10.22.09 kulturnatib

Nothing new

Many artists, I included for sure, have this overarching pride – half a step, really, to hubris – that what they do, their art, is something new, that it is something that has never been done before.

To them, and myself, it is always a good and humbling reminder to heed the ancient voice of the prophet of the Song of Solomon; There is nothing new under the sun.

When preparing, in the summer of 2008, for a performance art piece -- a performative action, as I have now learned to call these pieces -- involving alphabet noodles I thought this was a first. For myself, certainly, and quite possibility for the whole of Art as well.

But last weekend, this bubble was burst.

I was involved in a performance art event with nine other artists, six of them coming from Montreal. I arrived early at the house where the event was to take place. After depositing the materials or instruments for my performance in the home office that for the evening was turned into the coat room that soon accommodated more than just coats, I entered the living room to find other artists in the thick of preparations for their own performance.

This is not unusual. Often much of what gets used for a performance can only be brought together just before they are used, sometimes even, brought together only as they are being used, especially when the bringing together is crucial to the performative action.

I arrived at the point of their preparation when they had what I immediately recognized to be alphabet noodles scattered on the low living room table. The very same ones that I had used for my performance last year, the remainder of which we continue to eat as a kind of emergency, fast cooking meal, not because this is really part of our emergency preparations – it is now -- but simply because I had bought way more boxes than I needed.

I got introduced to the one artist I had not met before of this trio and to the fact that for that evening they were a trio. They have their own individual art practices but they are also together on a research project into performance art. In the course of this research they have decided to jointly develop collective actions, including that evening's, as part of their methodology.

I asked about the alphabet noodles, adding that I also had a performance last year involving those noodles and proceeding with a brief summary of what that performance was. In response, one of them, Anne Bérubé, then produced or wielded the bubble-bursting pin.

The use of those noodles were apparently one of her contributions to their entire performance piece that on the surface looked like disparate events but a closer reading revealed the connecting or organizing threads of play and communication.

The noodles came into play towards the end of the performance. They were organized into words contained in small resealable plastic microbags and distributed to the audience who by this time had been almost completely absorbed into the performance becoming unwitting though quite willing performers themselves.

She had been using alphabet noodles for some fifteen years now, she said, but not, so far, in the same way that you did, she added.

Bubbles don't burst halfway. But, like phantom limbs, bubbles can reappear like they did that evening when during my piece titled, 'A Musical Tribute To Housework,' I played Bach's Air in G on the classical guitar while seated in the bathtub with the water running.

10.15.09 kulturnatib

Art watched

My column last week ended with this paragraph, “In any case, they announce a switch: Art no longer the passive, pretty picture on the protected wall but the active pedestrian presence watching, measuring, judging the best and worst that we are or can be with the best or worst that we have or will produce, art and otherwise.”

So, the switch happened. Over the weekend, “ArtWatching,” more than a hundred paper cups with eyes from art works printed on paper and glued across their mouths and installed on traffic sign, traffic light posts and other public infrastructure like surveillance cameras, happened.

They watched, surveilled, listened, measured, judged. For the most part they were satisfied. They found they were, to some, like proper surveillance devices, invisible, they found interested strangers, but most satisfying of all, they found some friends; Hey, that's a Lichtenstein! That's gotta be the Mona Lisa! Warhol's Marilyn Monroe! Those eyebrows can only be Frida Kahlo! Goya? “Saturn Devouring His Son”? And so on.

For the most part what they saw was the normal run of things in a stretch of urban road in the capital, no less, of a major western country, Ottawa, Canada. It being a festival weekend, at least at this part of town, leading up to Thanksgiving Day on the Monday – not entirely the same celebration nor the same date as that of her southern neighbor though the historic impulse might be shared – and with the weather turning out to be a most agreeable in the closing days of Fall before yet another cold Winter, it was fun and merry.

People were out in droves, with children in backpacks, slings, prams, bicycles or otherwise trampling on foot. They sampled the sights, sounds, activity and, most of all though certainly not true for all, the merchandise. After all, this was the one day Giant Sidewalk Sale of shops that on regular days you would never catch a whiff of cheap from.

Yet, the GSS is simply the topping, of this extravagant annual Fall event called, as a whole, Cornucopia. If the picture of the harvest, the horn of plenty, is intentional and could be taken for shopping bags of goods to be loaded for or hoarded at home, the picture of a more insubstantial though every bit as substantive art that pervades the event is just as present though maybe not so immediately obvious.

This was especially true of the day's closing and main art event: Natural Disaster. A performance art event that promptly sold out to a packed audience of the art cognoscenti and those who could not tell spaghetti from panini artwise. Still, for both, there was the usual confounding or even confusing moments that performance art always brings on.

While way out of the range of “ArtWatching,” they knew about the event and were familiar with the history of performance art and the debates or discourses that accompanied the emergence of this art form or practice that continue to this date and to the foreseeable future. They would have been keen on it.

Still there was another part they also witnessed; mutilation, destruction, disrespect.

When we came around the following day to take down the cups some of them were gone – even some from a height that would have required a ladder or a Shaquille O'neal to get to --, some were missing the eyes, some had been crushed, ripped, discarded willynilly and not even given the decency of proper disposal in a nearby garbage bin.

Sad. But that's the life of art. Or, just life in general. You get all kinds. Even among the kind you think would know or do better.

10.08.09 kulturnatib

Art watching

For the most part and for most people, art is an object or event that is there, passively waiting to be viewed, read, listened to or otherwise consumed.

But, what if art were not so passive; Instead wears our shoes, watching, reading, listening or otherwise consuming us?

That is the question that becomes the premise or concept for my most recent installation work, a piece I had decided upon in lieu of a performance art work that was the original invitation for me to do.

This work had actually been percolating in my mind way before the invitation was extended, moving between developing detail and, as of yet at that time, the vacuum of venue.

Most of my works are site specific. The venue, space, wall or context of an exhibit or occasion for the work's display or unfolding just as important and germane as the work itself.

What began as a 'guerilla' piece not much different from graffiti that appears out of nowhere, unannounced and unacknowledged turned into this rather 'mainstream' work when looking further into the invitation and the venue, I realized this work to be a perfect fit.

And then, truth to tell, guerilla might have the radical chic appeal to it but so does the opportunity to make it 'mainstream' with some remuneration and recognition along with it. Why not?

So, informing the organizers, I submitted the proposal for this installation, regretting that the performance art piece isn't forthcoming and could be for some other time, should that be possible. No regrets, replied the organizers, we like the proposal.

The organizers are largely responsible for developing this smallish plot of Ottawa, a community called Westboro, into a cultural and commercial powerhouse – read chic, trendy, green -- known mostly for its two festivals. One in the summer, WestFest, and the other for fall, Cornucopia.

The horn of plenty then is where, once more, a plethora of art will happen along with a giant sidewalk sale on shops along a strip called Richmond Road where, except for this event, cheap is not something mentioned in the same breath.

Along this stretch as well will hang my installation piece, on traffic sign posts and other public infrastructure. These will be paper cups, more than a hundred of them, on the mouth of which are glued printed reproductions of eyes from art works known and unknown from all over the world, including one from a painting by the great Indian poet and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, who, I was pleasantly surprised to learn when doing research for this piece, had taken up painting towards the end of his years.

They will be like surveillance cameras; Art watching. But, they can also be taken as mini-megaphones; Art silently broadcasting their ever watchful presence.

In any case, they announce a switch: Art no longer the passive, pretty picture on the protected wall but the active pedestrian presence watching, measuring, judging the best and worst that we are or can be with the best or worst that we have or will produce, art and otherwise.