The Company They Keep

Posted on December 30, 2007 by Francois Lachance

On the hunt for Queer Art in Public Space (Outside Galleries) in Toronto.

Andy Fabo in response to a query about queer art in public spaces referenced Douglas Coupland’s Monument to the War of 1812 (2008) in Toronto, which enlarges toy soldiers to monumental scale. It certainly can be given a camp reading.

Next on the list is perhaps obvious. The statue of Alexander Wood (unveiled in 2005) sculpted by Del Newbigging (1934-2012).

A whole parkette is devoted to Frances Loring & Florence Wyle. It features four works, including a bust of Loring by Wyle, and one of Wyle by Loring. The Girls live on in the lesbian imagination of Toronto and Canada.

And the Public Studio team of Tamira Sawatzky & Elle Flanders launch in June 2014 Full Spectrum, a three-dimensional wall mural for World Pride 2014.

Full Spectrum is a three-dimensional mural that changes depending on the angle from which it is viewed. It incorporates a spectrum of colours on one side referencing both the LGBT community rainbow as well as the full spectrum that is visible to the human eye. Viewed from the opposite end, Full Spectrum becomes a midnight blue with reflective elements, representing the candlelight vigils held in the memory of members of the LGBT community who died from AIDS in the city in the 1980s.

Sometimes the celebratory and commemorative take on a permanent form such as the AIDS Memorial. Sometimes the interventions have been of an ephemeral in situ pop-up nature (one thinks of General Idea’s AIDS poster referencing Robert Indiana’s LOVE which at one time blanketed the city).

The lines between commercial art, agit-prop and street art blur when one considers the Valentine’s Day display in 2011 at Holt Renfrew. Pucker Up was its theme.

Not just Toronto. Consider the 2003 window display at Riverwalk Comme Ça store in Kitakyushu that featured according to the accompanying text representations of families with same sex parents (documented by Ed Pas).

Window Display, Kitakyushu captured by Ed Pas

2003 window display at Riverwalk Comme Ça store in Kitakyushu c. Ed Pas

As ever much depends upon the reading and context building.

And so for day 381
30.12.2007

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Resetting Three Pieces by Robert Kroetsch

Posted on December 29, 2007 by Francois Lachance

These three passage from two separate articles from Robert Kroetsch’s The Lovely Treachery of Words tell a story about story telling and the English-Canadian experience.

First from “The Exploding Porcupine”

That contribution [Ondaatje’s] is story. But story of a special sort. For if the ceremonies of death are diminished, if we are, in some strange way, archaeologists, grave-robbers, then we must make of that violent act a new kind of story. A story that honours the mystery.

Then from “Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye”

It was Frye who articulated (in every sense) my suspicion that no story can be told only once, that a story to be a story at all must be a retelling of itself, and, at the same time, a retelling of a story that it can no longer be, because of that very retelling. At the impossible centre of this maze of story is the impossible story that once and forever decentres all story into periphery.

And again from “Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye” where Kroetsch contrasts the situations where the American begins in rupture; the Canadian starting ever again in continuity

But at its best, this same unrevolutionary predicament, this absence that destroys the metaphor of birth and its attendant narrative, frees us from the appalling ignorance celebrated by that birth, celebrates instead our life-inspiring decadence. Coming always to the end, we are free, always, to salvage ourselves, not by severance, but by the lovely treachery of words.

A new kind of story deserves a new type of decadence and both turn round the decentring centre. Paradox as productive. Strange expansion from the diminishing of ceremony.

And so for day 380
29.12.2007

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Tergiversation

Posted on December 28, 2007 by Francois Lachance

John Ashbery in “The Bungalows” in The Double Dream of Spring announces

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording
A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect

And it so happens he ends the poem thus

For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

And this is how we breathe life into poetry, by our pauses.

And so for day 379
28.12.2007

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Gratitude & Attitude

Posted on December 27, 2007 by Francois Lachance

It was part of a work-related self-esteem workshop. We were asked to write down five things we are grateful for in life. I tend to resist being social-worked but once I wrote the first the others came swiftly.

my lover
our house
our garden
our 30 something years of memories
years ahead

Then we shared. Ah, coming out all over again. (Not sure everyone in our little group knew or wanted to know.)

Coming out again and again. Every mention is like a little bit of flaunting. So be it. It is a struggle to be unselfconscious. Sometimes delivery is smooth. Sometimes there’s an edge.

Regardless, I am brought to meditate upon questions of style and the accommodations of another generation.

W.H. Auden begins “Dichtung and Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem) with the following observation and wish:
Expecting your arrival tomorrow, I find myself thinking I love You: then comes the thought: — I should like to write a poem which would express exactly what I mean when I think these words.
He continues with a self-directed demand:

of any poem written by myself, my first demand is that it be genuine, recognizable, like my handwriting, as having been written, for better or worse, by me.

For me pronouns matter. He-to-he. Or is it words like “lover”? Marking a relationship as sexual and passionate. Definitely claiming our own terms.

And so for day 378
27.12.2007

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Image Machine Book

Posted on December 26, 2007 by Francois Lachance

No pagination. No one expects a graphic novel to be quoted. Pagination would ruin the layout and design.

Coach House Books is reissuing The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James.

The disposition of the pages is important not only to the images but also to the flow of the words… For example, this greets the reader. I quote from the left-side of a two page layout:

erupting yet again against that featureless facade … repeating all its infinite convulsions slowly, as if each tiny splash had been halted in its course, pinned down, examined and dissected …

and the imaginative space occupied by this observation seems to continue on the right-side, almost as if by way of an answer…

its flight meticulously recorded in the hope that, when assembled, these fluctuating observations would somehow serve to reconstruct and ultimately illuminate that thing whose very nature defied examination …

One almost thinks that what is being described is the object at hand: oneiric layers captured in codex form. Later one comes across this pair. Again beginning with the left-side of a two page spread (though there is no reason to begin with the left except custom).

… wooden framework skilfully constructed with a craftmanship almost excessively meticulous considering the brutality of its purpose … all joints precisely dove-tailed (where nails would suffice), reinforced with polished metal plates (square, as always) (themselves engraced with labyrinthine patterns) and all its surfaces lacquered like a gleaming brittle sheath …

And again an almost answer from the right side.

less an actual machine than an odd and enigmatic abstraction, totally unnatural, its utility obscured and isolated from the encroaching vegetation …

Abstract machine?

And so for day 377
26.12.2007

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Intestinal Intertextuality

Posted on December 25, 2007 by Francois Lachance

A whole chapter of Saints and Scholars by Terry Eagleton is devoted to a description of Dublin. This bit might remind you of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Irish style of defecation would be regular and efficient, brief in duration to avoid anal eroticism; children would be taught to regulate their bowels like Gaels, not shit as Sassenachs.

For some reason, I thought of the scene at the conclusion of Chapter Four of Ulysses where Bloom is relieving himself in the privy while reading. And as Eagleton continues the description of Dublin and its inhabitants, we get the wink:

Each morning Finbar would watch one of his neighbours in Eccles Street, a jowlish shabby-genteel Jew much berated by his blowsy wife, set off in bowler hat and stiff white collar to circle the city as some kind of commercial agent, before returning each evening to be insulted again.

All this in passing …

And so for day 376
25.12.2007

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Delicate Declining

Posted on December 24, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Getting turned down in literary fashion…

At Andrebrook Alice at last found a friend who shared her intellectual and artistic passions. She and Janet sometimes stayed up all night together, talking and painting. One night they got illicitly drunk and Janet let Alice put an arm around her. But when Alice tried to kiss her, she pushed her away and wrote on a scrap of paper, “No, no, go not to Lethe, neither drink …”

It was years before Alice read Keats and recognized the quote, but the words haunted her. [She made a watercolour incorporating the words.]

Interesting to note that the word “drink” doesn’t appear in Keats Ode on Melancholy though it is implied in all the references to sipping and imbibing. What makes this misquotation interesting in the context of a pass and its refusal is the word that “drink” occludes — “twist”. And the sentence continues on the next line in which reference is made to the poisonous wolfsbane (aconite or monkshood) …

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
           Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

For more on Alice’s adventures and her writing career, see Julie Phillips, James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.

And so for day 375
24.12.2007

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Trigger Words

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Seamus Heaney devotes one of his Oxford lectures (The Redress of Poetry) to Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It is an honest assessment of the poem’s aesthetic merits and faults. However one sentence glistens for me.

Wilde’s own public humiliation is recalled with great economy in his invocation of the ‘black dock’s dreadful pen’, and his preference for ‘the holy night’ over ‘the shameful day’ maintains a defence of the homoerotic life in face of the world’s total rejection.

On the surface this appears as a simple description of parti pris but the gorgeousness in which the observation is couched must perforce lead the reader to side with Wilde. There is something generous here especially for those fighting the world’s rejection. So much pivots on seeing that word “homoerotic” in print, in an Oxford lecture.

I am not alone in experiencing Heaney’s generous spirit. Witness the American poet Henri Cole’s as he records another moment of surprise

Over the years, I took many things he said under advisement. When I published my fourth collection of poetry, The Visible Man, I was worried it would be narrowly defined by its gay content, but Seamus objected, using the word “arena” — the arena of human emotion, he called it — which is where all good poems must operate, rather than catering to special interests. I didn’t expect this from the son of an Irish cattle dealer.

Cole’s piece about his friendship with Heaney first appeared in Death by Pad Thai: And Other Unforgettable Meals. A later version appeared in the New Republic as a tribute.

And so for day 374
23.12.2007

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Marlene Creates

Posted on December 22, 2007 by Francois Lachance

She lives up to her name. I am simply entranced by the description of one work. You get the feel of it.

Text from the Signs of Our Times exhibition catalogue, 2005. The exhibition was a retrospective traveling show of Marlene Creates’s work.

My project is a photo-installation inspired by the geography and diversity of current land use around the edge of St. John’s Harbour.

[…] Around St. John’s harbour the range of human activity is quite remarkable. Some the features represented in the photographs include: the generating station; the fish plant; the fuel storage tanks; the dockyard; the downtown; the fishing village with its domestic architecture and fishing stages; and, overlooking the entrance to the harbour, the headland which is now a national historic park.

[…] Each pair of photographs is mounted on a plexiglass panel the size of a door and lit from behind. The seven panels stand in the shipping container leaning against the walls, three on each long side and one at the end. A map of St. John’s Harbour, with the surrounding land and sea, is centred on the floor, oriented to the photographs. The order of the photographs around the shipping container coincides with the contour of the harbour so that the visitor standing in the container is presented with a coherent portrait of many natural and human features that encircle St. John’s Harbour.

Around the Water’s Edge, St. John’s Harbour, Newfoundland 1995 for Container 96 – Art Across Oceans, Copenhagen, Cultural Capital of Europe, 1996.

What is entrancing (enticing?) is the use of the shipping container and the panorama display with the map orientations. The quotidian landscape is given a scaled dimension which for me is a source of enchantment. It is a testament to the clarity of the description. I haven’t seen the piece in person.

And so for day 373
22.12.2007

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Perception Reproduction

Posted on December 21, 2007 by Francois Lachance

On aesthetic objects and their production/consumption in a world saturated by digital artefacts and traces:

consider that the manipulation of an object, digital or otherwise, can be witnessed by others synchronously either in person or at a distance.

consider that the moves of the manipulating can be recorded and thus affording a measure of asynchronous sharing.

consider that manipulations and records of manipulation serve to open to study alternative paths (undo a number of steps and follow a different set of manipulations)…

we can go backwards and forwards. this is where the virtual resides: in the set of interpretations (moves) that are attached to the object of interpretation regardless of its digital status.

we might now ask how does the change in the quantity of records (as well as metadata) affect the shape of the social space in which the records circulate in particular the deployment of expertise and authority…

This set of notes arose out of a contribution to a thread on Humanist. What began as an inquiry into modelling and the thing represented has morphed into a meditation on the aesthetic object.

And so for day 372
21.12.2007

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