general). By the end of the

Jim Hansen, excerpts from the Newfoundland Album (1970-1981), serigraph

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Jim Hansen, Cadeau (2006), manipulated digital photograph

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1970’s Hansen realized that these prints were less about Newfoundland and more about himself, a focus that is manifest in much of his successive work. He then decided to drop the title of ‘the Newfoundland album’ and reduce the size of each print by half. By the late 70’s-early 80’s Hansen and his new friend and collaborator Peter Walker were doing a lot of phallic works which were reasonably edgy at the time. “There were women in porn exposing themselves, but not a lot of men exposing their privates. It wasn’t in the movies, it wasn’t on T.V., and so the work became an exploration of the meanings of masculinity. This was when the feminist movement really started to hit its stride and it flipped out a lot of men. It started to really question where you were to with your sexuality. But now it [Hansen referring to this 80’s work] seems pretty tame somehow. Now cocks are everywhere.” * This was at a time when the St. John’s mayor, the now infamous father Hickey and the pervasive conservatism of St. John’s censored his friend and colleague, Peter Walker’s 1984 exhibition, “Sacred Art”, before the work was even open to the public. (Walker even received some death threats from the locals.) Eventually the criminal behavior of the sexually abusive pedophilic priests of Mount Cashel such as Father Hickey were exposed and became Canada’s largest sexual abuse scandal, and one of the largest in the world. Disclosed in 1989, the boys-home was promptly closed the following year. It was at this time that Hansen, before desk-top computers were powerful enough to work with images, bought a 4x5 studio camera with a Polaroid back. Photographs would be collaged then re-photographed with the insertion of text and printed with darkroom techniques. In Hansen’s work at this time one can see the proliferation of the use of photography and its bag of tricks as a main source of image-making with a gradual inclusion of himself as the subject, often prone, naked or thereabouts; his quirky sense of humor asserting itself. As this sexuality and humor took the stage it gave Hansen a litany of parodied masculine icons and situations to draw from. See his photo/object work such as Oh Canada (1986) where his member is proxied by a faucet mounted on a Niagara Falls plaque. The artist joins his country of birth and the one of residence in a gesture that hovers between a simple jibe and intelligent symbolism. Throughout the 80’s Hansen’s work often finds masculinity and domesticity as the centre of attention. This was a time when Hansen had become familiar with married life and parenthood, and he used this identity as a middle class, white heterosexual male. Hansen’s genitalia as the fountain-head for social, political, and philosophical musings are often humorous yet contain serious commentary on the patriarchal overtones of what is still largely a male dominated society. Photography gave artists the ability to easily capture and re-assemble their world. From magazines and pop culture, to snap shot photography, international photojournalism and reproductions of art works, montage and collage gave artists and designers a freedom like never before. With digital manipulation Hansen was easily able to draw from a world of images and re-assemble it in endless combinations and juxtapositions.

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Hansen began his digital photographic manipulations in the mid-late 80’s with the Amiga computer. With an operating system of a mere 1 megabyte Hansen used a kind of surveillance camera plugged into the computer to create digital photos - likely one of the first in the field to do so. “It was exactly what I was looking for. It didn’t take a lot of energy. With sculpture etc, I couldn’t do that physically. I was doing graphics, text, images and a polymorphous look at the world where things are happening but not necessarily connected. Being able to work on the computer seemed like I had found my perfect medium. That’s when Mac upped the anti

and the Amiga lost out when it Jim Hansen, Clockwise: C. Sherman (1992); was sold to Commodore. Com- FriskMe (1988); Oh Canada (1986), modore screwed it up totally. manipulated digital photographs The rest is history.” * Over the next decade Hansen’s work gradually shifted. Perhaps more engaged in dialogues with his influences and surroundings in the (art) world, it became less phalocentric in nature, and often took place in outdoor scenes with himself amongst re-contextualized sites and situations. Photoshop enabled him to do things he had never imagined and this saw him adding to empty signboards, placing himself seamlessly within a chosen frame and engaging in a myriad of grasping and posing acts. Beginning a persona as the private eye, Hansen, now less interested with a satirical and ‘phunny’ masculinity of his earlier years, engages the various institutions, systems, environments and artistic tools that pervade his life. His body is ever more present and often viewed from the back in a strategy reminiscent of Magritte.

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MANY FIND HANSEN’S WORK ENTERTAINING, yet profoundly enigmatic. Verbal and visual puns grant conditional access to his “Thought knots”. In the way that photography can impart a sense of voyeurism, the viewer of Hansen’s work is drawn into a complex , intelligent montage of artistic and personal references that Hansen uses in the service of his own often confused narratives. As Hansen once asserted “Mine is an art of impotence, sexual confusion and anxiety about my place in this time.” † Jim likes the little constructs that are one on one. His work is not about making big things for a public. It is P.I. Jim wishing to communicate with one other person. “You cannot view one small print with a bunch of people. You have to get your nose into it.” With large scale work one will often encounter oneself standing side by side with others looking at the same piece. For Hansen this becomes a distraction — half of your mind on the people by your side, the other half on the work. Hansen requests your undivided, private attention. For anyone who needs to understand what an art is talking about, Hansen’s work is sure to be frustrating, yet it will give you enough clues to keep looking. Something that Sartre talks of is the damage we do to a mystery if we attempt to define it, and so it is with Hansen’s work, it is better to accept the mysterious thing rather than to wound it. We should instead work our way around these mysteries and their companions to get a sense of their edges. His images tease you to enter his world (and the world at large) that is cryptic and absurd yet teetering on a sense that understanding is just within reach, a puzzling ambiguity keeping you coming back for more. BEFORE THE AGE OF TWENTY, Jim worked with his colleague Lyle Linville in a small advertising company, Hansen on graphics and images and Linville doing the ad-copy. After this small stint in commercial work, Hansen was never to Jim Hansen, Left to Right: Deep Undercover (2007); Private Dick (2007); Neon (2005); How To Read Signs (2010), manipulated digital photographs 72

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return to making images for commercial purposes but the vitality of advertising was never lost on him. Hansen points out: “Everybody knows how to read images with text, through advertising. If you wanted to see the best graphic work you looked to the ads, as far as craft is concerned, skill, even imagination in some sort of corporate way, from my point of view, you went to the ads.”* As Derrida once acknowledged, puns can serve as a sort of entry point into things, enabling you to begin a dialogue with something that will often go much further than the superficiality of a one liner. Text for Hansen often serves this role, giving you a starting point with a laugh that opens you up to what lies beneath. Yet often, this text is as curious as it is informative. Familiar words are often misspelled, and possessed of multiple meanings. Language is deftly worked with an air of poetic mutation. Hansen’s arsenal often includes bold references to the art world and the players that have given it (and him) so much. Magritte, Duchamp, Sherman, O’Keefe, and his colleagues all make their own kind of appearances. See his thanks to Cindy Sherman (C. Sherman (1992)), where he playfully splices in his face over hers, while Mint lifesavers hover above the image teasing you to take one and suck. Duchamp’s gifts to the modern art world are many and Hansen pays homage to him in his work, either in obvious appropriation or just in the tactics that Duchamp imparted with the use of ready-mades. Word play and skillful manipulation of language, together with his admonition of photography’s ability to supplant paintings with their aura of authenticity, are a part of this art. In much of Hansens work there is a humor, ambiguity and often rawness that lends genuine character to his efforts. In True Romance (2006), Hansen places himself on the street sidewalk, emotionally desolate, or destitute, or just waiting for the school of art-talk to re-open its doors. Perhaps he is also in love with what is abandoned.

Jim Hansen, Simple Sign Man (2005), manipulated digital photograph

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Through feminism and its efforts to define the boundaries of sexuality and identity, often blurring any distinction between them, Hansen continues to build his art using these tactics and its critical eyes. When gay and trans artists worked to expand notions of sexuality and gender identity, the alternative voices of previously disenfranchised peoples gained prominence in contemporary arts practice. This may have placed white, heterosexual, middle-class American males such as Hansen, somewhat lost or overlooked in the leveling of the artistic playing field. That being said Hansen has shown throughout Canada and The U.S. in nearly 30 solo and two person exhibitions, as well as in Paris, Brussels and New York — not to mention dozens of selected group exhibitions — during the past forty years. His work is in the collection of the M.O.M.A., Kent State University, Canada Council/National Art Bank and the National Gallery to mention a few. But somehow, and perhaps intentionally, Hansen has remained underground. He recalls in the early years of St. John’s, attempts to bring Canadian Art magazine editors to his studio, they chose instead to represent Canada’s east coast through landscape artists and painters of Newfoundland’s exteriors. This is somewhat understandable. Much of the popular press of art is that of the flashy ‘wow’ factor or heritage infused commercialism. Artists are often portrayed walking along the beach in a cliché that many find romantic. Difficult, sexually charged and complex work doesn’t fit so easily into this romance even though Hansen has tried. The majority of Jim’s work now happens in a relatively private world. He corresponds with others, but in recent years his participation with the Art world proper has been whittled down to a minimum. This is not unfamiliar. As art maker’s age, so their energy and enthusiasm to play in the game of the establishment often dwindles. Who, after 50 years of working as an artist, would want to write ‘submissions’ and compete for ever smaller pieces of the cultural pie? Hansen wishes to continue to show his work, but not for recognition, merely to sow seeds of “inspiration.” Hansen’s art is a testament to his ethics, a dedication to keeping alive the art that is so important to him and his willingness to put himself on the line through his work. He builds on the work of iconoclasts of the 20th century and responds to his place in time in unique and challenging ways that have stretched the intellect and confronted the safeness of popular trends in the intellectual art world. But as Jim says: “I’ve never thought of myself as breaking ground in the great tradition of modern art. The ground I’m breaking tends to be my own compost heap.” †

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John Hall Laura Pellerine

A MAN WITH A GRAY beard and glasses is standing next to his latest love—an acrylic-on-canvas rendering of five chocolate and caramel doughnuts stacked tower-like against a red backdrop. Despite being five foot tall, the doughnuts appear so fresh and real that it’s tempting to reach into the painting and sink your teeth into the moist, deep-fried dough and sugary sprinkles. This November, John Hall will introduce Ka-Pow! to the world at the Kelowna International Airport as one of his newest paintings in a series of rainbow-hued frosted doughnuts and licorice allsorts. An anticipated one million people will view the exhibit running until 9 May 2011. Some may question why a renowned Canadian artist would spend his days painting deep-fried treats and candy, but Hall is best known for his hyper-realistic depictions of pop culture objects. In the past he has depicted items like decaying garbage bits from the junkyard, skull-shaped Halloween lights, household odds and ends, and stones. His decision to explore a lighter subject matter was simple: “It gives me the same level of pleasure that I felt in my studio in the beginning,” he says. BORN IN EDMONTON IN 1943, Hall didn’t know at first that he would fall in love with painting. He didn’t come from an artistic family—his father was a seaman who would travel to the Arctic or the coasts of British Columbia to work on ships, while his mother, a former secretary, stayed at home in their bungalow to take care of him and his younger brother. After trying his hand at working on a ship in the summer after high school, he made his way to Calgary to enrol in, as it is now called, the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD). As a young boy he showed some promise in drawing and thought he might be able to make a living in the commercial art world, possibly in the advertising industry. He remembers sitting down with the head of the school, Illingworth Kerr (an Order of Canada recipient, whom he would later befriend and call by his nick-

John Hall: Left: Shaboom! (2010), acrylic on canvas Above: Ka-Pow! (2010), acrylic on canvas â&#x20AC;˘ Courtesy of the artist

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John Hall, Left: Angel (1989), acrylic on canvas Above: Muneca (1992), acrylic on canvas • Courtesy of the artist

name “Buck”) to ask about enrolment. The first-year art class was full, but because there was so much interest, a few days later Hall got a call saying they were opening up a second class. It proved to be serendipitous. “I started with every intention of becoming a commercial artist,” he says. “But just weeks into the program I had seen enough of fine art to know that that was what I really wanted to do.” Though he dabbled in printmaking, sculpture and even ceramics, it became clear that painting would be his medium of choice. “It’s like falling in love, you can’t explain it exactly,” he says. “There is an instant appeal and everything about painting appealed to me in that full sense.” Hall was also drawn towards the fine arts world because of the positive experiences he had with his instructors in college. Reading like a list of Canada’s who’s who in the arts world, Hall was taught by greats: Marion Nicoll, a pioneer in abstract painting for women; accomplished watercolourist Stanford Perrott; and prairie and foothills landscape artist Illingworth Kerr. He refers to many of them by their first names, saying they eventually became his friends and colleagues. Ron (Gyo-Zo) Spickett was his primary painting instructor. These days Spickett is known as a spiritual artist, but in the sixties he was reputed for his colourful, semi-figurative Western-themed paintings. Like Spickett, who is often referred to as an “ideas-based” artist, Hall’s work is generally thought to be more “meaningful than beautiful.” Hall says he has benefitted greatly from Spickett’s feedback. “He would respond positively, but not in a sort of a mindless reaction kind of way,” Hall explains. “He understood what I was trying to do and offered suggestions to point me in useful directions.” Aside from the many art greats, Hall’s time at ACAD was graced with another Canadian icon—Joni Mitchell. He remembers seeing Mitchell sitting on the grass and “singing away” one mild spring day. “Of course at the time she wasn’t the Joni Mitchell we know now. To be perfectly honest Joan Baez’s name was much bigger, so I thought, ‘Oh, this is just a Canadian knock off.’ I soon learned my lesson.”

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John Hall Left: Scar (1995), acrylic on canvas Above: Mirage (2001), acrylic on canvas • Courtesy of the artist

The revolutionary Swinging Sixties were a good time to be in the visual arts. With modernism growing stale, a new painting style was emerging, one that was creating a lot of buzz: pop art. From the very beginning Hall says he was drawn to the style of Jim Rosenquist. “He was a pop artist, painting everyday things realistically, ads from magazines, for example. He was fairly influential for me.” Hall quickly found himself caught up in the movement. “I was always happier painting a Coca-Cola bottle than a wine bottle,” Hall says. “The influence of French painting was so dominant that it was hard to see where you could go. As I left ACAD, I was starting to make confused paintings; but what they did have was an absence of the qualities that had encompassed the paintings in the first half of that century. It was exciting.” Hall honed his talent with graduate studies at the Instituto Allende in Mexico, a country he would fall in love with and frequent on and off throughout the years. In the mid-sixties, Hall says Canada offered few opportunities for graduate studies in art, and he was inspired to head to Mexico because of his instructor Ron Spickett’s enthusiasm for the Instituto Allende’s program. At the end of the program each student was granted a solo exhibition, and Hall’s was shown at the Allied Art Centre, a gallery that would eventually become the Art Gallery of Calgary. Hall was given free rein to choose which works would be displayed from paintings he had done during his year as a graduate student. He remembers feeling terrified before the opening. “I’m always very nervous and that exhibition was no exception. You’re hanging yourself out on the line,” he says. None of his paintings sold, but Hall doesn’t recall being disappointed. “Frankly I was more interested in having the work seen and appreciated than selling it,” he says. “I don’t think any of us had illusions about getting rich quick through art. It wasn’t a possibility.” Hall was instead encouraged by the show’s positive reception. It was a trend that would continue as his reputation grew over the next few decades. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Hall’s work appeared in over 70 group

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shows and nearly 20 solo exhibitions across Canada. He credits his surge in popularity to trend-watching curators who took notice that that he was among some of the first Canadian artists emerging in new realism. “Through the 1980s there was an excitement about the kind of realism I was practicing. Curators are always looking at what’s going on and I happened to be doing something at the time that made sense in the art world they were considering.” During this time, Hall’s style evolved. While his technique, material (acrylic on canvas) and themes remained primarily the same, the former sparse, gray palette he started off with developed into a fuller pictorial space illuminated with chromic colour. Hall attributes this change to looking at his subject material differently. “At the junkyard I’d find bits of rusty metal and discarded drapery. Gradually I started looking at the same kind of material but when they were brand new and shiny with the colour still fresh and full.” Once John Hall, Dance (1999), acrylic on canvas • Courtesy of the artist he started working with colour, Hall says he derived such pleasure from it that there was no looking back. “There was one time when Liquitex, the brand I was using, had 85 colours in their palette and I tried to use them all.” Another turning point for Hall was getting to see work from painting legends and his contemporaries in person. In 1980 he was granted an artist residency in New York City. During the day he would throw himself into his studio work, but in the evening he spent as much free time as possible wandering through the halls of art museums like the Met, the John Hall, Wait (2001), acrylic on canvas • Courtesy of the artist Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. On the weekends he skipped going to tourist attractions in favour of visiting “dozens and dozens” of galleries to check out contemporary work. “I was seeing exhibitions of artists I had only known about in magazines. To be able to finally see the actual paintings in their full physicality was extraordinarily valuable.” He was particularly impressed by an American painter named Ralph Goings, a realist who painted diners and the still life arrangements found there. “I remember seeing an exhibition of his at the time that just knocked me out.” He returned to Canada feeling confident in the direction his work was taking. Hall considers one of his biggest accomplishments as having a solo exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa. In 1979 his friend and former schoolmate, Ron Moffet was acting as the curator of ACAD. He pitched the idea of a solo Hall

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show to the National Gallery and they responded with a resounding yes—the exhibit hung for three months and then toured to museums and galleries across the country. “It was a collection of everything I had done to that point, so there were quite a number of paintings. I was thrilled of course,” he says. Since then, some of Hall’s other career highlights include a retrospective solo exhibit at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1993, having a street named after him in Sarnia, Ontario, being included in group exhibitions in Japan, the U.S., Great Britain and Europe and becoming a member of Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. The only negative review that comes to Hall’s mind is from 1972 by Calgary Herald reporter Carol Hogg, who had a problem with the cost of one of Hall’s paintings. “She wrote a review that featured one of my very large paintings, and one of her complaints was that it had the whopping price tag of $2,000 on it. Now this painting was about 6 feet tall and 20-some feet across, it was enormous. And according to her I had a lot of nerve putting a $2,000 price tag on it. That one did sell though.” To a layperson, the cost of paintings can appear outrageous, but many artists cannot live on the profits made from their work. “The price of paintings rarely reflects the time that goes in to them,” Hall explains. “In my own case, a large painting can take one or two months to do and the price won’t necessarily reflect the hours that went into it.” Though a smaller, 10” x 15” Hall painting can sell for $4,500, he has always maintained a full-time job to support his wife and two children. He spent a year teaching art at Ohio Wesleyan University and then for another six years at ACAD before finally settling in as a professor for the University of Calgary’s new art department. Hall feels fortunate to have landed a job teaching his passion. “A very, very low percentage of artists are able to live off their work. It would be much better if we could just spend our days in our studios but that’s not the case,” he says. “If you are able to, and few of us have been, to work at a university or art college, that can be extraordinarily interesting. And it certainly supports the studio habit.” In Canada, Payscale.com lists “fine artists” as making on average as little as $30,000 to over $67,000 a year, compared to jobs that require law degrees that pull in over $117,000 annually. When asked why artists tend to be more financially undervalued in society, Hall offers up the theory that an appearance of elitism could act as a possible deterrent for the general public’s lack of interest. “Art can seem a little intimidating and difficult to access,” he says. He does point out that art can often be seen as a safe haven for funds for collectors, but admits that for most people, art ranks low on their list of priorities. “They simply don’t value art the same way they value their automobiles, their homes and other things,” he says. He is quick to point out that much of his career as a painter was made possible because of his wife, Joice. After working all day at the college, he would come home and spend the evenings in his studio, working on paintings, while Joice

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shouldered the rest of the family responsibilities. “She carried a bigger load in terms of driving to the hockey rink and those sorts of things,” he says. “She was always ready to make it as easy as possible for me to get on with my work. I can see in retrospect that there was probably a price to pay, but it seems to have worked out all right.” John and Joice met back at ACAD, as first-year art students, possibly even on the first day. A teacher had instructed them to purchase tackle boxes to house their arts supplies, and both Hall and his future-wife-to-be, found themselves in the sports department at Sears across the street. “We were both eyeing the last fish tackle box—the deluxe model, and we reached for it at the same instant.” Being a gentleman, he went for the cheap tin version instead. “And that,” Hall says, “was the beginning.” They married before starting their fourth year of school, and eventually had two children, Janine and Jarvis. His supportive wife, a realism painter herself, even put her own artistic dreams aside to help move Hall’s career forward. Once their children became teenagers, Hall says Joice was able to focus on her work again. Their basement now has two full-time art studios, one for each of them. Hall says it’s beneficial having their studios next to each other. “When I’m in a tough spot I’ll go into Joice’s studio and see what she’s working on and frequently I’ll pick something up from her painting that makes good pragmatic sense and carry that back to my studio and apply it,” he says. He praises his wife’s realistic landscape paintings as having qualities that he finds inspiring. “The fullness of the description, the richness, they’re not wildly brushy, but they have a sensuality that is very rewarding,” he says. HALL’S NORMAL PROCESS BEGINS WITH photographing a subject from a variety of angles, and then continuing to build the scene in Photoshop. He’s methodic in his painting, filling in the larger spaces before attempting the finer, detailed aspects. It’s a process Hall describes as more pragmatic than emotional. Currently he’s spending his days working on his Sweetness & Light series. Painting doughnuts and candy is a challenge he’s enjoying greatly. “I’ve always gravitated to painting everyday objects because that’s my life, that’s our collective life. I had never painted doughnuts so the gloss and the forms and colours were unusual, and it’s just fun rendering those surfaces.” Despite their colourful appeal, Hall is hoping they will engage viewers. “The candies force people to think about what they’re looking at because there’s very little cliché in these images. We don’t expect licorice allsorts to be the subject of serious painting,” he says. When asked if he thinks he is a good painter, Hall responds with typical Canadian modesty, saying that he hopes he’s “adequate”. Hall maintains that virtue is its own reward. “We bare our souls through these art objects and then when someone views them and gets something from that process, that’s very rewarding. It’s really just a simple variation of wanting to be loved, I guess.”

John Hall, Zoom! (2001), acrylic on canvas â&#x20AC;˘ Courtesy of the artist

The Rebel Dollar

In Conversation with Philosopher Joseph Heath Robert Wringham

AS AN ARTIST, IF I find myself thinking about economics, it is usually disparagingly. I’m not alone. For years, artists have rebelled against economics through parody in paintings, music, stand-up comedy and Turner Prize-nominated installation pieces. Unfortunately, if we want to comment upon economics intelligently in our work, we have to know something about it. We can’t simply hate capitalism because we sometimes have trouble paying the rent or because we have a vague idea that it’s bad for people in Africa. To hate something intelligently, we need better data than that. AN EXCELLENT GUIDE FOR ARTISTS—and people who dislike finance generally—are the books of Joseph Heath. Joseph is a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and writes popular publications on the subject of money. His most recent book is called Filthy Lucre: Economics For People Who Hate Capitalism. I met Joseph to discuss the complex relationship between artists and money. “The latest book,” he tells me, “is remedial economics for people on the left. Like me, many people got turned off by their first-year economics class and decided that the whole thing was right-wing ideology and didn’t have to pay attention to it. It happens disproportionately on the left, so we’re often weaker in economics than the right. In the first half of the book, there’s a lot of economic theory that actually undermines classic right-wing positions. In the second half, I show there are things said on the left that don’t make sense from an economic perspective.” Like many academics now writing for popular consumption, Joseph strikes me as a highly accessible fellow: a man steeped in theory but able to discuss it with the layperson. What took Joseph from academic philosophy to accessible consumerism and economics?

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“Consumerism is already a topic in philosophy. Philosophy has some elaborate ideas about consumerism. Sadly, a lot of these are based on fallacies about economics, such as the over-production fallacy: the idea that massproduction has generated an overwhelming surplus of goods and so we resort to marketing. Alas, it’s a fallacy because ultimately in capitalism—despite the illusion created by money— goods are exchanged for other goods. It’s possible for there to be too many shoes or shares but impossible to be too many goods in general. Based on this fallacy, philosophers have thrown up elaborate theories on how the advertising industry manipulates people’s desires, makes them consume more and generates a homogeneity of desires. Lots of theories, but it’s all based on an ignorance of economics.” Another of Joseph’s books, The Rebel Sell, concludes that counter-cultural movements have failed and that there’s no real friction between the counter-culture and the accepted mainstream. The rebellious fringes may actually feed Capitalism:

Betty Page on the beach in the Florida Keys

“Rebellion was advertised in the late fifties and early sixties as having revolutionary consequences with respect to the political and economic system. The book points out that [the counter-culture] didn’t deliver on any of those problems. Rather than being a revolutionary transformation of consciousness, it was just consumerism. Take the sexual revolution: people thought it was going to undermine capitalism because, in the post-Freudian view, instinctive repression was required to get workers to show up at the factory and this was incompatible with sexual freedom. The sexual revolution was going to lead to a wild freedom in society that would make factories and the tyranny of the clock impossible. If you look at [the writings of psychoanalyst] Wilhelm Reich, you can see this theme prominently: that the sexual revolution was supposed to undermine the entire political and economic system. Looking back with forty years of hindsight and wisdom, the major consequence of the sexual revolution was [the feeding of] the pornography industry. It’s a classic example of countercultural rebellion failing to result in the collapse of the system and in fact feeding into the desire to consume more and more. People thought ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ was going to be revolutionary in the way that, say, Marxism was revolutionary. They thought that it was going to emancipate people and fundamentally change things, that war would become impossible. To point out the obvious, it didn’t pan out that way. What’s striking is that everybody has recognised the total failure of these ideals but we’ve not rejected the underlying theory: that the political-

Below: Mick Jagger at Altamont, from the film Gimme Shelter • Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

economic system is a big machine and culture is the software, so by reprogramming the software you could fundamentally change the way the whole machine functioned. You still see it in contemporary cultural politics and art theory. It’s just that nobody has the radical pretensions for it that people had in the sixties.” This strikes me as devastatingly defeatist but I’ve always been a dreamer. If the sexual revolution and rock ‘n’ roll—genuinely radical cultural forces—had resulted in the opposite of what was intended, what chance do small-time artists have in a world jaded by artistic rebellion? Should we hand in our pallets and brushes for white collars? Is there anywhere left for artists to rebel against money? “A journalist recently wanted to interview me about Lady Gaga. Basically, he wanted to know whether the violent imagery in the “Alejandro” video meant the collapse of Western civilisation. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, were you born yesterday?’ We live in a society that survived the Rolling Stones! The Stones were drug-using Satanists. The Stones and The Doors were the real deal, right? People thought it was mind-blowingly radical, that music industry would never be the same, that it was going to be Earth-shattering. But it didn’t quite work out. When I came along in the seventies, the Rolling Stones were already neutered. Already they were a joke in terms of rebellion. When punk came along people thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the real deal now,’ and its gone on and on. By now rebellion is such an empty gesture and so obviously a marketing gimmick, it’s astounding that anyone could think any kind of cultural event could have any significance on anything political or economic.”

At this point in the conversation, I remember a 2002 Adam Curtis documentary called Century of the Self. It mentioned something called the ‘torches of liberty contingent’: a 1929 women’s liberation movement in which hundreds of women marched on New York, brandishing cigarettes. There had been a perception in America that women shouldn’t smoke and so this was a hugely equalising demonstration. Equalising? Sure. But the real effect was the doubling of cigarette sales. Tobacco companies got richer in the name of personal liberation. Are there other cases in which the corporation has exploited our senses of justice and rebellion?

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“Sure. There’s the idea that capitalism has to increase consumer desire to get rid of a surplus of mass-produced goods. Everyone is somehow threatened into wanting the same house, the same car, the same clothes and so forth. So the idea arose that by rebelling against mainstream tastes, you’re throwing a cog in the works of the industrial system. By refusing to live in the classic suburban home, by cutting your hair a certain way—all the standard counter-cultural gestures—you are exacerbating the crisis in capitalism. This is the idea of the rebel consumer: that by smoking or getting tattoos or colouring your hair purple, you were striking a blow against the system. The consequence, however, is quite the opposite because rebellion becomes a positional good. The latest rebel style is extremely cool and attracts imitators. The people who want to rebel have to constantly search for the newest, latest thing. This generates competitive consumption and the quest for cool or the quest for rebellion winds up generating consumer desire. Rather than striking a blow against the system it actually ends up promoting consumerism. There’s the idea that rebel styles get co-opted by the system. But the co-option is completely an illusion. All that happens is once-exclusive things become popular. Once people start finding out and jumping on the bandwagon, it generates a snob effect whereby everyone has to get off the bandwagon. What looks like co-option is actually competitive consumption among individuals. But remember: none of this matters at all from an economic or political standpoint. Think of the fifty years of revolutionary rock ‘n’ roll, crap pop or whatever: it’s amazing that the system never collapses, but it’s because all this stuff is totally irrelevant.” So what can counter-culture can hope for? Is there any point to being a part of a counter-cultural movement now? “No. I don’t think so. By now, the rebel gesture is so empty and so vacuous. Younger people don’t actually believe any of that. It’s just all been done so many times and the radicality got pushed to the point where there’s nowhere further to go. By the end of the twentieth century, radical music was politically exhausted. The most radical gestures are made already. I think the best example is Lou Reed’s album Metal Machine Music: the band started out revolutionary and underground, but when a bunch of frat boys started listening to it, the band immediately became mainstream. To maintain their underground credibility, they make another album of less-accessible music in order to lose fans and maintain cachet. You make your music more unlistenable as a way of restoring its exclusivity: you sell people an album of screeching noise. Like, that’s as revolutionary as it gets! And some people actually listen to it! It’s all a matter of exclusivity. I’ve sat through contemporary dance performances that were absolutely inaccessible and when people start to walk out, you can see the look of absolute satisfaction on everybody

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else. It’s just straight-up snobbery, right? It’s like distancing yourself from the great unwashed, from the people with mainstream tastes who lack true aesthetic judgement.” Guilty, I explain that my favourite record is Captain Beefheart’s highly-inaccessible Trout Mask Replica, an album recorded under cult-like conditions with highly avant-garde results. I also remember how pleased I was when The Simpsons creator, Matt Groening announced it was also his favourite album. Me and Groening: two pretentious peas in a radical pod. “When The Rebel Sell came out, a lot of old hippies were extremely upset by it, a lot of people our age—Generation X—reacted to it with ‘Oh, that’s really helpful. It’s something I kinda thought but never articulated,’ but anyone younger was like ‘Dude, tell me something I don’t know.’ For anyone post-Internet, this is totally obvious. Stuff on the Internet gets co-opted overnight. It used to be that information moved very slowly. You could have a six-month lead before other people found out [about the hip, new thing]. Growing up, a girl I knew would visit New York to check out [the nightclub] CBGB. She would come back with a band T-shirt and she’d have the [scoop] on what was going on. This allowed us young punks to be cool for about a year because of the long lag. There was no MTV, radio stations didn’t play this stuff and albums were hauled around in trucks. Nobody could find out what was going on at CBGB, so if you got someone with inside ‘intel,’ you were cool for ages before the ordinary folks found out about it. I used to feel that I was a member of an alternative culture and there was an essential difference between us and the mainstream. I realised later on that it was just a consequence of time lag: the delay in transmission of cultural information. Now, if someone puts something on YouTube, 10,000 people are imitating it the next day. That’s why no young person was surprised by [the message of The Rebel Sell]. They’ve already realised it: there’s no such thing as alternative music. It took me a long time to figure out! I bought the whole thing, hook, line and sinker.” So the standard rebel arguments are often just garden-variety inherited wisdom, which doesn’t need to be proliferated through art. ONE POINT THAT I BELIEVE to be important, however, before we give up on rebellion, is that life without it is somehow hollow. Artists—whether musicians, film makers, performers or visual artists—have always gone against the grain or at least held up rebellion as a pretense for getting our blood pumping. There was never a song written about how the government have our best interests at heart and how the bankers do a great job. Without rebellion, sincere or otherwise, we’d never have seen The Wild Ones or Easy Rider or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We’d never have felt the love of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Bed In’. We’d have

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never experienced the punk phenomena of the Sex Pistols or Patti Smith or The Clash or The Fall; or felt the surge of naive adrenaline when absorbing the crimson ink of comic books by torchlight under the covers. Exposure to rebellious art will often leave the feeling of new neural pathways being cut, often painfully, through the brain and of new mental muscles being flexed. Something that disconcerts (the grotesque pornography of Jake and Dinos Chapman), challenges the way you perceive the world (Douglas Gordon’s 24-hour psycho video installation) or rocks the boat of social norms (Mark Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, the sculpture of a pregnant woman who has phocomelia , which stood beautiful on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth in London) has surely more value than a work that simply confirms what you know (stand-up comedy by Michael McIntyre) or agrees with the status quo. If rebellion in art is an empty gesture and is ineffective against capitalism, it is still the best way I know for art to feel like the result of independent thought and in favour of a beautiful, vigorous life, which goes against the grain. It’s also important to remember that artistic rebellion doesn’t only go against capitalism. Artists can rebel against unethical government policies, animal cruelty, environmental collapse, racism, poor public amenities and infringements upon our human rights: things that bring shame upon every one of us if they go unaddressed. It is not direct action but through the prism of rebellious art, we can generate a discourse around these things and heighten public awareness. Art can be the conscience required to temper the crimes of governments and individuals and the corporation. If an artist intelligently and opaquely rails against (for example) the war in Darfur or low standards of living closer to home in the US and Canada, it can be the spark required to ignite mass comprehension and ultimately mass action. Personally, I wonder if the counterculture’s failure to derail or temper capitalism is not a failing of rebellion intrinsically but that the counterculture has simply been rebelling in an unproductive fashion. Thanks to Joseph Heath’s observations, we now know that rebellion has backfired and lead to the stimulation of rebel desires and the identification of a rebel market. With this knowledge, perhaps artists should strive to create a non-marketable, non-profitable commodity and promote, through this, a form of anti-consumption. If art could successfully manufacture an anti-product: something which could neither be bought or sold with money and didn’t rely on further extraction of materials from the Earth, could we not exploit the rebel desire without the rebel dollar? Could we not appeal to people’s rebel instincts and desires for a better world without selling them the T-shirt? Can we not create a kind of “outwardly projected hunger strike” to discourage the unnecessary consumption of material products? When will the truly minimalist home (ascetic as opposed to designer) become fashionable? When will empty space be perceived as the next luxury good? I think, if any rebellious artistic movement can affect capitalism, it lies here. We now know that the acquisition of haircuts and records and magazines—what Heath described to me as “the standard rebel gestures”—only serves to fuel the system. If we want to properly throw a spanner into the works of capitalism, we’ve got to pull our funding and stop consuming these empty symbols of a fake revolution. That is the message of this rebellious artist. Now, where’s my commission? s 92

REVIEWS

An After Four Christmas After Four

Jim Breen grew up singing in choirs, studying drums and trombone. He has been playing trombone in a community dance/jazz band since 1991. In addition, he is a freelance writer.

Field Guide to Loneliness Ben Sures

Folk Tales Matt Lipscombe

Inventio Eric Quist Music and Water for All Gerrit Christiaan de Gier, orgel m.m.v. Auke van der Merk, trompet

The Ghostwriter

Days of Sand Hélène Dorion

From the Four Winds Haim Sabato

Laura Breen currently works as a music therapist and music teacher along with directing, accompanying and arranging music for choirs. She enjoys freelance writing on the side. Katherine Rochester studied music at Wilfrid Laurier University and has earned Associate diplomas from the Royal Conservatory of Toronto and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. She works as a music teacher, organist and accompanist in Cambridge, Ontario.

John Gould is an eclectic book collector with an interest in Canadian, British and American theatre. In addition to contributing reviews in these areas, he formulated the concept for the middle high school history series, Frontline on the Global Village and contributed to Peter C. Newman’s, Debrett’s Guide to the Canadian Establishment, Angus Gunn’s, South Africa in Black and White 1948 to 1989, as well as a volume of annotated Christmas Carols and contextual annotations to Canadian Nurse Dorothy Cotton’s unpublished diaries from her time at the Anglo-Russian Hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia during the time that led up to the Russian Revolution.

Susan Merskey has been a freelance editor in London, Ontario for more than 25 years. She often edits books, papers etc. for people whose first language is not English. She is interested in both mainstream and alternative theatre, classical and folk music and an eclectic range of adult and children’s fiction, and non-fiction, particularly history, biography and memoirs and autobiography. Her book reviews have appeared in the Canadian Book Review, the London Jewish Community News (of which she is a past editor) and elsewhere.

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An After Four Christmas • After Four CHRISTMAS IS MY FAVOURITE TIME of the year and I have sung, played and listened to Christmas music through all of my living memory. To be honest, many Christmas albums are rarely the respective musician’s passion and so not usually their best work. However, An After Four Christmas was a very pleasant surprise. This Jazz Vocal Quartet from Southwestern Ontario do an admirable job of recreating traditional Christmas carols with new and interesting jazz harmonic arrangements that are faithful to the original composers’ feelings. All but 3 of the 13 tracks are arranged by “After Four” members. While Jenny and Ron Nauta do the bulk of the arranging, all four take their turn at it. It sure feels like this Christmas album is not a mere token offering for a financially enriching season. Rather, a real passion for the music and the season come alive through their jazz vocals. All 13 tracks kept my attention for different reasons, even after listening to this CD repeatedly. The opening track “Carol of the Bells” is a great example of this group’s a cappella vocal skills as even their vocalizations reminded me of listening to real church bells. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is spiced up with strong saxophone solos and significant sections with what sound like 5 beats to the bar without the accompanying awkwardness such a time signature usually brings. “Snowfall” is a delightfully jazzy and impressionistic piece where the musical harmonies and rhythms feel like the fluttering falling of snowflakes dancing their way to earth. “Let It Snow” combines wintry lyrics with the contrast of unhurried Caribbeaninspired rhythms and warm harmonies. A traditional English carol, “The Holly and The Ivy” maintains its elegance while ridding itself of stodgy old English stiffness with welcoming harmonies, playful timing and warm cello/flute interludes and backgrounds. In complete contrast, the jazz dissonances and the excitement of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” let the jazz band have some fun with a New Orleans, kind-of-Harry-Connick-Jr. feel and vocal harmonies. “Christmas Song” is a real smooth harmonious a cappella treat that is worth the listen. This version of the Mel Torme classic separates itself from the thousands of other recordings of this

Field Guide to Loneliness • Ben Sures song. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is playfully titillating without being crude or rude. “A Child is Born” is a mostly instrumental piece with a canon-like echoing of vocal harmonies that acts as a wonderful transition from mostly cultural Christmas tunes to religious ones. “Angels We Have Heard on High” is another a cappella piece where the jazzed tweaking of the traditional harmonies and rhythms gave me goose bumps and a real warm Christmas feeling. “Some Children See Him” sings about how cultural backgrounds shape our perceptions of the Christ child. The addition of the Lambton Youth Choir’s child-like voices contrasted to the adult voices drew me into a song I did not know. My favourite song was “Silent Night,” sung a cappella with haunting harmonies that pulled me into the mystery of Christmas. Between the 2nd and 3rd verses of this Christmas classic the group sang a “musical bridge” with such beauty that, after repeated listening, I pictured angels praising the Almighty gathered around the manger scene. The final cut is “The Huron Carol”, a uniquely Canadian Christmas story flavoured with North American-born jazz. The combination of the Kettle Point First Nation’s drum and singing group with the French European violin style and After Four’s ability to merge First Nations harmonies and rhythms is powerful. Simply put, I loved this CD’s contrasts and harmonies. When finished I felt a kind of warm universal Christmas love. Thanks, After Four and, from someone whose holiday season you have enriched, have a very Merry Christmas. Jim Breen Order directly: E-MAIL: info@afterfour.ca PHONE: (519) 666-1577 or (519) 786-6038 Produced By: After Four Engineers: Ron Nauta, Will Haas and Cody Taylor After Four are: Jenny Nauta, Theresa Wallis, Ron Nauta and Dave Williams The Band are: Sandy MacKay (Drums), Rob Larose (Percussion), Larry Ernewein (Bass), Fred Blumas (Guitar), and Ken Foster (Saxophones), Don DiCarlo, Charles Rallo, Alex Ernewein, Dave Williams (pianists) and Rona Nauta (Synthesizer) With Guest musicians: Fiona Wilkinson (Flute), Christine Newland (Cello), Michael Wood (Vibraphone), Sigmar Marin (Violin), The Kettle Point First Nation’s Drum and Singing Group, and Members of the Lambton Youth Choir.

Running time: about 48 minutes

MY PARENTS ALWAYS TOLD ME NOT to judge a book by its cover. Apparently the same goes for Ben Sure’s 2008 album Field Guide to Loneliness. By looking at the cover, with its broken ray gun and the outdoor living room scene complete with a heart in a jar, I was expecting some esoteric exploration of loneliness due to weirdness. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed this CD. First of all, the music is just plain good. Ben Sures, a veteran of the Canadian folk music scene from Western Canada, is a skilled guitarist and musical storyteller. His writing and musicianship and the accessibility to the lyrics are great assets. I was expecting his Field Guide to Loneliness to be a big downer, but his music is actually quite up-beat, allowing us to examine the issue of loneliness from various points of view without becoming depressed. In fact, the second thing I really liked about this CD was how it actually described the kinds of loneliness that most all of us can identify with. Take, for example, the first cut entitled “Dancer.” It tells the story of a dancer who, due to injury, cannot dance anymore but still moves like a dancer even as she “watches from the wings.” Many of us who have been injured in athletic endeavours have experienced that dejected feeling of not being a part of the “team.” Ben Sures does an excellent job of helping us to remember those feelings of loneliness that come from watching others do what we used to be able to do. The positive nature of the music also allows us to become reflective about our limitations and work through the feelings of loss without getting discouraged. An appeal to the kind of universal loneliness that most of us experience can be found in much of the music. “Used to Have a Raygun” is far from being the weird song I was expecting as it talks about how, as children, we “pretend” all kinds of ways to fix our mistakes in human relationships as we face the loneliness of having done something embarrassing. As a person who has wished he could “press rewind on the universe” due to embarrassment many times, Ben’s song about having a ray gun to help people forget all the stupid things they have said or done

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Folk Tales • Matt Lipscombe connected with me in a profound way and became a favourite song on this CD. No matter the age and experience of the listener, this CD has something for everyone, from the loneliness of being dumped by your girlfriend/boyfriend and the joy of finding a new one in the song “My Last Girlfriend” to the loneliness of learning how to relate to your parents as an adult leaving home in the song about “Lettuce and Tomato” sandwiches. In the best of folk tradition, Ben Sures is singing about real life and real life relationships and, to my surprise, this CD has caused me to take the time to reflect upon my own relationships with family and friends. The third reason I like this CD is that its sound is not uniform throughout. Oftentimes, to the boredom of the listener, music groups create and rehash the same particular sound over and over again. However, on this CD, every single cut is unique in its sound and feeling. “Bachelors” explores the loneliness of men living without women in their lives, using a kind of unbalanced feel that depicts a life being lived out of rhythm. “Not On the Town” is about an old man being attracted to a young woman and the loneliness he feels at being ignored because of his age; this is actually a delightfully harmonious blues duet with Canadian songstress Little Miss Higgins. Each song on this album is unique and, in general, the music is fun to explore with its quirky qualities, emotions and depictions. The only real critique I would have is that the “goofy” cover might cause many people to by- pass this truly delightful CD. Its greatest strength is its ability to help the listener reflect with surprising depths on our human relationships. Jim Breen Purchase: www.cdbaby.com/cd/bensures3 $12.97 CAD from cdbaby (Buy CD) $9.99 CAD from cdbaby (MP3 download) $9.99 CAD from itunes story

4.0 out of 5 stars Running time: About 44 minutes

MONTREAL FOLK SINGER, SONGWRITER and arranger Matt Lipscombe introduces his music to the listener with the words on his album cover: “Welcome to this rustic world.” This CD has a decidedly rustic, relaxed and carefree feel, from the way in which it is recorded to the vocals, lyrics, instrumentals, style and mood of the music. The album has the quality of a folk concert performed on a street corner or in a club. The recordings were made either at “the homestead”—his old loft, Apartment 5 Studio—or at the Local de la Fanfare Pourpour. On first listen, I found nothing overly impressive or unique about the music; it blends well into the background, an offering of background music for meeting with friends in a relaxed setting, where the world is good and the demands of life are few. Yet hearing the songs repeatedly seems to make the appreciation for the artist and the artistic process greater, and brings to light the thoughtfulness with which this production was created and is held together. Certain characteristics do stand out immediately, such as the quality of Lipscombe’s voice—with hints of John Lennon or Simon and Garfunkel—or the well-crafted arrangements and use of interesting instrumental combinations. A clear example is the haunting piano introduction in the third track, “Very Big Fortress” (mimicking the old familiar upright piano sound), which has an ethereal beauty about it. The guitar and bass accompaniments throughout the entire CD are worth mentioning and applauding, as Lipscombe masters all styles with finesse. Whether it is a ballad as in “Heroes and Promises,” or a blues piece like “Mexico City,” or a slow rock in “Faith,” the skill is strong and secure. Regarding lyrics, Lipscombe is a poet in his own right. According to his website, he has been an avid student of poetry, and it shows. I just wish he could have included the lyrics in the notes so I could follow and reflect on them a bit more effectively. Even though it often took several tries to catch many of the lyrics, with the relaxed vocal style I was able to eventually discover the depth and meaning in many of the pieces, which are often observations or commentaries on various aspects of life and relationships. “Mexico City” addresses the issue of children who are

victims of homelessness, but not in a necessarily heavy-handed manner. “Leaves in Fall” is a carefree song with good lyrics that seem to have some deeper meaning within the poetry. “Walk the Streets Alone” addresses brokenness in the home. “I Am Flying” uses a Beatles-like psychedelic sound, complete with mystic cello sounds, and could be a commentary on drug abuse. More notes in general would have helped with the interpretation of lyrics or understanding Lipscombe’s themes or thought processes. What was helpful was reading his website (www. myspace.com/mattlipscombe) to know who he is as a person as well as an artist; he is a true child of the Montreal art scene, which is clear in his music. I was not enamoured by every track on this CD. There were moments when I felt the vocals were weak or, at least, a bit too relaxed for my liking. At times, I found some of the music repetitive or uninteresting, but again more suitable to a club or street corner than intended for deep listening. While I certainly found myself warming to some pieces, I also found myself tiring of others. Some of my favourite moments were usually related to the effectiveness of Lipscombe to meld together a great melody, a supportive accompaniment and thoughtprovoking lyrics, such as in the ballad, “Bramble and Thistle.” “Make More Money” is completely opposite in style and tempo and mood, but another effective combination of the elements that make a good performance. It is good to hear the addition of piano or cello, or even Tibetan bells, but also refreshing to hear the acoustic guitar in its simplicity as a backdrop for the voice. The last piece, a blues song entitled” The Changing Room,” is such a piece, again with a memorable melody and thoughtful lyrics about being real as a person. Matt Lipscombe shows great promise and artistic skill on this his first English-speaking solo album, which he also produced. I look forward to hearing his well-crafted work again, and hope his name becomes well known in Canada and internationally. Laura Breen

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Purchase: Price: $10.00 CAD, MP3 download from www.mattlipscombe.bandcamp.com/ Artists: Matt Lipscombe (vocals, guitar, bass); Jean-Francoise De Bellefeuille (groovy guitar); Nemo Venba (drums); Patrick Watson (piano and back vocals); Francois Sanche (drums); TJ Plenty (lead guitar, bass, tambourine); Sid Zanforlin (drums); Rebecca Foon (cello); Jesse Dwyer (drums); Madanna Calix-Antoine, Marianna Giannelli, Mael Iger, matt Tomlinson, Vivian Doan, Nilia Berkin (back vocals).

Running time: about 40 minutes

Inventio • Eric Quist

INVENTIO IS A COLLECTION OF NORTH German organ music from the 17th and 18th centuries, played by the Dutch organist Eric Quist. It was recorded on the historic Hinsz Organ of the Bovenkerk in Kampen, The Netherlands. The Golden Age of organ music in North Germany included the likes of Weckmann, Reincken, Böhm and Buxtehude, all of whom influenced the great J.S. Bach and his student Krebs. These are the composers represented in this album. They had access to some of the largest and most highly developed organs ever built. The grandeur of the instruments and the buildings that housed them are reflected in their music. The Hinsz Organ of the Bovenkerk in Kampen was first built in 1524. After a number of additions and changes Albertus Anthoni Hinsz did a major expansion and rebuilding in 1741. The instrument evolved through a series of changes in the succeed-

ing years and the most recent “revitalization” was done in 2000 by Reil, retaining many of the characteristics of the 1741 instrument. Eric Quist was born and educated in The Netherlands. In 2006 he was awarded the First Prize and the Public Prize at the International Organ Contest at Nijmegen. He is the organist of the Reformed Congregation at Tholen in the Netherlands and has recorded an album on the Van Oeckelen-Steendam organ there. He has also recorded Louis Vierne’s Symphonies II and IV as part of a complete recording of Vierne’s Symphonies. The first track on Inventio is Buxtehude’s “Toccata in D Minor.” This is a great piece to show off the power of the organ and the reverberant space of the building. One of the things I love about this recording is listening to the long reverb after the keys have been lifted. After the final chord of this piece, you can hear six seconds of diminishing sound, giving you a feeling of the size of the building and an enjoyable sensation of “being there.” This composition exemplifies stylus fantasticus, the brilliant and dramatic style of the North German composers, particularly Buxtehude. It is played by Mr. Quist with great flair. The short bursts of sound in the opening measures are followed by rests where we, once again, enjoy the reverberant acoustic. A contrasting piece by Buxtehude is a set of two variations on the chorale “Von Gott will ich nicht lassen”. The first variation is an expressive setting featuring the Vox Humana stop; the second, a more exuberant setting. Quist changes the pace beautifully with Reincken’s Fuge in G minor, using only a 4-foot flute register. The building adds a warmth and shimmer to the clear tone of the flute stop. The short, repeated motives seem to fold in on themselves in a very striking effect. Georg Böhm was an organist in the city of Hamburg and most likely taught J.S. Bach. His setting of the Lutheran chorale „Vater unser im Himmelreich” (The Lord’s Prayer) provides another moment of repose in the program on this collection. It features the Nazard stop in a highly ornamented melody over a repeated chordal accompaniment. Mr. Quist plays it with precision and sensitivity. In contrast to the rest of 18th-century Europe, North German organs had a large and independent pedal division; it was much

more than just a harmonic support. Krebs’ Toccata and Fugue in E major begins with a pedal solo, showcasing the capability of the instrument and the virtuosity of the organist. The rest of the toccata features a dialogue between the manuals, another typical North German technique. The rest of the CD is devoted to the music of J.S. Bach with four representative pieces. Bach wrote several preludes on the hymn tune “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Her” The one included here is introspective with a beautifully embellished melody appearing in the solo and also in the accompanying voices. A contrasting chorale prelude is the exuberant “Nun danket alle Gott.” Bach’s Trio Sonatas are some of the most difficult of his works to play but sound deceptively simple in the hands (and feet!) of a fine organist. In this recording of the 3rd Trio Sonata each of the three voices is played with clarity and integrity. In the quiet middle movement there is quite a bit of mechanical noise noticeable from the inner workings of the organ. I like the authenticity this brings to the performance, but some may find it distracting. In a famous story from the life of J.S. Bach, as a young man he made the arduous 250-mile journey from his home in Arnstadt to hear Buxtehude in Lübeck. He immersed himself in the musical life of that northern city, overstaying his leave by 3 months. Buxtehude’s music had a marked effect on Bach’s own compositions. The final piece on the album is Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in A minor,” a virtuoso piece that shows the influence of Buxtehude’s stylus fantasticus. The prelude is improvisatory with rapid passagework and thundering pedal. Mr. Quist plays it brilliantly. The fugue builds from a strong but simple statement of the theme to a huge mass of sound. A fugue is a complex interweaving of many parts; the challenge to the player is to maintain the clarity and character of each voice as the texture becomes denser. This is done admirably on this recording. The fugue ends with a flourish reminiscent of the opening prelude. On a large instrument like the Hinsz Organ the possibilities for variation in sound are endless and in this album we hear many of them. A very nice feature of the liner notes is a listing of the stops used for each piece, as well as the specifications for the entire organ. This album features music from some of the best composers for organ played on a historically significant, beautiful and versa-

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tile instrument by a player of great virtuosity and style. If you are a lover of organ music there is much to enjoy here. If you are new to organ music this is a good and enjoyable introduction to the forms and style of the North German Baroque. If you just want to immerse yourself in the full and rich sound of a fine instrument, sit back and crank up the volume. Easy listening this is definitely not, as the richness of variety, complexity and beauty make Mr. Quist’s Inventio a rousing musical experience. Katherine Rochester Purchase: Price: $18.99 US website www.arkivmusic.com

4 out of 5 stars Approximate Running time: 1 hour, 21 minutes

Music and Water for All • Gerrit Christiaan de Gier, orgel • m.m.v. Auke van der Merk, trompet

FIRST, A WORD ABOUT THE TITLE of this CD set. Income generated by this production will go to a water dam construction project in Burkina Faso sponsored by the Dutch charity Woord en Daad. In keeping with this aim, the theme of water features in the programme with excerpts of Handel’s Water Music and chorale tunes such as Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon”) and Psalm 42 (“As the deer pants for the water brook”).

The three-CD set is in five sections, each recorded on a different organ (all in the Netherlands). The repertoire has been carefully chosen to match the era in which the organ was built. Each segment includes at least one improvisation by Mr. de Gier in a corresponding style. The first segment was recorded in the Grote Kerk, Wijk bij Duurstede. This organ at this location was first built around 1615. Changes have been made over the years, but in 1980 a restoration was undertaken which reversed many of the earlier changes, and the organ now is similar to that of 1717. (Most of the organs featured in this set underwent similar reworkings.) The program opens with Buxtehude’s exuberant “Toccata in F major.” The sound here is clear and bright; the improvisational flourishes, dramatic pauses and held bass notes are typical of Buxtehude’s “fantastic style.” The organ uses an older tuning system in which certain chords sound slightly out of tune. Rather than being a negative, this adds colour and character to the organ. Other composers represented here are Schiedt, Sweelinck, Frescobaldi and Cabeçon, all from the Renaissance or early Baroque. Each contributes a theme and variations which show off the variety of sounds available on the organ: some beautifully quiet, some full of character and others grandiose. Usually one type of figuration is used continuously throughout a variation and it can become somewhat pedantic. The most interesting is Sweelinck’s partita on “All Glory Be to God on High.” This shows a great deal of diversity in texture and mood. Cabeçon’s “Differencias sobre la Pavana Italiana” is attractive and interesting for its Spanish roots. Here the pure flute sound of the organ is used to advantage. A nice surprise is the improvisation on Psalm 77. It is another theme and variations, and sounds as though it could have been written in 1600. The harmonies are conservative, but still interesting, and the theme is clearly heard through a variety of moods. In this way it matches the style of the other compositions. The next organ is at Sionskerk in Zeist which wasbuilt in 1978 by Flentrop. Although it is a newer organ it is historically oriented and has mechanical action. The two improvisations which begin this segment are in a more modern style. The first is based on Hymn 33 from the Dutch hymnbook (“Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the water”) and is associated with Holy Communion. It is

an introspective work, depicting the flowing water through the use of short swirling figures through which the melody can be heard. The contrasting improvisation on Psalm 42 (“As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God”) is rhythmic and lively. The style is contemporary, but they are very accessible and attractive works. Also included here are “Fantasia Phrygica” by the Belgian composer Herman Roelstraete (1925-1985) and a “Psalm Suite” by Willem Vogel, one of the Netherlands’ most respected church musicians until his recent death. His five psalm preludes presented here are generally thoughtful and avoid showiness; the use of the old church modes gives them an ancient feel, while the treatment sounds contemporary without being hard on the ears. Particularly enjoyable is the bubbliness of Psalm 113 (“Praise to the Lord”). There is a pleasing clarity and simplicity to these works. The third organ featured is at St. Michaelskerk in Schalkwijk. It was built in 1758 and has a bright, baroque sound. This is evident in the first few tracks, Boehm’s “Prelude in F,” and Handel’s “Fantasia No. 7.” These are cheerful works, played with energy and a light touch. In the same mood are three movements from Handel’s “Water Music” (Aria, Minuet and Coro), transcribed for organ by Mr. de Gier. A quieter mood ensues with two baroque chorale preludes, one by Johann Pachelbel and one by J.S. Bach. In a more contemporary vein is British composer Andrew Fletcher’s prelude on Psalm 137, a melancholy, almost sentimental work. It is followed immediately by an improvisation on the same psalm. The organ in Hervormde Kerk, Maarssen is from 1790 and the sound is on the dark side. There are several short chorale preludes and a little known trio by J.S. Bach. The stop used in the right hand here has an unusual “scoop” on the attack which is almost comical; it sounds a bit like a slide whistle. A Ciaconna by Johann Bernard Bach (a cousin of Johann Sebastian) is used to show off the possibilities of the organ. It is a short theme with 20 variations, so does get to be a bit tedious. This segment culminates with a careful, somewhat conservative performance of Mendelssohn’s fifth organ sonata. The final organ was built in 1908 and is located in Ijsselstein. Trumpeter Auke van der Merk is featured in The Sept Chorales of Jean Langlais (1907-1991). This work is written in a 20th-century idiom, each movement based on

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

Days of Sand • Hélène Dorion

Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky an old hymntune. The trumpet clearly sounds the tune while the organ provides the character and commentary for each hymn. These are interesting pieces and well played here. This section also includes two 19thcentury compositions, Franck’s “Fantasie in A major” (in its lesser known A version) and Lemmens’ “Storm Fantasia.” The latter is a highly descriptive, romantic depiction with growling pedal, threatening chords, chromatic whirlwinds and a hymn-like calm after the storm. Two more skilful improvisations are well integrated into the program. The last one ends with a majestic toccata on Psalm 93 (“The Lord reigns, He is clothed with majesty”). This set of CDs covers a lot of territory in the organ repertoire, presenting some seldom-heard and interesting works while avoiding the overdone ones. The playing is solid but, for the most part, not spectacular. There are some inspired and inspiring moments, particularly in the improvisations. The cover features an organ case gushing with fountains of water. While this picture is somewhat playful, it belies the seriousness of the recording. Katherine Rochester Artists: Gerrit Christiaan de Gier, organ m.m.v. Auke van der Merk, trumpet Purchase Price: € 24,95 www.deversluis.nl

Running time: 3 hours 6 minutes

The Ghostwriter ROMAN POLANSKI’S FILM VERSION OF Robert Harris’ 2007 novel The Ghost offers fans of the versatile award-winning suspense film director and the popular British novelist a new fix. Polanski has no less than twentyseven Academy Award nominations and eight Oscars to his credit. Harris is noted for his popular historical mystery novels. The film’s hook is a ghostwriter’s search for the “autobiographical” record of the former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). The “ghost” (Ewan McGregor) is ostensibly hired to finish up

the work of a predecessor who died. However, when he starts the job, there is not much gathered material on hand. It is also discovered that the previous “ghost” died inexplicably. From here, the plot races through a web of geopolitical intrigue, diplomatic crisis, manipulation and sex to find the truth. Roman Polanski’s film experience makes this adaptation come visually alive on the screen. He saves this film from stalling by his cinematic genius. The casting choices proved to be wise. Olivia Williams’ portrayal of Ruth Lang, the scheming prime minister’s wife, was the most intriguing role in the film. Ewan McGregor and the venerable Pierce Brosnan were obviously chosen for their box office appeal. For this reason alone, they were both good choices as the “ghost” and the former prime minister respectively. These two actors generated a believable tension in their roles. The plot depends on this kind of interplay: the story focuses on the damaging secrets that eventually led to a rocky end of a political career which, in turn, led to the attempted creation of a whitewashed official record that was going wrong for a second time. While there is no question that Robert Harris is a masterful writer, his novel comes across as the superior story to his screenplay. But then novels do not often make a successful transition from the page to the screen. The Ghostwriter is yet another example of this. The film version tends to lag at various points so as to make the running time appear to be longer than its 128 minutes. Viewers who have read the story will be disappointed. Theatre patrons who have not read the story will be able to negotiate this bump but will likely be mystified by some apparent unexplained leaps in the plot. The character of former Prime Minister Adam Lang is a fictionalized Tony Blair. The inspiration for the plot was based on the post 9-11 joint American– British venture in Iraq. Compared to other Harris adaptations, such as Enigma (1995), The Ghostwriter falls short on the grounds of plot intricacy. It simply could not be shoehorned into the given runtime of this film to qualify it as a good mystery. As it stands, this film is sputtering in thriller class. John Gould Director: Roman Polanski Writer: Robert Harris (novel and screenplay) Screenplay: Roman Polanski

Running Time: 128 minutes 98

HÉLÈNE DORION, WRITER IN RESIDENCE at Université du Québec in Montreal, Quebec poet and winner of the Prix Anne-Hebert, has turned her attention to writing a novel. Days of Sand is her second publication to be translated into English. The novel is a complex blend of autobiography and fiction within the style of poetic prose. The premise is shaped around leading the reader through snapshots of daily life from a child’s perspective. Each vignette is loaded with observations and subtleties that have withstood the process of translation. Saint John, New Brunswick native Jonathan Kaplansky proved to be an excellent choice for the translating work due to his previous experience with both fiction and poetry translation. Any good novel must lead the reader somewhere. Days of Sand is ultimately about a child’s growing awareness of the world. The title seems to reflect the vacation segment, set on the Maine coast, where the tide and waves alter and erase footprints on the beach, much like when new and greater experiences fade life’s past events and milestone. Many readers will connect with what Dorion describes: vacations, a visit to the hospital, family events and the sheer emotions each person feels as life unfolds. Without a doubt, Days of Sand is a remarkable piece of creative writing for its concept of lyrical prose to fiction and autobiography. Beyond this technical construction, Dorion enters the deep water of seeing the world through a child’s eyes. Since the last-

WINTER 2010 • “MONEY”

From the Four Winds • Haim Sabato

Translated from Hebrew by Yaacob Dweck ing impact of Frank McCourt’s highly successful embellished memoire, Angela’s Ashes, there has been a deluge of fictional recollections, pulled out from desk bottom drawers and deposited onto the trade book market. I am not convinced that Dorion can write well from a child’s perspective, even though there is evidence that, as a writer, she can understand someone in their green years. I became unconvinced when I compared Days of Sand with two authentic teenage works, The Diary of Anne Frank and American author Eric Sloane’s The Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805. Similarly, it does not stand up against two landmark fictional works: Sue Townsend’s multi volume Diary of Adrian Mole and Sondra Gottlieb’s True Confections. It was also a stretch for me to develop empathy with the principal character in Days of Sand. For all its artful crafting, the writing lacks devotion and dedication at a level a reader has come to expect with a family backdrop. If novels are supposed to lead the reader somewhere (which in Days of Sand was supposed to be a child’s growing awareness of a greater world) then there is a void in this work. Dorothy made this discovery at the end of The Wizard of Oz. This reality is one of the truths of existence: The people, things and events that surround us in life, which we come to know and observe, allow us to get to know ourselves. Knowing ourselves allows us to encounter the things and people of the world with greater certainty. I am uncertain about this achievement in Days of Sand. While these shortcomings lessen the impact of Days of Sand, its structure and backdrop still make the novel an interesting read. What’s more, Helene Dorion is an important Quebec writer who needs to become recognized among English Canadian readers. John Gould Published by: Cormorant Books - Toronto, Ontario ISBN: 878-1-897-151-07-5 Price: $18.00 CDN Paperback with French flaps 112 pages

IN THIS SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL novel, Haim Sabato draws us into his childhood. From the Four Winds is an evocative account of his experiences as a young boy who emigrated with his family from Egypt to Israel in the 1950s. Living in Beit Mazmil, in a transit camp on the edge of Jerusalem, Haim and his family are happy to have escaped the mishaps of their former home country. However, they and their fellow Egyptians cannot comprehend the Hungarian immigrants who share their neighbourhood. They have never known Holocaust survivors before and are confused by the grief and silence they encounter. The differences between the two groups are indeed stark. While the Egyptian homes are open to all, the houses of the Hungarians—who constantly demand silence— are closed day and night. The five-year-old Haim tries his best to comprehend this new culture in which he finds himself, endeavouring to understand the new language and traditions surrounding him. Going to school is, at least in the beginning, a form of torture to him. Small for his age, he is also the butt of bullying. Soon, however, Haim is befriended by the owner of the local grocery store. A veteran immigrant from Hungary, Moshe Farkash is a man as distant from Haim’s background as west is from east. He takes Haim under his wing, and helps him to better understand his new situation and surroundings.

Moshe also shares with the boy his own secret: he had memorized every word of the letters his mother wrote to him before they were taken away from him. These letters are actually poems written by his mother. Interspersed throughout Moshe’s narrative, they link together much of his story of one Hungarian family—four generations passing through time—from a town in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, through two World Wars, right up to their life in this transit camp, and the renewed world of Jewish learning. He also tells the stories of a number of other individuals: the old lady who leaves her darkened apartment only once a day to purchase half a loaf of bread and a container of yogurt, Mr. Ulmi the poet, and others. All these stories combine to help Haim to understand more about his new surroundings and those who live with him in it. The story is simply told, in highly evocative, often poetical language which draws the reader inexorably through the pages of the book. While many of the themes are bleak and sad, there is also much that is hopeful. Author Haim Sabato is descended from a long line of rabbis from Aleppo, Syria. His family lived in Egypt for two generations before moving to Israel when Haim was six. His first novel, Aleppo Tales was published in 1997. His second, Adjusting Sights, won the prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature in 2000 and the Yitzchak Sadeh Prize for Literature in 2002. From the Four Winds is his third novel. Susan Merskey Published by: Toby Press, New Milford CT USA Distributed in Canada by Jaguar Book Group, Georgetown ON Hard Cover • 160 pages Price: $24.95 CDN/US

SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

Milestones Inventing Identity: The Personae of David Bowie & Andy Warhol Reid McCarter Reid McCarter is a freelance writer, editor and graduate of the University of Guelph. He has contributed to several print and online publications, including Maple Tree Literary Supplement, blogTO and C&G Magazine, and played bass and guitar in the (now defunct) Guelph/Toronto indie band You Yourselves.Currently, he maintains the literature and music blog Sasquatch Radio with his partner and is working on putting together both his first novel and a new band.

ART IS NEVER STATIC — and so the artist can never afford to be static. In whatever medium it is expressed, art must always be flexible, willing to take bold directions that combat cultural paradigms while forging new movements in its wake. The responsibility to make this happen falls on the artists — the ones who are inevitably tasked with channelling the spirit of their work and presenting it in some manner. David Robert Jones and Andrew Warhola were born into eras of rigid cultural mores that, had they let them, would have strangled their modes of expression. Both artists sought to challenge the status quo but were unable to do so without the creation of personae that allowed the free range of their ideas. If Jones had not become David Bowie, and if Warhola had not become Warhol, the latter half of the twentieth century would have been deprived of some of its most iconic and influential art. Andy Warhol broke away from his roots as the socially inept, bedridden son of strict Catholic immigrant

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parents to become a trendsetter that exploded traditional notions of visual art. Growing up in 1930s Pittsburgh, Warhol was made quiet and anxious by scarlet fever, chorea, blotched skin and the rejection of his peers. However, once he had delved into the world of commercial illustration in New York and shown his first works in Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery, Warhola became a new person — Warhol, the eccentric visionary who would act as the nearly godlike leader of a sweeping social revolution. To the modern eye, Warhol’s early art may seem benign. However, seemingly innocuous pieces like Campbell’s Soup I, 200 One Dollar Bills, or any of his numerous celebrity portraits indicated a scathing criticism of the type of blind, post-war consumerism that would obsess Warhol throughout much of his life. He would go on to forge a path into even more controversial territory, combating Western stances on touchy subjects like sexuality and fame worship. In order to delve into this material properly (and fear-

lessly) it was impossible for Warhol to present himself as he was born; he was forced to adopt an identity that gave him the proper tools for completely unreserved exploration. Warhola, the middle American religiously and socially conservative youth, had to create and grow into a persona that allowed him to become a man able to take a stance on inflammatory topics without reservation. After beginning his career by embracing the first waves of American blues and rock, David Robert Jones — the man who would later become David Bowie — flirted with the British Invasion sound by joining outfits like the King Bees, the Manish Boys, the Lower Third and the Riot Squad before finally shrugging off all limitations and embracing the theatrics he’d absorbed through his close friendship with the dancer Lindsay Kemp. From this point onward, Bowie began to slip in and out of other character’s skins. No longer was he trapped in the identity he was borne to; Bowie was free to craft personae that ranged

WINTER 2010 • “MONEY”

Left: David Bowie Right: Andy Warhol

from the doe-eyed, sexless singer of Hunky Dory to the Martian glam rocker of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars or the dapper wraith of The Thin White Duke on Station to Station. Each album explored different issues and Bowie took on the appropriate persona to best channel these thoughts. Whereas Warhol cast aside his past to break from his upbringing, Bowie was always more interested in the dramatic nature of the persona and used the creation of alter egos as a manner of expression rather than one of self identification. His relationship with Kemp gave Bowie the tools he needed to set out onto a path dotted with wild characters, more able to channel a given musical concept than the artist himself. As Warhola became the austere leader of a never-ending circle of hanger-ons and fame junkies, his persona almost entirely overtook him. His past disappeared, seemingly shattered by Warhol’s very existence. The Factory and its population of ordinary-artistscum-celebrities melded Warhola with

Warhol — fusing the average American nobody with the larger than life artist’s persona and obliterating any trace of the man who was Warhol, pre-Warhol. Bowie was able to remain a chameleon almost without fail. Despite years where certain personae clung to him past their shelf-life (we needn’t look further than the stylistic hangovers of glam or Anglo-tinged Krautrock — both styles where David Bowie has been attributed as parent to), Bowie has always been remarkably apt at giving his personae the death necessary for pre-empting the birth of a brand new character. While we see Warhol primarily as the identity he assumed, Bowie has (and probably will always remain) a collage of various aesthetics. In fashion, artistic theme, musical style and outward personality, a definition of Bowie is informed by a cast rather than a single entity. Even though we recognize both David Bowie and Andy Warhol as prime examples of invented identity, they inevitably emerge as polar opposites within the context of this

phenomenon. In David Bowie we see a man who managed to hold a centre despite his reinventions of character — Bowie has ultimately always been able to triumph over his own creations and now holds sway over a colourful cast of personae that reflect stages of his career rather than his own identity. Warhol became his own production and holds a legacy that maintains almost nothing of his original self (barring, perhaps, his late career work centred on the Byzantine Catholicism of his youth). The artist’s creation of persona is nothing new. Whenever we channel ideas through ourselves we naturally act as a kind of medium and take on something of the work as it moves through us. With Andy Warhol and David Bowie’s lives as examples it becomes easy to see the tremendous freedom — and the dangerous possibility — that comes with presenting and understanding ourselves through these characters. s

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SIDESTREET REVIEW • ISSUE 6

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